I have been playing with Flickr the last few days trying to figure it all out. It seems to be fairly easy to work with IF you know what you are doing. I have not learned all about it yet so am having a bit of frustration trying to get pictures from one place to another. It is not too complicated though once you learn where everything is. We used to take pictures with a camera, take the film out, take the film to the store for developing and in a few days pick them up. After that they either ended up in a drawer, a box or if I was motivated in a photo album. This is much the same only with digital images. Pictures are taken, downloaded to a computer and Flickr acts kind of like the drawer or the box. When you want to share the picture you can pull it out and put in on a blog or some other site for sharing.
I chose this picture of my kitty Salem to share in this blog. I had a bag sitting by the door with my book in it to take back to school the next day and he crawled in. I couldn't resist taking his picutre with the Breaking Dawn book. This is a very popular series at our school now and so I downloaded the picture to my e-mail and accessed it at school so I could use it to make book marks and a poster that said "Curl up with a good book". It was fun and the students loved it.

Pictures, blogs, Flickr account have so much potential for use and it is fun, but, alas, it takes time!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

The new assignment is to think about these things as you blog:
What do you like about RSS and newsreaders? This is very convenient, just log on to one place and there is a list of news or blogs that have changed. I like this because sometimes I forget to check certain places or I can't think of the name of something I was following and this way it is always there.
How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your library or personal life? I can see that this would be quite beneficial with reading groups, to keep up with who is reading what, libraries can share information quickly and easily and patrons can know quickly what is new.
How can librarians or library support staff use RSS or take advantage of this new technology? i think I answered this question in the previous one!
Which tool for finding feeds was easiest to use? The easiest tool was the one on the tool bar that let me know that the site I was on was RSS
What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds? Some sites had an area which indicated RSS or share feature.
Find any great sources we should all add to our feed reader? I am still learning so could not answer this yet.

Create a Blog

How easy was that! I began using computers way back when everything was text, and all the commands had to be written out to draw a box, add a picture (usually just a series of symbols in a design), delete and add, copy and paste. DOS commands were all we used. Fortunately for the school where I am, I was familiar with the DOS commands because our library program from the 80's is a DOS program, so no problem for me. I just had to brush up on the commands a bit.

Anyway, with just a few clicks here and there, voila, an online diary of sorts. I can see using this in a variety of ways:
staying in touch with fellow librarians
recommending books to patrons
using a network of blogs for book discussions
book reviews
learning about new technologies

So many things to discover in the cyber world. I have only begun!

Lifelong Learner

This is a test post for the Challenge. Although I have been blogging for a few years now on MySpace, I have never set up an account anywhere else, so this is new. I enjoyed the lesson on being a Lifelong Learner. The easiest thing for me is to accept responsibility for my own learning. I read and study things that are interesting and in so doing I am learning about a lot of different things, one thing leads to another. The hardest thing is to actually set a goal. I do things, learn things but without direction, so often times I am all over the map, with pieces of stuff everywhere. This is a good exercise to stay focused