Beginning

Thank you Allana, Christa, Michael, and Susan for the amazing 23 experiences! And thank you for your patience and endurance!

After completing all of the Discoveries, I feel I'm no longer on the fringes...not really knowing...about these technologies. The difference was the hands-on experience! Invaluable!

My favorite discoveries were: Image Generators, Delicious, Slideshare, PBWiki, GoogleDocs, and My Heritage from the Web 2.0 Awards List! My least favorite was probably Twitter.

I really liked how I could work on these activities at my own pace and on my own time schedule. I didn't have to "be" at class at a particular hour of the day. I could work on an activity at my home computer for awhile, do laundry, come back to the activity, make a meal, come back to the activity, etc. And some days I could work on activities while I was at work. That kind of schedule really works for me!

I know that I haven't retained all the knowledge that I gleaned from this class. I need to go back & keep using the technologies so they become more automatic for me. Any chance that these 23 things will stay posted online beyond Jan. 30 so one could go back & refresh one's memory?

Depending on the topic, I'd most likely participate in another discovery program. I need to keep "stretching." Thanks again!

podcast

My daughter loves podcasts, so I thought this lesson would be a great way to connect with her. I used a couple different directories and ended up subscribing to 5 podcasts, 3 of which are NPR podcasts. The 3 NPR podcasts I chose were: All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Talk of the Nation. Then for fun I chose 2 others: Uncontrolled Vocabulary and Circle of Seven.

So now maybe my daughter, who lives out-of-state, and I can discuss various common podcasts!

YouTube

I've heard tons about YouTube, but I'd never before looked at it, so this was a first for me. I searched for newspaper digitization & was disappointed, as most was pretty commercial stuff. Then I searched around for genealogy stuff and found A LOT! I certainly picked up some pointers by watching a few genealogy videos.

I created a YouTube account & before I end this blog, I'm going to try to embed 2 basic genealogy videos that I thought were good.

What I liked about the YouTube site was the search bar was prominent & it seemed to work fairly well.

As for what I didn't like about the site, there was one genealogy video that I watched that was REALLY amateur and a waste of my time. So I guess that's the downside, that you have no idea how good or bad the video or its information is. I'm looking for accurate and helpful information, not cheesy entertainment.

Since I'm new at this YouTube thing, my "dumb" question is: how do you actually make the video? The genealogy videos I watched were live action shots of a computer screen, complete with clicks, highlights, links, etc. So did that person set a camera up on a tripod over his shoulder to record the screen and every click of the mouse?

As for applying YouTube components to library websites, I'm wondering if this might be a way to publish some electronic database tutorials??????????

Okay, now I'll try to switch to Edit Html & embed those 2 genealogy videos. Wish me luck! Hmmm...I see the copied code when I'm in the "Edit Html" tab, but when I switch back to "Compose" mode, I see nothing.