Missing Week..hmm..

I just realizied that I think I half typed up a post for week 7 and then got distracted in the middle of it and never posted. Oh well.

Anyways~ Here's a quick recap from that week.

Del.iciou.us is one of the most helpful simple tools that I have discovered during this Play to Learn campaign. It is VERY helpful to be able to find a website while I'm at any computer and bookmark it and then be able reference that bookmark later from another computer. I often come across valuable resources at both home and work that I ususally end up emailing myself the links for, but now I can just bookmark them and they will be available at both sites.

Technorati was an interesting site. I searched a lot of various topics and found lots of great information from a wide variety of blogs. I even found references to some of the blog posts that I had made in my personal blogs because a few of my friends list their blogs on Techonorati.

Both of these tools are very valuable for being able to search for, and reference a whole host of ideas and links to information available on the world wide web. This all equates to blend into the idea of Library 2.0. Libraries are evolving and the world wide web is going to be a large part of this evolution. It is a wonderful tool and all librarians should really take the time to find out how they can best use it to their benefits.

Okay~ I think that about covers my lost post. Or at least I hope it does...

The End~

Wow, we've reached the end of the program. It's hard to believe that it's been ten weeks of Playing to Learn. I really enjoyed being able to take the time to sit back and go through some of the many resources that are available to us online. I only wish that there was a little more time for me to explore some of them.

I'm not sure if I actually had a favorite exercise. I really enjoyed the fact that I pretty much found at least one new website or resource that I hadn't seen before each week. I especially enjoyed learning about RSS feeds. I had heard of them, but was not really familiar with them. It was fun to finally figure out what they were and play with them some.

I do believe that this has help expand on my life long goals. I have a lot more tools for my toolbox now, and am equipped with the basic knowledge on how to use them. Now I just have to take the time to go back and explore some of the programs on my own so that I can learn them further. After all my life long quest is for knowledge of all kinds. :D

I will take away with me a lot of valuable and fun websites. I can't count how many links to websites I emailed myself to check out later. That was before I figured out how to use delicious to bookmark them from here so that I can look at them at home later. Yay for useful tools.

The only way to improve this program would be to maybe expand it a little so that there is a little more time each week to look at all the various resources available. It was sometimes difficult to carve out enough time in my day (even just once a week) to go through everything that was listed. It was an enjoyable experience though.

I would definitely choose to participate in any future programs like this. After all, I really do enjoy learning and writing about what I learn. It was a lot of fun and an enlightening experience, even for someone like me who has a lot of web experience.

Thank you for the oppertunity for this~ I really enjoyed the experience, and will be using a lot of what I learned for a long time to come.

I love youtube. I spend a lot of time on that and veoh in the evenings watching videos and Asian dramas/movies.

Here is a video that really makes me laugh. These gentlemen are inside of a library in Japan, and are trying to be quiet while all these things take place. Can you imagine someone doing this in one of our libraries? I love Japanese game shows...



Plus, because music is such a big part of my life and I really love this new video- I decided to use one of the other video sites I frequent to include the video for it. Yes, it's in Japanese. The artists are TVXQ (famous Korean/Japanese band) and Koda Kumi (Japanese pop artist)


Online Videos by Veoh.com

Here is a link to a podcast that I listened to on Japanese music. link here

I've taken the time to look through our Download Library, but I have had yet to download anything. I think that I would really like to listen to one of the Dr. Who books that they have narrated because it is read by one of the actors on the show. :D I will do it when I have a little more time, but I really think that our Downloadable Library is a wonderful feature. Personally, I'd rather read a book, but for those who are interested in listening to books on cd and audio players, it's truly a wonderful resource.

Week 9 ~ Applications and Web Awards

I actually didn't really know that there were web applications out there. Now, it doesn't really surprise me that they are there, but it's a really good thing. This actually comes in handy for me, because I just had a friend who got a new computer that doesn't have all the office applications on it. Now I can let him know that he can still open and access all his old documents using one of these sites.

Web Awards~
Many of these I'm familiar with, or have learned about through this Play for Fun session. I took this time to play a little bit more with Last.fm, which allows you to pick an artist that you like and listen to music that is similar in style to that. It looks like it also has the capabilities to keep track of what you listen to, and will begin to play music for you based on your choices. I was really surprised to see that it contained a full selection of Asian music, which is a lot of what I listen to.

I also took a look at The Broth- which is a Visual Arts nominee and allows you draw or post things that you have drawn online. It also has chat capabilites so that you can talk with your friends as you draw, or about what you are looking at.

Color Blender is a handy tool that lets you mix colors together to create a color palatte and then gives you the html code for it. This will be handy for me to use on my various websites and also in my novice attempts at icon making.

Finally I looked at the three video programs they had. I'm very familiar with youtube and use it all the time. In my opinion it is one of the best video websites out there. Daily Motion was a good site, with lots of videos available. Not quite as many as Youtube, but still a good selection. The last choice Metacafe didn't have many video selections at all, or maybe it just didn't have many of the things I chose to search for. :s

Once again, it was a week full of new and fun tools on the internet. :D