Week 9, Things #20, #21, #22, and #23

I do like the "Introducing the Book" video, and I think that middle school students might think that it's funny. At a workshop recently I was introduced to the book trailers that publishers have put on Youtube, and our public librarian planned to use them to promote the summer reading program for teens. There is a wide variety available. In addition, I hope to incorporate book trailers into plans for a Library club next year. With a few Flip videos I think that the kids would have a lot of fun and might come up with some interesting projects. The next step will be to partner with a teacher to offer the book trailer as an alternative book report option. Here is a sample for The Hunger Games:


The variety of podcasts available is pretty incredible. Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me is one of my favorite radio shows, and I often miss it, so it will be good to have the RSS feed here. When we convert to Follett Destiny in the fall, I hope to have students create podcasts for book reviews and upload them to the library catalog. It might also be fun to have a weekly podcast on the library web page of "What's new in the library this week," or even a way to promote the monthly trivia contest. I will take a look at the podcast tutorial this summer.

LibriVox is a cool idea, but I didn't come up with any hits for the middle school level titles that I searched. Still, it may be worth a try to find materials for vision-impaired students.

I didn't expect to like ebooks much, as I had only tried those in plain text format. Several of those available in American Libraries used page turning, which I absolutely loved, especially for the illustrated children's books. The variety of texts available at worldbookfair.org is incredible, especially for $8.95 a year! I thought that the featured bird book was the ultimate ebook, until I looked at the British Library's online gallery. Every offering there leaves me speechless.

The web sites about Creative Commons and fair use were enlightening. The Stanford site provides one of the clearest definitions of copyright and fair use that I have ever seen. I did find a fair use of the CSLA Learning 2.0 site at Northwest Region OELMA members, but the planning and execution of the original site is so much more sophisticated that it makes it clear that "fair use" doesn't necessarily result in expansion or even replication.

Week 8, Things #18 and #19

Google Docs is the best. I had looked at it briefly at work about a month ago when I received a form email as a school library survey. I am amazed at the number and variety of templates. I think that the form in Google Docs would be great as a P.R. tool for the library. Kids love surveys. Including surveys about books on the library web page is a pretty obvious idea, but some of the other surveys included in the templates might be fun too, such as the "Random" survey. I think that short surveys of teacher and staff opinion could also be fun as well as useful.
I chose Google over Zoho because I think that's the tool most familiar to students and staff. Another way to collaborate with a lot of potential for student projects and even faculty committee work.

Whew! Library thing is overwhelming! Of the five books I added, the classics and best sellers had the most followers, of course, but one of my favorite books had just a couple hundred. I'd be most interested in reading comments on that novel. As far as using it in the school library, I think that new version of Follett--Destiny--has some of the same functionality. I may come back to Library Thing if Follett doesn't come through as I hope it does. The covers are a definite draw, and I am sure that we will have those in the fall.