Online organizational tools...this week topic instantly makes me think of summer and Google Calendar. My family uses the calender to organize the use of the family summer house. Every was invited to join and can now reserve the times they want to use the house. No more arguments or mis-communications. especially important because there are 6 siblings, their 10 children and their 12 children that all use the house. Needless to say Google Calender has been a blessing.
Besides reminding me that there are approx 16 more weeks until summer...it also reminded me of my bloglines account which I had not logged into in about 6 months. I had created it and linked all these great blogs that I was going to keep up with and alas have not. Even if it does organize my information and prevent me from having to search all over for what I want to read I still have to login in and read it. I love having all of this information at my fingertips but there should be some online class I can take that teaches me how to manage my time. Maybe I need to make it a habit to log on everyday and check my feeds. Is this something that digital natives find easy to do? Do they need to try and make it a habit or does it just come naturally? Ha or maybe I am just lazy... Soo I decided to check out Google Reader. I set up an account and added a few blogs to it; The Blue Skunk blog by Doug Johnson, Web 2.0 Tools and Applications, The Shifted Librarian, The Cool Cat Teacher blog and ALA's job listing site. I like Google because I can have a lot of stuff in one place plus my calender, mail and documents. Now I just need to set aside the time to keep up on it...
In terms of social bookmaking I started with Delicious and created my collection of sites..linkasaurus but then I discovered Diigo and loved the functionality of it. I have 240 links on delicious but have not been maintaining them or adding. I have 498 on linkasaurus at Diigo and continue to add to it. The button that you can add to your browser makes it so easy to add new sites. I have used it with the students for particular projects or when a teacher wants them to use a set collection of resources. I have a link to my collections on the media center website and encourage studentss and faculty! to use them when they research. I need to work on encouraging the students to add to the collection. I think it can be a great resource but also something I will have to maintain...double checking the quality of the links added.
Shelfari was another tool that I had always meant to try out but had not yet. It was also discussed at my book group this month. One of the members was describing what a great tool it is. She uses it to keep track of the books that are recommended to her that she wants to read. Also to search for books that she would be interested in reading. I set up a site and added my shelf to this blog. I listed books that I want to read. I think it will be a nice way to keep track of what I want to read. At school I am thinking of creating one of recommended books. The students could select the books and write reviews..This would also be great for the forensics class book assignment. The students could recommend or not the book they read and then we could add the information to the media center website.
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Nice overview Megan. Your real world examples are terrific and you cover each of the apps very well. I hear you about the time management piece! With google reader I categorize my feeds into must-read, fun, and perhaps-when-I-have-the-time. This way I check my must reads ever couple days, read the fun ones when I have some time to kill and just skim over the perhaps ones to see if anything jumps out at me. I imagine bloglines will let you put your feeds in groups as well. It really helps because if I see 40 unread things in my perhaps folder I don't freak out because I don't feel obligated to read that folder!
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