Thing 3: Photo Sharing, Editing and Fun

I'll admit it. When it comes to photos, I am very disorganized. I don't work with them often, except to share family photos on Facebook. And I'm not very creative when it comes to editing them. So, this task was a challenge for me.

I decided to play around with Photopin. I wanted to search for book cover images of Battle of the Books titles, so I could post them on my library webpage. I was actually disappointed that I was not able to find all of the titles I need. And then when it came to including the attribution...well, I'm not sure I did it correctly (which may be due to my frustration with working on the wiki platform more than anything else). I only chose a couple to include there for now. I may work on this more over the summer.

http://graybodley-library.wikispaces.com/Battle+of+the+Books

I definitely think I'll end up using one of the photo sharing sites eventually, in order to store the pictures I have taken, and will continue to take, of events and displays in my library. Battle of the Books is an obvious choice for me, but I know other ideas will occur to me.

Thing 2: Online Communities and Personal Learning Networks

I'm a Twitter veteran, so I explored some features that I either hadn't know about (Twitter Advanced Search) or have been wanting to try for a while (HootSuite).

With the advanced search option in Twitter, you can enter a variety of search criteria, much like you can in a search engine's advanced search window. I searched for librarians in my area. When you select to narrow by "People," you find others who have identified themselves as librarians in whatever area you choose. I found a couple more people to follow that way. This feature is a great option, and has the power to create some really awesome learning communities right in your own back yard.

I've used TweetDeck for about a year, but now I'm exploring HootSuite. HS is a bit more involved, but I like how you can view Twitter Profiles more easily here than in TD. Still, when I'm just browsing through my Twitter feed, I prefer the actual website because I can go at my own pace. The feed in TD goes way too fast to do that.

I've enjoyed some Tweetchats as well, especially #tlchat and #edchat. You meet some great people in these virtual chats, and come away with some great ideas and advice.

Twitter is one of my all-time favorite social media sites.

Thing 6: Curation Tools

I. Love. Pinterest. I really do! I've used it for probably over a year now, and at one point I became very addicted to it. I started out using it for personal reasons, finding great ideas for my home, my kids' rooms, hairstyles, etc. Then I realized that I can use it to gather information for work. I now have boards for promoting books and reading, display ideas, authors, etc. Just recently I looked for ideas for March displays (aside from the usual St. Patrick's Day) and pinned a few of those. Pinterest is my go-to tool for fresh and interesting ideas for my school library.

I did play around with Learnist a little. I think I might explore this more as I get closer to the end of the year and begin thinking about lessons for next year (especially orientation). I think it would be fun to put together a few learning experiences for students, especially those who may have missed a lesson, or for homebound/alternative ed students.

Diigo is another tool I went back to explore. I don't think I would use it directly with my students because I already have several links for them on my website. However, I would use it to gather additional websites, that I can then add to my library's website. It's a great way for me to organize sites for review, before placing them for others to use from my site.

This was great fun!

Thing 4: RSS, Personal Home Pages and Feed Readers

Way back when (July 2012) when I learned that Google was doing away with its reader and hence the iGoogle option, I wondered what I would do. Then I saw a post by The Daring Librarian (Gwyneth Jones) on Protopage so I thought I'd give it a try. I haven't used it much until now. I do like the way it looks, and adding RSS feeds is similar to iGoogle. I arrange my feeds by category in columns, which helps me stay organized. I will have fun playing around with finding different feeds and tweaking the page.