Week 5, #12- Roll your own search tool with Rollyo

I was able to finally create a Rollyo once I stopped trying to be creative with it. One of my passions is trying new recipes. So I decided to go from there. Usually I will just google a recipe but I realized that I usually end up at a couple of favorite sites. Once I become more familiar with it I will work on incorporating it into a library setting. I can see it being used by teachers and students to access various sites that have been pre-approved. It just isn't the easiest to incorporate into our district's current webpage format. However, this will give me some more things to do in my spare time over the summer. I was disappointed that I could not place the tag anywhere on my blog (excluding this post) except under my avatar.
Another thing to work on this summer!

Thanks to those that gave me some alternatives and suggestions. It really helps.

General comment

I am currently working with Rollyo and we're not getting along. I decided to see how everyone else got along with this feature. In searching for blogs regarding Rollyo I encountered an abundance of amazing blogs. Wow...I am spellbound by the creativity within this group. Thank you for opening many wonderous doors...now if I only had more time! (but I have to get back to Rollyo...I know I created something I just have to find it in cyperspace!)

I know there is a way to harness all these great ideas but I either slept through that lesson or haven't come to it yet!

Week 5, #11 Explore (and still playing)

I perused many of the award winning sites but I still have my reservations as to how I would utilize them. In light of recent of news reports about a missing girl and comments from those I know, I wanted to look into Craig's list. Personally, it does allow individuals to get information out to a majority but it brings up those questions about Internet safety.

A friend obtained a roommate via Craig's list and it turned out to be a disaster. They did not meet prior so there was no way of getting that "intuitive" "warm fuzzy" feeling about an individual. It was kind of like a mail order bride.

As with many of the Internet sites, an individual can become a chameleon and be whatever they want to whomever. There are so many great technological tools for our students to access on the web but I understand why school districts do not want to take the legal responsibility of where students go. If we minimize the filters to allow students to access Flickr photos (for example), we open the door to them accessing inappropriate materials. How do we merge the two?

Ning's are new to me. I joined a Library Technician group and am very excited to see where this goes.

And I played some more....thanks to Whats up I found another fun image generator site. And now it is time for some fun in the California sun!

Song Code form ProfilePitstop

Make your own at ProfilePitstop.com

Week 5- #10 Still playing

I am still having fun with the generators. Two generators caught my eye...Gamers Sig Generator and Arcade Games Pic. Kids love video games. Unfortunately, I am not that familiar with some of the current games and Pong was not on either list. However, I did find a couple that I recognized. The elementary kids also love bookmarks so I merged these two loves.

Using the image generators above, I created the picture for the bookmark. Then I imported the graphics into PrintShop 21, added the rectangular shape at the bottom and saved the entire graphic as a .jpg file. The bookmarks would be cool with color at the bottom but it would use up way too much ink. As it is they use up quite a bit. There is some distortion with "Sonic" that I am trying to work on.

This course has really helped me to look outside the box for ideas. Our school's yearly theme next year will be "Go for the Gold", revolving primarily around the Olympics. Trading cards with Olympic athletes would be really fun but cost will certainly play an important role. I love the Movie Posters and Magazine Covers that many have created. These would also be something that could be created for the library, with Olympic athletes again.

My school webpage has a "Quick Poll" feature. Currently I am just featuring details about a past Olympian. I would like to create a trading card with the information and incorporate it into our poll feature.

Week 5 - #10 Play

I have always enjoyed Image Generators. However, I never knew there were so many different sites out there. Currently, I use a font generator for my school webpage... www.familylobby.com. I like adding a little more dimension to the title. Finding sites that did not contain questionable content for elementary school age students has been an issue.

I played around with the Comic Strip Generator and noticed a link to http://www.imagegenerator.org/. Wow what a plethora of sites to search. Loved it.

A new project that I would like to introduce into our school library is a Birthday Book Club. Many of the schools within our district have such a program to increase the library collection as well as acknowledging the students. My funding is very limited. One way to save on some cost would be to created a bookplate that I could print out on the computer using existing Avery labels. Another positive for this project was the opportunity to purchase the rights to the graphic which would be free of the link. This would eliminate any students going to a site that may potentially have inappropriate material or links to another site that does.

The label was created using a generator found at http://www.customizemagnets.com/.

Week 4, # 8 & 9 - RSS & Newsreaders

I found some really cool sites for RSS feeds, my favorite being Doug Johnson's blog. I also created a draft post asking how we can keep up with new blogs for those within the CSLA course. Now I know. However, I ran into some difficult. We are just about to the MAX on free space on our computer so the RSS and Newsreaders really slowed us down. My task this summer is to do some computer housecleaning and clear some of those old files. I can't afford a new, bigger, better computer just yet! So for now I need to be content to bookmark the sites and visit them on a regular basis.