Thing 47! Evaluation

Some Observations about MORE THINGS on 17 June:

1. Some that were the "most fun" were also the "most frustrating" for me. Even though I spent lots of time working on GOOGLE Maps and screencasting, I am not satisfied with my efforts, and want to continue to use those THINGS.

2. Thanks to the Things, I spend much time on Facebook and Twitter now. It is amazing how they change our communication and the way that we spend our time. When I just checked, I found that I have 117 friends on Facebook, and follow 117 on Twitter. What a coincidence!

3. There are many potential library uses for the Things we just completed, and I hope to implement what I have learned professionally as well as personally.

4. I found it easier to do the first 23 Things last summer than I did this round when I started while I was working full time. My preference is to work on one a day rather than a group of them at a time to try to finish by the deadline.

5. RSS is probably the Thing that I use the least, and WebJunction one that I want to use more than I currently do.

6. Some of the Things that I found most fun and useful were the music and photo ones. It was great to learn about sites (like Animoto) that I had not used before.

7. I enjoyed looking at the blogs of other Things participants, especially after "meeting" some of them on the 23 Things Ning and Twitter.

8. Thank you for offering More Things!

Thing 30! More Ways to Use RSS and Delicious

The only RSS feed that I have on my blog is the Google News one, but I have others on my iGoogle page. Being I have widgets for CNN and Politico on my blog, I do not want to clutter it up too much. Thing 30 introducted me to MANY RSS sites, tricks and tips that I did not previously know about. I looked at all of the sites selected for Thing 30, bookmarked some on Delicious, and now have accounts with Tabbloid and Spreed. After setting up the Spreed account, I thought of my mother who was such a speed reader and said that you don't need to read every a, and and the! I looked at the .govFeeds and rssWeather.com. Now I should spend less time on Facebook and Twitter for awhile and concentrate on RSS feeds for a few days. Too many THINGS to read!

I have had a delicious account before I did the 23 Things. When I set up my original blog, I added a link to it before I did any of the "Things". Now I removed that link and added the linkroll to the sidebar so the most recent entries are visible. I want to organize my tags. Now I have an account with 43marks.com and added my bookmarks to Insuggest.

Thing Seventeen!

17. ELM Productivity Tools.

At our library I make extensive use of Proquest, Ebsco products, and NetLibrary. When we do class presentations, we instruct and encourage students to use them. NetLibrary is a great resource for our students to have access to current books.

Because I am more familiar with the higher academic resources, I concentrated on searches using the Gale Discovering Collection geared for students from grades 8-12 and did searches in MasterFILE Premier tonight. After hearing Nancy Pelosi on NPR this noon, I did a search on her as well as on other names and topics. I must admit that this was the first time that I logged on the ELM Portal on my personal computer at home using my public library barcode number. My barcode number from my college id. card has been in my memory for years, but I never even thought of using my public library number to access ELM databases from home. Searching different databases gave me a new perspective of the many resource available to us in Minnesota.

I had not tried the Page Composer or RSS Feeds in ELM yet, and was surprised by features that I did not even know were available. Besides doing an account and a new folder, I also saved an article to my Del.icio.us account. The search for images is easy to do in the EBSCO databases. Tonight I spent a lot of time on Facebook as I wanted to have a "head start" on Thing Twenty so that I have something to report by the time I reach that THING. I will return to Thing Eighteen soon to do more exploring.

LATER: I returned to ELM on 09/14, and had time to work more with the search alerts feature, a very useful one.

Thing Three!

3. Set up an RSS account and add feeds.

"Really Simple Syndication"

I have an account with GOOGLE Reader and subscribed to some feeds (BBC and NPR are two).

The GOOGLE News one has been added here . . .