Monday, September 10, 2007

On Past 23...



My favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey included actually creating my blog and becoming comfortable expressing my thoughts through the blog. I can't see myself stopping any time soon. Even though it is a little frustrating when I don't get a comment on something I think is clever or pithy.
23 Things has introduced me to so many new ideas and ways to use on-line resources personally.
The living isn't always easy in the summer. Summer Reading activities were the highest priority for me and that kept me from focusing on this program. I found that often it was next to impossible to work on the program because of the slowness of our internet during such a busy season.
If another discovery program like this was offered in the future, I would definitely choose to participate.
Last night at our first Girl Scout meeting of the school year, we were discussing some upcoming concerts the girls were interested in attending. The girls were lamenting the fact that many of the concerts - particularly Fall Out Boys - were scheduled for school nights. I mentioned that the DropKick Murphys were on a Monday but that my daughter's school had off the next day and mentioned that I had a clip of them performing on my blog. One of the girls squealed - You have a blog! Oh, give me the URL, I've got to see it.

Pando - a peer to peer file sharing tool

http://www.pando.com/

I found out about this tool while surfing other 23 things projects. It is a way to send large files to others that might otherwise be too big for your e-mail account to handle. It works by compressing files.

Downloadable Audio

Project Gutenberg: The Audio Books Project - Project Gutenberg makes audio eBooks available for some of the same great literature available in plain text. Listings are divided into two categories: Human-read and computer-generated audio books. These are FREE so you don't need an Overdrive or NetLibrary subscription to learn about downloadable audiobooks!

Great idea and wonderful choices but I didn't find any of the titles that came to mind - Almost French, How Green Was My Valley - neither were listed.

Overdrive and NetLibrary have been popular with our patrons and I have directed a number of people to the area where they can register and have shown them how to search for titles. These both offer access to popular titles and fill a need.

Celtic Folk Podcast

I have added Celtic Folk Podcast to my Bloglines account. This feed includes Celtic music from Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.

I was frustrated with the search capabilities of Podcast.net, Podcastalley.com and
Yahoo Podcasts. I searched for podcasts dealing with Nova Scotia and with storytelling. I didn't come up with anything for Nova Scotia and found that the term "storytelling" is used very loosely.

My best results came from googling "Nova Scotia Podcast." This brought me to a Podcast.net selection, so go figure.

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Almost Half Way to St. Patty's Day

I like YouTube because it is easy to search and I enjoy some of the exchanges between various viewers. It would be easy to spend way too much time viewing these video clips. My daughter has committed so many of these to memory - quotes from the video clips become a kind of communication shorthand for teens, immediately establishing their quirky humor.

I chose this clip from Dropkick Murphys because it is almost halfway to St. Patrick's Day and they will be performing at Ram's Head Live on September 17.