2.0 Challenge

Well I promised to try to keep up here and post occassionally so here I am. I am glad I took this class. It was fun but now I am hooked on Farmtown....lol. It is nice today so I am going to spend some time outside working in my garden.....hope it comes up and the seeds don't rot. The rain was nice but with no sun my garden is sooo behind now.

Lesson 5---Assignment 2

Pick some activity that will keep you involved and learning new things. Make a commitment to keep your blog up, use the tools you’ve learned about in this class, find a new thing a week. Decide if this commitment means spending 15 minutes a day, or a posting on Facebook once a week or some other benchmark. Post your pledge to your blog or Twitter it.

I am going to stay with facebook mostly because of the new friends I've made there, old friends and old classmates I have found. And besides I think I am addicted to Farm Town...lol. I am going to stay with Twitter at least for awhile and see if I can get some of my patrons to use it and stay in touch with me when they need a renewal or want to see if a particular book is on the shelves, or even make an ILL request. I am also going to try and keep my blog going. I never thought I would kind of like doing the blog thing. My goal is spend 15-30 minutes a day playing with my new found toys. Time will tell this time next year if I am able use them in a productive manner. But even if I lose my interest in some or all of them I would like to thank Lauren, Tracy, Meredith and Suzanne for this challenge and reawakening my interest in the internet.

Cute little App

There are so many apps out there its like a jungle. There are a few I already knew about but there are alot I had no idea existed. I spent my days off just searching and reading about many of them trying to find something that appealed to me and something that I thought I could use in my little corner of Library Land. After much searching and reading I finally found a wee little one that caught my eye. It is called Desktop Notes. Its like having little yellow(or other colors if you want) sticky notes on your desktop, or not so small because you make it the size you want. It is very easy to use. You have a choice of many different fonts, you can make them fairly transparent if you want. Your notes can be bold, italic and or underlined. You can change the size and color of your font if you want. I am going to use it at the library for all those little things you use sticky notes for that you usually throw away at the end of the day. It will also stay at the bottom of your desktop for easy access. And the best part is I will help save a tree (hahaha).

HOW TO: Find Out What Those Odd Twitter Trends Are About

After much searching trying to find a topic that interested me, and finding sites that I could not embbed an RSS feed, I stumbled across this site on Mashable. I started to read and decided to pick this one thinking it might have some pretty good information on it. The SuperBowl feed I chose because I love the SuperBowl adds.....and I do watch most of the game also. Now the funny sites feed I decided to put on here just to lighten things up a bit because thats just the way I am.......and a little humor everyday is a good thing.

Netvibes

I chose to make a page for myself on Netvibes. I am not quite done getting it set up but will put up the url anyway.
netvibes.com/redneckgirl51
I will work on this some more tomorrow.

Billings Gazette RSS

Facebook, etc.

I spent the last couple of days checking out LinkedIn, Bebo, Ning and a couple of others. It's really amazing how many sites there are. I am having fun on facebook. Have reconnected with a few friends and playing the games and taking the quizes are fun as well. Am glad I joined Facebook. Still not sure I can use this in connection with the library. Time will tell.

Facebook, MySpace, and others.

I have been checking out the social networking sites the last few days. I am familiar with a couple so I know how they operate. I chose Facebook first and pretty much decided not to do MySpace, but saw a few friends that used to live here so joined it too but only to find friends and classmates at a later date. Facebook has been pretty much what I expected it to be. Seems to be alot of teenagers using MySpace. There seems to be alot of people using Facebook in the professional fields which that surprised me. But it is a good tool for just that reason. In exploring around the site I've seen many different professions represented here. What a neat way to be able to communicate with others from all over about your interests and ideas in your chosen field, and to be able to "compare notes". These sites are definately nice for staying in touch with family and friends and finding classmates. I went to several high schools so am excited about the possiblity of hooking up with some I haven't been in touch with for years. So far my only new friends on Facebook are librarians. I have found 1 old friend, my renter who is also my neighbor, a cousin, a few people I know from our community, and someone I used to work with in a different field found me already. We really do live in a very small world.

I plan on looking around Facebook more and who knows? I may even find old friends from my junior high days. Won't that be a kick in the pants!

Twitter feed

I think I finally got my twitter feed going......YYIIPPEE!!

Meebo

Next thing I'm going to check out is Meebo.

I have been following other libraries on Twitter to see how they use it. There really are a lot of useful ways larger libraries use twitter. Everything from informing other staff, posting happenings such as movie times, special events such as book signings, releases of new books, feedback, online services, job information and just about anything in between that comes to mind. I think this is a great tool for libraries and their followers. Maybe someday in the future the smaller libraries will have a use for this tool, especially for their patrons who live several miles out of town. Would be a good time saver and a nice way to stay in touch for both the patron and the library. I don't think I would of tried Twitter if it were'nt for this class. Thank you for the introduction!

Twitter feed

Not sure it's working yet.....getting a wee bit frustrated here...lol. Going to take a break and come back later.

Twitter feed

Trying to figure out how to get my twitter feed to work....not much luck yet

Playing

Just playing here this morning but need to get off of here and get something done today. I love the widgets you can add.....way cool.

Twitter

I am not sure about this twitter thing....i can see how many people like it and use it daily but not sure its for me yet.

For the second part of this assignment I chose to check out the OPAL Master Schedule since this was something I’ve never seen or experienced before. After looking around for a bit I decided to watch a video on the Amish people. I watched the whole 12 minutes and found it quite interesting. I learned about their beginning and had no idea they went so far back and where they started from, Switzerland, of all places. I think this is a great resource for finding information and I will use this resource again and more than once.

Communications..email

Email......hhhmmm.....we use email to send information to our local paper, communicate with the town office, subscribe to newsletters we are interested in, updates for programs especially anything with new viruses or worms floating around out there. Just recently we had a couple of requests to help with obituaries from many years back. Its handy for staying in touch with other librarians....almost faster than the telephone. Our patrons don't email our library but I am hoping that will change sometime in the future.

As far as productivity goes it helps immensly with any communications from the state library and notifications of upcoming classes, webinars etc. It helps keep me in the know about important news.

Using web tools for communicating is a great thing. I would like to see our community use this tool in connection with our library. I am sure they use it within their friends and family circles, and getting them to use our library for this as well would enhance their experience with the library.

I do a little IM with friends but nothing through the library and we don't text. I don't think it is available in our community and we don't have phones in the library capable of texting either.

Well, this is my first time blogging so bear with me. I am going to participate in the 2009 Montana 2.0 Challenge. This is all new to me but I think it will be fun. My first assignment is to tell you which of the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Effective learners is the easist and hardest for me. I think the hardest for me is having confidence in myself. That has always been a problem for me even since grade school. The easiest I think would be creating my toolbox. I have several hobbies and getting all the necessary items together is easy especially when using the internet, books and people as resources to get everything you need together.