Wrapping Up

I have finally completed the OCL Webthings challenge. I feel like I learned so much that I did not know and what I already knew was reinforced. One thing I really liked about the challenge was the flexibility of the challenges and how we competitors were given a great amount of time to work on any one specific challenge. Some of the first few challenges were pretty easy to me since I have other blogs, but I understand that all of the steps were necessary because not all competitors have had blogs before. One thing I thought was really cool was the Sandbox I had a lot of fun in there. Before the challenge I did not know what GoogleDocs is because there was no need for me to use it, however I definitely see how it can be used by people running businesses or who do programing. Delicious is great! I downloaded it onto my computer and just tag websites I like. It is almost like a better version of favorites.
I think the one thing I love the most and will share with everyone is World Cat. I just love to read everything I can get my hands on. At Ocean County we are lucky to have so many different materials in our system. And if we don't have them we can go on World Cat which I love because sometimes I must admitt I read kind of strange books. Recently I saw that a link was added for World Cat on the OCL Page under the Library Catalog. One thing I shared with others is library thing. I told my mom about because she also reads many books so it is a good way for us both to keep a list of the ones we have read.
My only difficulty with the challenge was not having access to a scanner because Whiting Reading Center does not have one.

background

After searching for a few weeks I finally found the perfect background- Disney Princesses. I know it's so appropriate! I was having a problem with the code because I had not update my template bar to layout so the html code would not work. Now that I finally figured it out it is a piece of cake!

Thing 22 Listen NJ

I love the whole concept of listening to books on cassettes or cds. I really hadn't listened to a book on tape until a couple of months ago. I read and fell in love with Stephen Colbert's book I Am America and so Can You and I knew I would have to listen to it on cd so I could hear Colbert read it. Then naturally I found Jon Stewart's book on cd. Currently I am listening to the Harry Potter series spoken by Jim Dale who is AMAZING!!! So I was very excited in learning more about Listen NJ. First I looked for popular authors; of course they had James Patterson. The actual website is easy to navigate and they either have the material you are looking for or they don't.
What I do not like about Listen NJ is all the stuff you have to download on your computer to get the book you want downloaded. First I had to download the software for OverDriver for my selected book title. Then when I went to download the book I had numerous error messages which led me to upgrading security of windows media player which they recommended. After that I finally was able to download the book. The download was so slow but eventually became faster.
The book I downloaded is Sacajawea:The Story of Bird Woman and the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Joseph Bruchac. I love Native American culture which is why I chose this story and then I saw who the author was after downloading it and was very pleased. He writes many Native American stories and one that we have in Whiting called Code Talker (in YA) is excellent. I encourage everyone to read it!

podcast

Since the theme of my Blog is Disney of course I looked up Disney on podcast.com There are some great stuff out there like Radio Disney which I loved as a kid. I found a podcast called "Everything Disney Podcast" which of course I figured would be perfect for a Disney lover like me. So I started listening to the Podcast and the podcast is merging with another disney podcast into one major podcast. They did give us listeners a temporary website to go to until the main one is completed. This is where they told us to go: temp.poddisneycom.officelive and when I tried to go there I could not find it or anything close to it so I searched google for it and found a different Disney podcast called "Zip-A-Dee-Doo" Podcast from another podcast website...here is the link to the podcast I found http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podcasts/9723
I then looked on odeo.com for Disney and also came across a few interesting ones. There was even a podcast for Disney cruiselines!

I love youtube!

I am quite familiar with youtube and have used it before. I have a video on my myspace of Ronald Reagan that I love. He was my favorite President! Youtube is really simple to use and has videos of everything you could possibly think of. I was writing about the Christmas tsunami of 2004 for a sociology assignment and I found some great footage of it to help prove my paper because the video included news brodcastings and statistics. The video I choose to put on here I absolutely love. First of all, I love the song used and I just love Disney movies and Disney Princesses. I love this video because it shows how creative people can be.
After seeing this video I looked at the side and saw related works that also included Disney scenes set to popular songs like "Everytime We Touch." I could watch these videos all day long!

web 2.0 awards

Here are some of the services I like:
-One Sentence
-43 Things
-Yahoo Answers
-Color Blend
The service I would like to become more familiar with is Yahoo Answers. I have a yahoo account already and love yahoo. Next to Google I use Yahoo all the time. Sometimes I am kind of reluctant of using online question and answer websites because many of them like about.com have more advertisements than information. However, yahoo may have a few advertisements but not as many compared to other sites.

Google Docs and Zoho

Since I work at the Whiting Reading Center we do not have programs really because we are so small. However, I think this would be a great program to recommend to our patrons who forget to save their stuff and wind up losing it. This is a great way for them to be able to save work online with being able to access it any time they go on the internet. I like both Google Docs and Zoho because they are very similar to Microsoft Word so for younger people like myself who have been taught Word in elementary school.
These are both great programs for the library system to utilize. One of the advantages of both websites is being able to work on them anywhere with internet connection. I know if computers do not have powerpoint this would be an excellent way to do a presentation.