Friday, December 18, 2009

Shop for a Kindle

Amazon now has a way have direct link to a specific product and if a blog reader buys it via this link the blogger makes 15% of the purchase price. Kinda neat!

Friday, December 11, 2009

The Unquiet Library

Keep an eye on this site it's full of stuff about "21st-century" learning and is sure to change and grow as time goes on.
Take a look at the video "Connected Student Toolbox" for a vision of the future.

in reference to: The Unquiet Library 2009-10 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Google Sidewiki Works

Thanks for the explicit directions! I've seen this before but haven't used it until now.

in reference to:

"Click on the Sidewiki button on any web page Add helpful information about the entire page or any part of the page Publish to the browser sidebar for others to read"
- Google Sidewiki (view on Google Sidewiki)

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

ShareThis


Here's a really neat free tool that works in conjunction with your browser to enable you to share on lots of different forums really easily.

ShareThis adds an icon, like the RSS feed icon, right in the address box of your browser. Clicking on it opens a list of various social networking links such at Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Delicious, etc. In just couple clicks you can share stuff in a variety of ways.

Social Media Revolution?

An interesting video referred on LM_NET by Lizanel Boman from Ryan Seacrest's page(!?).



Get on board or get off the track!

Monday, June 1, 2009

Eight Tips for Super Searching

Interesting article from PC Magazine, Eight Tips for Super Searching. I'm always looking for new search techniques and sharing them with kids and teachers as appropriate.
In other news, Microsoft has released it's new search engine, Bing. It's got some new features and a neat home page effect (could be distracting?).
I notice that in the above article they still refer to MS Live Search but the link is re-directed to Bing.

Shared via AddThis

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Print Can Be Wrong Too!

Great little article on the SpeEdChange blog discusses how print media can be wrong too.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Britannica Widgets

Encyclopaedia Britannica has recently made a series of widgets available which can be embedded into a blog or website. They come in a variety of "flavors," e.g. U.S. Presidents, brain, dogs, philosophy, with more to come.

The widgets are dynamic and show a snippet of information about one of several topics under that particular heading. There is also a link to the article in Britannica itself. One caveat is that the version of Britannica used is the commercial version which is different from the version many schools and colleges use. But it's still a pretty nifty little series of tools.

I've embedded several into the library web pages. See, for example, the page on U.S. history which uses the U.S. Presidents widget.

For more info on the widgets and to watch a video about how easy it is to embed them in your site go to Brtiannica's Assets & Widgets page.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Try Bit.ly

Bit.ly is becoming the new standard for link shortening.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting posting about it here. "A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."

This is Bit.ly's link to the California School Libraries Work! wiki .

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Embedding Video in a Blog

Well, I finally embedded a video in the library news blog, Library Leaves.

I took a one-minute clip at the Mock Senate yesterday with my little Panasonic library camera. It shows a student, Ian Kaufman, speaking about lowering the drinking age.

I use Picasa at home to manage my pictures and was able to save it there and then insert it using the video insertion tool on Blogger. It worked just fine.

Take a look. Now that I've done it once I may just do it again!

Friday, March 27, 2009

AL Direct, the online journal of the American Library Association, recently (Mar. 25) had a link to a Google Blogoscoped posting about an experiment Google is running which gives more search options using regular Google search "Tony Ruscoe and Philipp Lenssen write: “Google is running an experiment in their search results, apparently shown to a portion of their users. On search results, say for the query comic books, a link in the top blue bar will read ‘Show options.’ Click it, and a side bar full of options expands to the left. One of the most interesting experiments is the ‘wonder wheel’. This will show a Flash-based interactive mini app which starts with your keyword in the center, and related terms around it.”..."

The technology involves downloading a cookie to the specific computer so the blog posting gives the code that needs to be sent to Google to put the "Show options..." into effect.

For a long time I've been waiting for Google to become more graphical and this is an admittedly baby step in that direction.

Some of the other options allow the searcher to limit the search by media type and date range. There is also a tool which give a time line of the search terms.

How useful all this is waits to be seen but it's always good to see what Google engineers are working on.

BTW, there doesn't seem to be anything at Google Labs on this topic/tool yet.