Week 4: Twitter

It was easy signing up for Twitter. I tried looking for my friends on Twitter but couldn't find any. I followed the NY public library, Mt Roskill Library and Margaret Atwood (because she is my favourite author). I found Margaret Atwood's twitter very confusing. I don't really see the point in using twitter. Firstly, my friends and family don't use twitter. I heard that a lot of famous actors, actresses and singers use twitter. Unless you want to follow them, then I don't see the point in using twitter. Second, the search box is great, you type in a keyword and it comes up with a bunch of comments with that word in it. But is it relevant? I am really not interested in what people think. So I can safely say that I still prefer to use facebook. I guess ACL can advertise their library events on Twitter.

Here's the link

http://twitter.com/Casie25

Week 4: RSS Feeds

I learned about RSS feeds at the beginning of last year so I already have a google reader account. Unfortunately, I never got around to checking for the latest updates because it was annoying to find that there was a long list of updates each time I logged into google reader. I have gotten used to going onto the website and checking for new posts. It was much easier that way.

However, I am helping my colleague start a Teen book group next month so I subscribed to new and recommended teen fiction and graphic novel. I need to keep up to date with teen novels so I will try and use google reader more. I also found that you can unsubscribe from some RSS feeds that you don't want to read anymore. If you click on a particular feed on the left hand side, you can read the updates from just that particular website instead of reading everything all at once.

http://www.google.co.nz/reader/view/?hl=en

Week 3: Image Generators (Part 4)

I quite like Letter James and Image Generator. In Letter James, you could search for a lot of pictures, select the one you want and put in the words. One annoying thing was that you had to type in word verification every time you made changes or to confirm your image. Image Generator was the same without the hassle of typing in word verification. However the website offers only a small amount of images.

Week 3: Edit your own images (part 3)

My parents had a pink photo of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I decided to use picnik to fix it. I thought it was a going to be a difficult task but actually it was quite easy. Picnik is much user friendly than the photo wizard we normally use in the library computer. There were lots of useful functions. First of all, I clicked on auto-colour to change the pink to greyish white. I also clicked on Crop and cut off the black edge on the left hand side. Then I clicked on the Create tab, clicked on "text" and typed in the word "after" and placed it at the bottom of the photo. I also went to frames and changed the photo so that the edges were rounded.

I have included both photos before and after the change.




I think Picnik is a great website for touching up photos.

Week 3: Flickr Fun (part 2)

I looked at a couple of flickr mashups. I think the one I like the most is Flickr color pickr. Instead of the normal search where you type in a keyword, you search for images by picking the colour. Again, I do not think any of this would be useful to my library job. The only thing I can think of is that it might be useful for doing displays. If you wanted images of the same colour, you can go to the website and search for images.


Trading card maker was much more interesting. It was fun and quite easy making cards by uploading your photos or pictures you like. I would recommend this website to kids as a school holiday activity. I also made a magazine cover. This is a cool activity when you are bored and need something to do.

Week 3: Explore Flickr (Part 1)

To be honest, I found Flickr a little bit boring. I don't take photos a lot and hardly share any at all (even on facebook). I did not want to set up my own account so I used the Aclelgar one instead. I typed in "Sakura" which means Cherry Blossom in Japanese and found some lovely photos. This is the one I picked out of all the images. The annoying thing was I couldn't add the photo into my gallery and save it to my favourites in Flickr. In the end, I saved the photo onto my desktop and uploaded it onto the blog. Here's the link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/altus/3430767281/

I understand that flickr could be a useful website if people wanted to search for images online and share their photos. I don't think I would use this website at all.

Week 2: Social Networking

I am a Facebook user so Bebo and Myspace was just not that interesting to me. First of all, I only found one friend on Bebo. I think all my friends and relatives use facebook. I read somewhere that teenagers use Bebo a lot whereas the 20-30 age range use Facebook. I didn't like Myspace at all. Sure, there were stuff about music but I could find them on google or wikipedia. There were also "sponsored links" (advertisements) that you scroll down and ignore before you could find out the information you wanted.

The one thing I really like about Facebook is the social networking games like Restaurant City, Cafe World, Farmville or Pet Society.

Restaurant City is a cooking game where you design your own restaurant and collect or buy ingredients to cook more dishes. If your friends play these games, you can also visit them and see what they do with their restaurants. You can send them gifts and trade ingredients. You can also find out what ranking you are among them.

Here's the link to Restaurant City

http://www.facebook.com/restaurantcity?ref=nf

I think facebook might be a good thing to promote events in Auckland City Libraries. They have something called "News feed" where we can write about upcoming events and publish them on our profile. I am not sure about Bebo and Myspace. I think the libraries could use Bebo to promote kids and teen events because I noticed that a lot of kids and teenagers use bebo a lot.

Week 1: Learn through Play Web 2.0

Well... first week of Learn through Play. I already had a gmail account and blogger account from doing License to Play last year so it was basically just registering my name and blog. Nothing much to do this week...
Looking forward to the activities and exercises next week.