Things 1, 2 and 3

So, here we go with ALSC's "21 Things for 21st Century KidLibs!"

1. Make a blog.  Here it is.  Hope you like it.
2. Become more knowledgeable about Library 2.0.  I'm on it! (Love the manifesto on the ALSC 21 Things blog
3. Post something technology related.  Again, here it is -

I've taken web challenges before, and although I know quite a bit about blogging and other facets of web 2.0, there is always something else to learn, something that's become passé , something new that has taken its place.  In the past few months, I've become aware of at least three new things with possibilities:

Glogster - My son brought this one to my attention.  His teacher uses the .edu version for her class. Imagine doing a book report like this:


Scratch - This one I learned about from a colleague.  Scratch, created by the great minds at MIT,  teaches kids to write computer programming code.  Check this out.  My son “drew” this picture using MS Paint and then used Scratch to animate the drawing. (click the green flag to animate)  He used about 40 lines of code to animate the drawing.

Learn more about this project



Topsy - need up-to-the second information?  Topsy is a tweet-powered search engine.  Think of it as Google for  tweets.  The word in the blogosphere is that Topsy outperforms Twitter’s own search engine.

Sometimes it's not immediately apparent how (or if)  a new application will be applicable to libraries, but staying ahead of the curve is part of the challenge!  On we go -