Twitter

As many of you know twitter is a social networking site where you can instantly update your family and friends on your life in 140 characters or less. Personally despite the fact that I do have a twitter I have never been able to jump on the bandwagon for my twitter. I dont understand why you would want to be constantly updating the world on your every movement. Those who agree with me might find this comic funny.

However I can appreciate the potential twitter has for getting information to a lot of people instantly. For example If you are having an activity at your library and want to get the word out to your students a simple tweet in the twittersphere could have more of an impact then having signs in your library for a month. 

Library Blogs

Personal development is essential to becoming a successful librarian or teacher. There are many blogs and sources online to aid in the search for knowledge. A blog that I find very useful for school librarians is http://kissthebook.blogspot.com/. This blog is dedicated to book reviews. What I find very helpful is that they specify what level (ie. Pre-K, K-3,...) the book is for. Then they rate if the book as essential, advisable, optional, not recommended, or public only for the level. Another blog I find helpful is http://futura.edublogs.org/. It contains web 2.0 teaching strategies and lists of helpful technology for the library. These are just a few examples of the breadth of information out there for personal development.

Technorati

Tachnorati is a blog search website. It catalogs and organizes millions of blogs. You can search through the blog directory that is organized into different subject categories or you can search blogs and posts for key words. Unfortunately the blog directory didn't have subject categories for education or books. But you can search the blogs and post for those words. It also has a top 100 list. I would definitely keep this website in my belt as a resource.

Diigo

Diigo is an online bookmarking social network. If you are like me your first thoughts were, "What is an online bookmarking social network?" and "Why would I need that?" I was rather sceptical at first then I watched a video explaining what Diigo is. Diigo is an extension that you add to your web browser. It allows to to bookmark pages and then highlight and make notes right on a webpage. It then saves your notes so that next time you access the page the notes are still there. Now we are at the social networking part, besides the ability to save those notes you can also share the notes with other people that have Diigo. If you have a group of students working on a research project they can all start out doing initial research and taking notes. They can then share all those notes without having to write anything on paper or email or anything. I decided that I needed to play around with it a little. Diigo is an amazing way to collaborate. I used it to find pages that were tagged education. I found tons of websites that are resources for educators. I am definitely sold on using Diigo. Besides making it easier for my students to share their research I think that it also could be used to share reviews on popular books. Here is the website if you are interested in checking it out www.diigo.com.

Logan Area Search Engine

This is a search engine that connects the different libraries in the Logan Utah area.

Keep Calm and Read