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.

Thing 21: Mashups

I was going to make a trading card, but apparently the website is blocked by our filters. Darn!

I love the idea of mashups because, ostensibly, they combine two (or more) services to fill a niche need.

The only mashups I've really used involve improving Craigslist, with housing maps and such, but I'm loving InfiniteComic, which takes flickr photos and mashes them with tweets to make comic strips. Here are a few I made:

Thing 20: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

I LOVE delicious.

I stopped using traditional bookmarks years ago -- working on multiple computers in grad school necessitated that I have something available via the cloud, and with the plug-ins for Firefox, all of my bookmarks are readily available. Because of tagging and categories, they're also easier to find.

JSRCC has a delicious account which we use to tag websites we find that might be useful to our students. Because delicious allows for easy creation of RSS feeds based on tags, we are able to import a customized, easily updated list of websites into our libguides.

Thing 19: Multimedia

I was going to post a youtube video, but somebody just sent me this spoof commercial which I thought was very funny, so I'll post that instead:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Thing 18: Audiobooks

I thought Beth Farrell's article, The Lowdown on Audio Downloads (Library Journal, 05/15/2010) was a very good overview of Audiobooks in the context of libraries.

I have had trouble with formats in the past; I own an iPod, and for a long time, most audiobook providers did not work with the apple products. I have downloaded audiobooks from the apple store, and I particularly like listening to them on long road trips.

I think I need to remember that I can download them from the library - I always forget, which, I'm guessing, is a majority of the public's problem with audiobooks too.