Check out the blog post dated Friday, October 27, 2006, at The Amplified Library
Links to an Interesting video of a teen panel with Guy Kawasaki and asks questions about technology use. Says there’s a What Teens Want conference(?) for marketers.
technorati tags:teens, what_teens_want, technology
Here’s a LifeHacker post Ten steps to mental fitness about an article entitled The Ten Part Mental Fitness Program
It comes timely for me in particular as the post mentions the steps relating to thinking about the future, plans, & goals. Perhaps you, too, encounter decisions at work that seem lacking in future vision? Maybe this would also help provide a context or framework for why you do what you do. I will hopefully read this.
technorati tags:lifehacker, mental_fitness
Here’s a nice way to resize images you need to post on your library (or any) website. As I understand, although you may resize an image within your web editing software, you may not necessarily reduce it’s actual file size. Those large files of images are what can slow down the load time of a website. Use it to resize for email, as well. It allows batch processing, too. Also, generate mulitple sizes of a single image. I tried it, and it worked!
Quick Thumbnail: The fastest and most powerful way to resize images online
technorati tags:quick_thumbnail, images, photo_editing
More fun for librarians! Create your own card image with customized info:
from
http://www.blyberg.net
technorati tags:card_generator, byberg.net
C|Net has a series on digital kids:
Teen-only gym: Virtual reality, real sweat
MySpace blurs line between friends and flacks
Keeping kids safe on social sites
Are virtual worlds the future of the classroom?
School filters vs. home proxies
When digital kids rule the classroom
MySpace reaching out to parents
Teaching kids to drive the Net
When ‘digital bullying’ goes too far
The ‘millennials’ usher in a new era
noslang.com is an Internet Slang Dicitonary & Translator. Plug in your IM slang you can’t fgure out, and it’ll translate it for you. The site also has some other resources, tips, and some plug-ins for your browser.
Here’s a post from Lifehacker:
Take your kids to the Zoo(.com) for safe searches
Parents have a new tool in the fight to protect kids from inappropriate web content: Zoo.com, a child-friendly search engine that filters out sexually explicit material.
Designed for tweens and teens (specifically, ages 8-13), the site pulls search results from the likes of Google and Wikipedia, and news from ABC, Fox, and Yahoo. Zoo.com purposely has no image-search capability, and it promises to weed out “adult” words while retaining suitable results. Says the press release:
A child using the search term “breast cancer” will get plenty of information, but the word “breast” delivers no results.
Kudos to InfoSpace for this; I’m surprised more search engines haven’t created similar offerings (yeah, I’m looking at you, Google). My kids aren’t quite Internet-age yet, but when they are, I’ll be glad there’s a smut-free search site like this.
technorati tags:zoo.com, lifehacker, search, Internet
For those of you using Google Calendar (which I recommend):
Zotero and Notetaking Applications
Lucy Gray points to five notetaking applications to help students keep and organize notes from their research. In addition to those mentioned by Lucy, Kairosnews recently pointed to Zotero. Zotero is a free Firefox 2.0 extension/add-on that enables note taking organization from within Firefox.
…helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.
Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.
Technorati Tags: Firefox 2.0, notetaking, Zotero
More library video fun! A bit disjointed, but fun all the same!
Putting this on my to-try list:
from http://tim.lauer.name/
John Pederson points to Google Co-op. Basically a build your own do it yourself search engine. John points out some educational uses including dumping your list of search links into Google Co-op and making the list of vetted web sites into a custom search tool using Google as the front end. For example a teacher who has researched and found appropriate sites for her students to visit could create a Google Co-op search tool that returned search results from those specific sites only. There is also a collaborate feature that allows you to invite others to edit and add to your custom search tool.
Below is an example I threw together this morning. It returns search results from several kid friendly search sites. I’ve invited our technology teacher, Tony Jamesbarry to also edit the tool with me, and anticipate sharing it with staff later this week.
One nice feature is that non-profits can turn off adwords, so the results returned are free of advertisements. Also there are tools for customizing the look of the search box and easy cut and paste javascript for including the search box in your own web page.
technorati tags:google_co-op
