Magpie

It has happened enough over the past few weeks that I started thinking about it. A number of parents and colleagues have stopped me to ask where I find links and resources that are integrated into our Learning Commons wiki. Like most librarians, I am a magpie. I gather things.

My RSS feed is the primary source of glittering, nourishing, astounding resources. Every day I zip through recent posts from the 97 blogs I follow. Peer librarians, technology gurus, publishing and book review sites, blogs on Google, social media trends and news aggregators from around the world all show up like the most personalized newspaper you can imagine.

By tagging items I build my own digital archive that I can search for specialized content. If I need to get quickly up to speed on the use of back channels in the classroom and the different platforms I can check my feed, where I have been tagging back channels for the last year. How about avatars? Yup.

For the last year or so I have known that I need to pay attention to mobile apps for the library. The best bloggers in the field of school librarianship have been posting resources and recounting their experiences, all for my benefit. By tagging their excellent work (thanks, Joyce Valenza!) I can easily refer to it when I am ready - which is this year.

I am not book marking websites. I am tagging content.

Here is a great example:

On the wire – September 2010 | Educational Origami

This blog post has some amazing web apps that work and are being used successfully with students. Click through for the links. Here are a couple of highlights:

• grabbing images - we always have students pulling images off the web for media projects
• cheat sheets for specialized programming languages (sending this link to our tech arts media teacher)
• Quickstart guide for iMovie09 - this will get posted on the wiki
• Sound Bible - royalty free music, great for those media projects, waiting to be posted to our wiki
• Lovely charts - I have to play with this, but it looks really powerful and a great way to present data in a compelling, visual way

RSS feeds, Diigo, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other outlets are all part of the daily doings of this little magpie. And our wiki is my nest. By the way, did you know that magpies gather in groups called "parliaments"? How cool is that? I wonder what you call a gathering of librarians...

A shelf of librarians?

Photo Credit:

Flickr Creative Commons

Perching Magpie

QR for your library and a new site for your RSS feed

At our high school I can tell you one thing for sure. Teenagers don't read signs. Period. I struggle with signage.

Let me give you an example. We have a LCD screen behind our main desk and use it to promote events and showcase student life. For the past couple of weeks we have been using it to remind students to clear their student network server accounts before the vacation as all work would be deleted. I was standing right under the display when a student asked if there was a limit to how much he could leave on his network account over the summer. I pointed to the Keynote presentation advising students to clear their accounts that was running right above MY HEAD!

I just came across a great blog that had a neat idea. Shelf Consumed: Cool Tools for Libraries...QR Codes. Click through to the post, which is rich in links and resources.

The short version is that this free (yay!) service allows you to generate a QR code for anything. It is a neat way to tag your collection, promote events, promote books - anything! Tagging is a core skill in organizing web-based information, so why not incorporate it in other ways as well?

Our students don't seem to read signs very well, but they read their cell phones with great skill. Smartphones can be used to read QR code. Hmmm... Using a free mobile barcode and an app like Ingima  a student can "read" a QR code and automatically link to a website, video or any web-based destination. This could be a great way to publicize the learning commons in September. Or to showcase some of our new books. Shelf Consumed has even more suggestions for uses of QR codes in your learning commons or library.

Additional links:
QR Code Generator
Sticky Bits

I can see that Shelf Consumed is going to be a valued addition to my RSS feed.