#7 week 3 - Digital cameras

Digital cameras - I love them! For a number of years I had a wonderful Olympus with a 10x zoom. Feel on it ithis spring while scanning the skies for California Condors. Now I have the newest Olympus with an 18x zoom. It's wonderful for nature photography - from birds in the distance to close-ups of flowers, etc. Now & then I'd take a photo of a subject, plop it into Photoshop, put in a title with a Dewey Decimal number, and display it on my check-out counter. For example, I took some photos of otters while kayaking one day. Edited in with a title, "Otters 599.74." Kids enjoyed seeing what photo and call number would be showing that week. Now and then they'd actually head off to look for books in the "advertised" call number.

Also had fun over the years creating @ Your Library posters of kids, teachers, and parents reading or researching in the library.

Today I was organizing photos and adding keywords in IPhoto and was thinking about how "librarian-like" that was. It would be a good experiment for kids. What key-words would you use and why? How do tyou find things on the Internet? How can you use general or specific keywords to expand or narrow your search?

#5 & 6 Week 3 - Using Flickr & Mashups

Since SBC/Yahoo is getting rid of Yahoo photos, and switching us all to Flickr, I'd had a bit of experience with this one. I had just started uploading pics to Flickr last week. I had fun creating a trading card, but since I do NOT photograph well, my library dragon had the honor instead. I enjoy the idea of students creating trading cards as a way to share info about books, explorers, famous folks, and so forth. Author trading cards might be fun, and of course, we'd need to write the author first to get permission to use an image of them. Maybe they'd even send an image we could use. We'd have to put in a note about photo used with permission of...

One thing that does concern me is opening up so much personal info to the world. I'd love to be able to use the applications that connect your phots to map locations. However, you need to have your photos published as public to use it. The photos that are being shared with friends and family can not get connected to a map.

Week 2 - Exercise 3

Blog creating time. I've been using Constant Contact for several years to create electronic newsletters for my school community. Setting this up is quite similar, except I'm not happy with my header/title area. Will need to go recreate what I want in Photoshop, then resubmit the gif.

Thing 2 - 7 1/2 Habits

Is there a student version of this slide show? Most of it would be perfect to use with older elementary students. However, some references were aimed to adults. And...the pacing wold be too slow for most kids. They'd yawn before it was over. Nice reminders for them that they DO control their own learning, though.