Missed Things: Thing 8: Screencasting and Thing 9.5: Image Generators

Oops! In my haste to finish, I skipped over a couple! So here I'm tacking on the two areas I overlooked:

Screencasting: Earlier this year I used Camtasia and Jing to create several screencasted help videos for students in our transition to Blackboard 9. Here is one I created: http://teach.reynolds.edu/BB9/Videos/BB9SSendingEmail/BB9SSendingEmail.htm

I used Camtasia because a) that's what the school has to use and b) it really is easy to use and useful for creating screencasts. One of our other librarians has been creating little videos on how to use the databases and such for our own library.

Image Generators
I can't say I'd ever really played with one of these before. I am fairly competent with Photoshop, so I usually do any image manipulation on my own. I had fun playing around with these though... I tried to make one with a picture of my cats but the website kept causing an error, so instead I'll make a flickr words thing in honor of Banned Books Month:

Thing 23: The End!

Wow. I'm finished!

Since I did almost half of it in the span of a few days, most of it is pretty fresh in my mind. I wish I had paced myself a little better throughout the project, unfortunately I had to push this to the backburner for other projects and deadlines.

I was familiar with all of the technologies, but it is great to be able to look at each one as to how it might fit in to use in our library, and it's even better to be able to go through all of the other participant's blogs and see how they are using the same technologies.

To everyone who has participated! Congratulations! I look forward to discussing your discoveries with you at Peer Group!

Thing 22: Podcasts

I love podcasts - when I make the 10 hour drive home, I stock up on them. My favorites are This American Life and Car Talk since I fail to remember to listen to either program when it actually airs. I subscribe to them via iTunes, so to get new podcasts I can just plug in my iPod (or iPhone) to my computer and it automatically updates.

I've also been fairly impressed with iTunesU, which allows you to download lectures from colleges and universities across the country and take education into your own hands.