Technology Adventure, Unit Three

Unit three: Websites
3/7 - 3/20

OPPL Teen: This is the prototype for what our entire website will be like this time next year (hopefully). The backbone of this is interaction – polls, blog posts, book reviews, etc. Read through some of the recent blog posts and leave a comment. Read through some of the book reviews and leave one of your own. (Feel free to leave out your age and school.) If you want to see what the back end looks like, how to create a post, etc, ask Shelley for a demo.

Delicious: This is a site where you can save bookmarks and access it from any computer. We can use this to have a shared archive of useful or fun links. Like Flickr and Blogger, you can tag these for easy organization. I’ve gotten us started with a few links, but this is something we can all use.

Go to delicious.com and choose to sign in with a yahoo ID (the link is below the boxes for logging in.) Check your e-mail for the user name and password.

Go to Bookmarklets and follow the bookmarklet button directions for whichever browser you are using. (Note: for Internet Explorer, use Manual method instead of Easy.) Once you have this bookmarklet in your toolbar, all you need to do is click on this button when you are on a website you want to save, then up will pop a window where you tag it and give a description of what we will find there (in Notes). Save that, and delicious will automatically update to include it. Tags can’t include spaces. If you choose to make it private, only we will see it when we are logged in. Add a few tagged sites to share. Blogs you forgot to include in unit one, fun cracked.com article, whatever.

Of course, it’s hard to add a bookmarklet to the reference desk computers, since it resets every day. But you can go to delicious.com, log in, and click “save a new bookmark” in the top right blue box. Takes longer, same result.

If more than one person bookmarks a site, the numbers appear in a blue box. You can click the box to see who else liked it, what they tagged it, and follow their tags to find similar cool things.

RSS feed/Google Reader: Many of you already discovered that RSS feed readers make blog reading easier, because it sends all the posts from most blogs you like into one place for you to read. There are different choices that do the same thing, so pick your favorite. Ideas are Google Reader, Bloglines, or FeedDemon. It’s understandable to be concerned with giving Google so much control over your online life, but they do have a good service here and it’s also integrated with your Blogger account – you can read it at Google or Blogger.

If you don't already have a feed reader set up, create an account and add some blogs. For Google Reader, you click on Add Subscription on the far left. You can search by keyword for blogs to get some ideas, or browse Google’s bundles of topic suggestions. If you want to add a specific blog, you can go to its website and click on the orange box in the URL field. Choose to add it to your RSS feed and follow the prompts. You can add blogs and websites that update regularly with content, such as news sites or even our delicious account.

Google Docs: Google also has word processing programs online. These include spreadsheets, slideshow presentations, forms, etc, which can be private, open for all to see or shared with specific people. Choose a format and create...something. Share it with everyone in the department by going to Share on the top right side, and choosing sharing settings. You can open it to the public, to anyone you give the link to, or specific people, as well as choose if others can edit it. Check out what everyone has done and edit where allowed. (If you’re both viewing the document as they edit, you’ll see it change letter by letter. It can be fun.)

Bonus:
Google Alert: Ever wonder how Debby finds all the news articles that mention us? Chances are she uses an alert program. If you use Google Alerts to get notified of every time a website mentions Oak Park Public Library (or Doctor Who or Newbery Medal, etc), you can also have the notifications sent to your Google Reader.

Tumblr.: Kind of a blog, kind of a social media thing. It has the ease of sharing content that Twitter has, with added support for pictures and sounds. People were very very sad when it went down for a few days earlier this winter. As one person put it (and dozens of others reblogged): The difference between Facebook and Tumblr. Explore!

Write a post talking about your experiences. What do you think of OPPL Teens? Think Delicious will be useful? How could we use Google Docs, or even Tumblr., as a dept?