runawayreader

Week9Thing23-Reflections

For the most part, I liked this exercise. I enjoyed YouTube, Online Productivity, LibraryThing and Avatars the most. I was least satisfied with RSS feeds, Bloglines, and Rollyo. I don't think that I liked these because I am less likely to use these in the future. I am glad that I now have at least a basic understanding of these 23 things. I think that has been beneficial and I would encourage and participate in future projects like this.

Week9Thing20-YouTube

I like YouTube. Not all of the videos have the greatest quality, but where else would this Fleetwood Mac-aholic find old videos and concert footage from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. Boy have the band members changed. I love it. I also found some funny videos where the original footage had been altered to create humorous footage. This would be a fun site to play around with when no one else is using the internet.

Week9Thing21-Podcasting

I tried the different podcasting directories and hated them. They were difficult to use. I would try searching by subject and I was having a hard time finding recordings that I wanted. So I just picked the first category, first by alphabet, and added it to my bloglines. I could have used iTunes. I'm a little (not much) more comfortable with them. This will take work. Thumbs down.

Week9Thing22-E-books

I played with Project Gutenburg. Frankly, I didn't want to register for more things that I might not use or forget about. It was easy to find books if the authors were not current (deceased) so that copyright was not an issue. I found Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. I don't care much for reading a book online, but it was easy. It would be nice for someone with a large monitor who doesn't want (poo poo) to make the run to the library or whose library doesn't carry a copy. I liked that foreign language titles might be available.

Week8Thing19 Web 2.0 Awards

I looked at an amazing site/idea. I found http://www.donorschoose.org/ . This is a site where teachers can submit proposals for ideas that they would like to implement in their classrooms, but they need additional funding. Donors can browse by state, topic, and so many other things to find what they would like to donate to. They choose the amount of donation. They get to see where the school is located, how much of the area is below the poverty line, what the cost is broken down, and more. This idea is very interesting. It makes me want to put out a commercial. Attention all teachers!!! While this site is teacher specific, why couldn't it be tweeked to be for needy teachers and needy librarians. There are teachers asking for funds for books. Small town librarians and poverty areas could really use this help.

Week8Thing18-Online Productivity

I played around with Google Docs in the word processing mode. The tool tabs were very similar to the Microsoft Word templates that I'm used to using. This made is very comfortable to use, familar. I could see this as a tempting tool to use for someone traveling, working on a paper. They could have it saved and could access it where ever there was internet. You wouldn't have to lug around a disk. But if internet went down, you'd be stuck.

I appreciate that there are other options out there besides the software based applications. More people can access things.