Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

The search alert is a great way to follow an issue you are researching. It is also a great way to teach about the differences between magazines, academic journals, newspapers, and books. We can also teach that the information being sought helps determine what type of sources should be used.

I was not a big fan of the EBSCO page composer. I did not find it user friendly, and could not see the changes I made until previewing the webpage. There are definitely better sites to help compose a webpage.

Proquest is a great research tool. It is useful for teaching students how to refine a search. I think it is wonderful that Proquest is available to the public for free.

NetLibrary, like Google Books, represents the future of reading. I think it is fantastic to be able to type in a word and to search for it in an entire book in a matter of seconds. It is a great research tool, and it allows you to write notes online. Imagine having access at home to every book and every periodical article that was ever published (and still exists). With the Internet, we now have this capability.

Thing 16: Assignment Calculator & Research Project Calculator

I can see how the Assignment Calculator and Research Project Calculator can be a great benefit to middle school students and older. The calculators do a good job of breaking the research process down into steps, and provides many useful links to websites that can aid the research process. I thought the supporting materials in the teacher guide were useful, and could easily be reproduced for students. However, I work with elementary students, and think the Assignment Calculator and Research Project Calculator are too advanced for them. It would be good to have a research calulator more geared toward younger students that could help show them how to break down the research process into simple steps.

Thing 15B: Second Life

I watched the video for Second Life, and checked out their website. I cannot think of a place for online games in the library, other than for patrons with idle time who are using the library computers. When I think about virtual reality I think about a person whose head is completely enclosed by a large helmet so that it looks like their head has turned into a television. This is the image that I thought of when I first heard of Second Life.

Thing 14: LibraryThing

I like the ability to create your own reading list. For my list on LibraryThing I chose Minnesota authors who I had the privilege of meeting. I think the best uses for LibraryThing would be to catalog books in a personal library, to create a reading list of books read by an individual, or to create a wish list of books that an individual wants to read. I can see how this website can be of great use to both book lovers and librarians.

Thing Thirteen: Online Productivity Tools

I am a big fan of iGoogle, and enjoy having a customized home page with links to the weather, current headlines, and news of interest to me. I like how easy the page is to set up, and how you can easily move things around to set up the page however you like. I also checked out the Google calendar. Again, I liked how easy it was to use. I checked out the Backpack website, but did not join because I already receive many of the Backpack functions through Google. I like the ability of accessing many different applications from a single starting point.

I joined Remember the Milk, but will not use it much until the I run out of scratch paper and pens. I also checked out the Zamzar site, and I thought it to be a very helpful resource. Time will tell if the applications in Thing 14 help me to increase productivity, but they are definitely useful things that I am glad to be aware about.

Thing Twelve: Social Media Sites

I researched the social media sites and joined Mixx, then posted a BBC article on global warming onto Mixx and tagged it "climate change." Personally, I cannot think of a reason why joining a social media site, such as the ones listed under Thing 12, would be of any more benefit than receiving an RSS feed from my favorite news sources. I do not see the value of joining a community where the only prerequisite to membership is to have an email address. Voting is very important to the social media sites; voting decides what stories, videos, podcasts, etc. are deemed the most important. I would rather think for myself and decide what news stories are most important. I do not want to be a part of a "community" where you have online conversations with anonymous people. The comments posted by users on the social media sites that I read were mostly short with little thought. That said, I can see the benefit of having a select group of people, such as an English class, have their own social media site in which they select stories of interest to them and have discussions about what they think about the stories.

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I tagged my posts and thought about how tagging goes against the Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal cataloging systems because anyone can tag anything with any word they want to, without any catagorization system whatsoever. I checked out Del.icio.us and found different tags for the singular and pronoun form of the same word, such as "wiki" and "wikis," or "library" and "libraries." Standardization of terms would not be such a bad thing.

I thought the Del.icio.us tutorial was interesting, and like that you can view other's reading lists. It is a great research tool, as you can seek out online sources that people with with similar interests have tagged. Also, if you have to travel and/or will be using a variety of computers, it is a useful place to bookmark sites that you want to have access to.