# 17 Delicious

Well not only have I been able to set up a Delicious account but have managed to test it on 4 different computers as I've been travelling this week. I love that you can access bookmarks from any computer (no more having to email my husband sites he needs). I have also managed to link Delicious to my igoogle page which I am chuffed about and makes bookmarking very quick and easy. I also like the privacy aspect where you can share sites or keep them for yourself. (I would definitely set it up like this for classroom use). I used Delicious years ago when it was De.lic.ious. We had a teaching network who would all bookmark great sites. I loved it, but as I haven't been teaching for a few years sort of forgot about it. One thing that did frustrate me was when not all the sites bookmarked were that great, you still had to sift through them. However, setting up my own account eliminates that a bit. I can see that in the classroom, by bookmarking relevant topics for research it would reduce time spent trawling irrelevant sites. The only down side I can see is if people bookmark too many sites that you don't find helpful and you don't have much control over what is bookmarked. Yes, I'll be using Delicious in the future and hopefully hubby will be too.

# 15 RSS and # 16 Subscribing

Well have spent quite a bit of time this week revisiting igoogle (and have now made it my home page). Now that I have reclaimed my laptop from the rest of the family (told hubby to bring his home and stop using mine and banned kids from using it), not to mention purchasing and setting up wireless so that I can work at night, I can play around a bit more with each activity. Up until now I felt as if I was just getting by, doing each activity but not really absorbing and understanding what everything was. I am immensely proud of myself for going wireless and what a surprise when husband came home and discovered my new IT skills.

I found the video RSS in Plain English great. It was very straight forward. I understand RSS to mean really simple syndication and that it delivers regular updated info without having to search whole websites. I now have the blogs I am following, regularly updated on my igoogle page which is great. As there isn't really any website I check regularly at the moment I didn't know what to subscribe to. I haven't quite worked out how to attach an RSS feed to my own blog. I think I'll have to just move along and revisit this activity when I get inspired about what to follow.

I love the concept of RSS. My husband regularly checks particular sites on his work computer and I told him he should use RSS. I think he will.

I can see that in a classroom situation this would be great if you wanted regular updates on a current affairs issue being studied. How do others use it primary classes?

# 13 MySpace and # 14 Facebook

Well after much deliberation and psyching up I finally joined MySpace and Facebook, checked out what each of them offered. Checked out what other people had on their sites, then promptly deleted my accounts. I know that was wimpy of me but there is a reason I have avoided joining the ever growing numbers of people on social networking sites. Over the past few years I have been amazed by the number (and frankly the type of people who have wanted to 'friend' me). Surprise! Surprise! my friends have remained my friends even though I have not friended them on Facebook or MySpace

I have to say that I printed out the 5 easy steps to stay safe on Facebook, and followed them to the letter. I can see how people would get frustrated with this task and not bother, though when I looked at the default settings it certainly allows people to access just about anything. For this reason, I would prefer facebook over MySpace as it seemed to offer better privacy settings for the user. MySpace had a more appealing  homepage and I can certainly see it appealing more to the younger user with it's easy access to music downloads. Thanks for the articles about protecting yourself, they were very valuable.

Lots of my friends are on Facebook and find it very useful for sharing photos, especially when living/travelling overseas or organising group catch-ups. I don't feel the need at the moment to spend an inordinate amount of time seeing what others are doing. Maybe that need will present itself as my kids get older.

I checked out Ning but couldn't access it and had a look at Linked-in which looked good for those in professions such as teaching or education. Haven't had much time to investigate Twitter. What I saw didn't impress me much. However, I have enjoyed reading many people's "Twittered" comments whilst watching Q and A.

# 12 Flickr

Yipeeee! It worked!!!!

Imagine my surprise when I set up my flickr account and found not only did I already have an account (which I suspect a family member had set up) but that there were photos of my children on it that my brother-in-law had put on. I have uploaded photos to flickr and discovered that because I set my settings as 'family only' and not 'everyone', I was unable to post the pictures to my blog. At least I know how to do it if the need arises. I like how you can search for people by email or name. It's easy to organise into sets and collections of sets. the galleries are great for getting ideas. I loved the N-generation clip.

I got this from Dumpr. Love the way you can turn photos into sketches. I tried it on photos which I loved but didn't want to put photos on my blog. Here goes, let's see how easy this is to add to my blog.


http://www.dumpr.net/photo/e1c236ca0a5765e8/

oops will try again.

# 11 LibraryThing

Being an avid reader, I spent loads of time in this site. I set up an account and found lots of my favourite books quickly and easily. I was fascinated to discover that the Kite Runner had 29,859 people who had catelogued it. I spent some time looking at the different groups and thought there were some novel ideas eg the read a book with a fabulous front cover challenge. I can see how this would appeal to many people but do wonder where they would get the time to participate in challenges and group chats. I don't feel the need to have an online catelogue of books at this point, though I do feel it's a great way of keeping a record of fabulous books read as I have a terrible tendency to forget what I've read and then can't recommend them to others.I wouldn't think there's much scope for this in the primary classroom. If anyone uses it in a primary classroom, please let me know how useful it is. Checked out Yarra Plenty's new website. It was also easy to navigate. I'd love a job that involved writing book reviews!!!

# 10 Still Going

There surely must be a better way. Whilst I have enjoyed playing around with the each of the online image generators suggested for this week. I'm sure my limited capabilities are restricting me. I have decided to move on and come back to this when I have quite a few more hours in order to process the "how to' of attaching to my blog. I'm sure it's a easy as someone showing me the one necessary button to click.
Image by Cool Text: Logo and Button Generator - Create Your Own Logo

# 10 Again

Am trying this again to see if there is a better way of linking this image to my blog.
ImageChef.com Poetry Blender