Thing 9 - library blogs

I really like Edublog as a tool. The first thing I saw when I clicked in was Best Librarian Blog Awards. I followed out to the first place winner Hey Jude and read about glogster for the first time. Amazing! One of the posters was an Internet scavenger hunt theme and the librarian radar clicked in - Scavenger hunt?! we do scavenger hunts in the library. This would be more fun than the ones we do.

Technorati also yielded many interesting results, in all different formats, but with 1500 blogs tagged libraries I still feel overwhelmed, even with the descriptor attached. I can see that, as always, precision is key so got better results (for me) when I typed in elementary school librarian. The tutorial wasn't really worth the trip, especially since it loaded in Dutch the first time! I have used the free lesson accelerators before with Atomic Learning and one or two of the free tutorials, so that was like finding a friend in a crowd of strangers.

I am getting lost as I move from place to place and need a better system for keeping track which I hope to find in future lessons. Now that I can open several tabs on the browser, I can get even more lost than I was before! Where do all the hours go?

Thing 8 - RSS feeds.

Some of my favorite feed articles are linked in the side bar. I access them easily on my igoogle page's Google Reader gadget. I think RSS feeds are a great professional development time saver, plus I feel more likely to "stumble upon" the things I need to know to do my job. I will still rely heavily on my LM-Net Listserv friends for good ideas and practical tips, but the sites I chose are good for thinking and building a vision about what the library is becoming.

I saved the Eagles Read site so that I can build one like it for my own students. I hope they are as excited about talking about Bluebonnet books, research question troubleshooting, new books, and keywords as I am.