Is this how it's done?

Just the link? Shouldn't the photos show up here?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/59446774@N05/

These are a few pictures from our honeymoon a while back. For the first few days, we stayed at this unbelievable spa resort ("Alm") in Austria.

I am mad at Flickr...

First of all, the former English teacher in me is wondering why the "e" is missing in "Flickr." Is that necessary?

Then the frustrated grad student in me is ready to throw her laptop across the room after spending an hour attempting to link my Flickr account to this blog. I thought it would be nice to have my pictures show up here, and a good tool to know. Though it is fairly easy to upload photos on to Flickr (though honestly, not as quick or intuitive as other programs I've used in this class, like this blog or Twitter), I have found their Help section to be buried - they direct you to their Help forum first, which is just others' questions.

I guess it would be okay to just have the Flickr account for photos and just drop the blog issue, but I am trying to master these programs in order to use them in my professional and personal lives...so I am frustrated that I'm having this much trouble. Flickr's "test blog" worked and showed up here (I deleted it); why can't I get my own pictures here? I don't want just a link - or is a link all you can get for your own pictures? Can you only blog other people's photos, and if so, why? Is it because this is a Google application and Flickr seems to be connected to Yahoo (thouugh I signed in through my Google account)??

Hopefully my next post will be more positive and full of blogging/picture sharing success...

RSS Feeds

Setting up the RSS feed was really easy: I used Google Reader and followed the very intuitive layout: I clicked "Add a subscription," typed the addresses in, and I was all set. Again, I love how it's cleanly my infomration is organized; I won't have to remember whether or not I visited a site I like on any given day because they're all in one place for me to peruse. I like that I can add notes and share items with others - especially the library sites I'm following, which my classmates or colleagues might like to see. I can also envision how a teacher might share certain entries with her class, or students might also share with the class.

Currently, I am following several of the School Library Journal's blogs, including Adult Books for Teens (not "adult" adult, but rather books written for grownups that teens would like), one about the Internet, and one on great new books for students. I am also following boston.com's news feed, which is tough to keep up with, boston.com's food section, and a blog that I absolutely love called Food Network Humor (http://www.foodnetworkhumor.com/). I'm allowed to have a little fluff!

I can see how, like Twitter, RSS feeds can keep professionals up to date on the latest their colleagues are writing about. I particularly enjoy seeing the School Library Journal feed - especially the entries about technology and new books. As I mentioned in the Discussion board, I am not sure how practical or useful these feeds are in terms of direct student interaction; in other words, I am not sure about productive, intelligent ways to use RSS feeds in student research projects, unless their research has to do with blogging or other forms of social media. As I also mentioned, I would show students how to set these up for their personal use, like keeping track of the latest sports or celebrity blogs, or whatever they enjoy.

Finally, my husband brought up a good point when I attempted to put my new RSS feed knowledge to use and set one up for the 15 or so sites he likes to read on a daily basis: he enjoys the routine of going through his sites and reading the articles. He likes the visual set-up of each site, and the act of going through them. When he saw my RSS feed he felt like it would take away some of the relaxation he feels from this browsing routine, with everything in one place and looking fairly similar. I wonder if other people feel that way too - I can see his point. So I guess they're perhaps most helpful for people who need and want to look at large amount of materials on a daily basis to stay updated, and perhaps not the average reader who likes browsing around a bit for fun.

I'm still glad I know how to set one up now...though I don't know how much I'll use it. Between reading tweets from colleagues in the field, using delicious to remember any sites I may forget, and looking at the blogs I like, I guess I don't feel overwhelmed by manually going through sites as opposed to looking at the latest feed on the reader. That could easily change though as demands on my personal and professional time increase, however.

Good Reads

On to Good Reads...the link to my account is on the previous post.

I looked around Shelfari and Library Thing, and both looked excellent;  I like Good Reads in particular though because it's not connected to a store (like Amazon with Shelfari); and though the cataloging feature in Library Thing is excellent, I don't feel I need it for my current job, I don't think the students would use this feature (see my explanation of Destiny and Destiny Quest in the next paragraph), and I don't want to have to pay a fee if I add more than 200 books.

I have had a Good Reads account set up for many years but I have actually never used it to post books I've read. I use it to look at what other people have read and their book opinions, because I love good book recommendations. For this week we were required to enter at least five books, and that was my plan out the outset. But...once I started adding books I had a hard time stopping! First of all, though slow, the site is very easy to use. You simply press the button that describes what you'd like to do: enter a book, rate a book, leave a comment, organize your shelves, etc. Secondly, for a visual, organized person like me, seeing the list with the accompanying book cover icons is enormously satisfying; it's like I get to tidily revisit all the things I've read recently. I can absolutely see why a librarian would want to use this in connection with her library/collection. At our school however we use the Destiny catalog,which has the Destiny Quest feature - which functions very similarly to Good Reads, and has the safety advantage of only being accessible to members of our school community. Users can "shelve" the books they've read, categorize, and rate them, and send each other messages. Since we're already paying for Destiny this is a useful social networking feature to get students exciting about reading. Good Reads connects users to other readers anywhere, not just in a school, which is particularly helpful when trying to connect with colleagues and get feedback about prospective books for the collection.

Next, the tool that perplexed me the most this week: RSS feeds.

Online Organizational Tools

Being an overly organized person, I was very much looking forward to this week's Explorations. Even more ways to organize myself, my work, my studies! I am a particular fan of a couple of the sites we were to look at: delicious (http://www.delicious.com/mrschase23) and Good Reads (http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/433145?shelf=read). I have used each of them to varying degrees.

I actively use delicious, as I find it both useful and convenient. I mostly use this account to bookmark sites for graduate school because I set up a different, joint account for the librarians I work with. When I'm gathering sites for a teacher's latest project in the LMC it's great to be able to use delicious to save and easily share them with my colleagues.  During this program, delicious has been enormously helpful in terms of remembering the sites that I use not only for coursework, but in particular those that I plan to use (or currently do use) at my job. There are so many sites out there - some good, some bad - that having a spot to keep it all in, regardless of which computer I'm using, has been a huge help.

Just an aside - my page is called "Mrs. Chase" because that would be my name if I hadn't kept my maiden name. Apparently I was in a traditional sort of mood the day I created the account. That brings me to my next point: there are a few non-grad school sites saved there, all of which are sites I saved when searching for my husband's Christmas gifts, including a subscription to the English World Soccer magazine. The subscription site is harder to find than you'd think! I attempted to lock the two or three non-library related sites, just to help out any fellow librarians who search through and are not interested in European sports magazines...

Before I accidentally delete this I'm going to start a new post about Good Reads and RSS feeds.

This time it was not my fault...

I just went back into my previous post about my wiki to add some of my musings on how my wiki would work collaboratively when...blogger crashed. I lost all of the work I had added. I see that it saves itself automatically, but where are the "drafts" it gives the time for? Where do they go and why can I not figure this out? I frantically searched around for the draft that had to have contained my newest work, but all I could find was my original post. The site then proceeded to crash and reload itself (and erase any new work I added) every time I hit the "enter" key.
I'm going to frantically add this before the site crashes again...I chose to do a wiki with a student page and educator page (though both groups of participants can go to all pages) because I have been thrilled about the small but committed group of students I've met in the high school I started working at this year who are avid readers. The only other age group I've worked with who've had this much (and even more) enthusiasm for reading are the second and third graders who can't wait to get into the library for more books. The library staff run a once-monthly book club in school for the kids, but I think they'd love a wiki because they like talking about books, and they like communicating online. Some teachers show up at our book club and I know more would like to come but can't because of their schedules, so the wiki is a way for teachers to talk about books with each other and even the kids. Personally, I love getting book recommendations from others and I am always excited to try something I've never heard of, so even though an online book group may not be the most original idea, it is one that I feel sure that students and staff in my school would enjoy participating in.
Best book a student has recommended to me lately? The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart ( http://www.amazon.com/Disreputable-History-Frankie-Landau-Banks/dp/0786838191/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296585475&sr=1-1). What a protagonist!

Why a Peanut Butter Sandwich?

I've decided to use PBWorks to set up my wiki; I have used it before for courses in this program, and I've found it easy to navigate as a user.  I read in a couple of this week's articles that the "pb" stands for peanut butter, as in, "This site is as easy to use as making a peanut butter sandwich." Interesting choice. I do think PBWorks is pretty easy and intuitive to use, but I do find as both a user of wikis and now a creator of a wiki that this site can get bug-gy. In other words, sometimes it crashes while I'm trying to save (this must be a common problem because there's a link that keeps showing up that asks me to click on it if the page crashes while saving!). It's inconvenient, but easy enough to learn how to deal with. Just reload the page or click on the link to get to a saved version - easier to regain your work on PBWorks than on blogger, ahem. Also, I have found some delays or problems when editing: when I try to copy and paste from Word, my content often gets re-formatted and it is very hard to figure out how to format the work in a more attractive way. Sometimes when I try to change font sizes or styles it either refuses to make the change or the change kicks in about two lines later.
Aside from these minor glitches though I find it easy to add new pages, add links, and beginning a page is quite easy. I also like how they sent a welcome email to me that offered a free live webinar tutorial each month, and also not-live help sections that are always available. I like what I can get for free, and how, when I went to set up an educational page, the site offered me a bunch of template pages that I might need as a teacher (like Assignments, Syllabus, etc), that had pre-made charts and bulleted lists. This would be incredibly helpful if I were really setting up an educator page (especially since I've found formatting things like making charts to be occasionally tricky on this site), but I decided to do student and educator book club pages instead. In order to cut down on confusion for potential users I was easily able to delete the unnecessary pages from my navigation sidebar.
My overall impression is that PBWorks is easy enough for an educator to set up - it did take me a while to set up my pages (even though they may look simple!!), though from what I saw of Wikispaces I think it would take a while to set up a wiki on any host site. I definitely think students would find this easy and enjoyable to use - through links and the sidebar I was able to make everything neatly organized and accessible.