Best Practices for Social Software

Michael Stephens has a very nice article with ideas about what social software can do for libraries at ALA TechSource. It is interesting reading, and would make a great discussion piece - especially with our public school buddies. In fact...take it right to your principal before you have that first of the year appointment! Take a look- and you will see what I mean!

New Blogging Browsers

OK, I'm probably the last one to know but posting to your blogs is only one click away from most browsers. By downloading and installing an extension in Firefox you can using a tool called Performancing . When you click on the pencil icon, it allows you to create a blog post and submit it to a variety of blog hosting services out there. Performancing also allows you to post links to your Delicious account, keeps user statistics (hits) and has a limited uploading capability.

Now, on the other hand there is a free web browser called FLOCK.
It is very BLOGGER friendly ...once you download and install it, it allows to you highlight portions of the web that you are
reading, right click and choose a portion of that data to post to your
blog. You can even post pictures on that temporary space and have them upload to your blog.

FLOCK can be associated with online photo editors like FLICKR and social bookmarks like del.icio.us
in dynamic ways. This means that if your friends have FLICKR accounts
and post pictures...they can show up on the masthead of your browser.
You can use Flock as an aggregator too making it easy to subscribe and view your feeds without another application.

By the way, I composed this whole entry while I was in Performancing and then published it to my blog without ever opening it! Check it out!

School Librarians rejoice!

If you haven’t had the opportunity to listen to the most recent podcast #53 Ed Tech Talk - LibraryFest, take the chance. Joyce Valenza was the guest and provides great information for your principals and teachers to listen to. For example if you need to put together a unit on biography, or civil rights or how to form your upper level BLOOMS questions with your staff or kids!

Check out the podcast runs - it runs about 45 minutes and the show notes have tons of excellent links worth checking out! Take some time and listen it or download soon- then think about how you might use the ideas it has in your own work!

I LOVE WIKI's

Thanks to Librarian in Black and Libraryman I can keep up to date with my WIKI quests! Look at the cool map that popped up called Wikimapia. Folks can create locations with labels and TAGS so that they are searchable! Your students and Social Studies teachers are going to love this!

Off to the hills
~pg