EnCompass Culture Exercise

I love this website! It's very easy to spend a lot of time trying all sorts of combinations of books based on the various genres you like and the "appeal" characteristics! In the intro to this activity we are told that the site has over 10,000 books on it's database - so that is very comprehensive resource for any ans all booklovers! On that basis alone, I would promote the website! On the LHS there is a comprehensive drop down list where you can quickly access Reading Groups, undertake quizzes to test your knowledge, read Author reviews and book lists. I was interested in the Book lists and I printed off the 2010 best books for Children & Young Adults to share with the Children & Teen Librarians/Library Assistants. I did notice as I went through some of the combinations that I chose that the majority of titles ranged in age from 1998 - 2004. There were on a few less than 5 years of age. The most current title I found was "The Ant Colony" which was published in 2009. The generated lists were pretty old titles and the covers looked dated, even if the stories may be very worthwhile. I came across a Margaret Mahy title, but most of the authors were British or American writers.

In the Reading Groups link I came across a few ice-breakers which could be useful i.e get students to collect 3 books in the library. One book must be for themselves, one for a freind and one for some-one they hate! Share your selection with the group and have a good laugh at what you discover! I thought this sounded like a lot of fun!

I was also looking for some ideas for a library paper I am currently doing and I liked the suggestion under the Creative Reading link - 100 words.
Basically this project was all about encouraging people to write at least 100 words a day using "creative" language.

Another feature that I felt was worthwhile for librarians was all the "related links." There is a whol;e page of them and as I scrolled down the list, my favourite ones were "The Big Picture" and "Booked Up'.

I believe that many of our patrons would benefit from knowing about this website and I will be making mention of it in the Teen Newsletter that I will be sending out this month.

Librarians and Library Assistants should also save this in their "favourites" as it would be an excellent R.A tool.

It was good to finish web202 with a website that brings us back to the reason why we're here and that is to make recommendations or match books with our patrons appeal characteristics. For teen who aren't sure what to read, I also believe that they would find this website very cool and appealing to their taste as it is very interactive and looks good to the eye!

Alas, I have now completed this web 2.0 part 2.

Sayonara......


Jesus Freak

Slideshare Exercise

I had a reasonable look at "Slideshow" last week but I didn't get around to completing the commentary. This site is similar to YouTube is some ways as you enter s keyword in to the search and you retrieve various home-made movies to view. In "Slideshow" I did a keyword search on "Christianity" and there were many interesting slideshows. One of them that cought my attention was a short slideshow on the challenges of Youth Ministry which I subsequently forwarded to one of our Youth Leaders! There were a couple of other ones that I thought were worth downloading also.

I think that this is a very useful site for all sorts of people. If you are wanting to get ideas about how to make a professional presentation on a topic or subject that you believe someone may have created, then it is worth checking out what has already been done! You may even want to access it and use it yourself -making sure that you acknowledge your source of course!

This site is worth while in a Library context as I could see myself recommending it to students who are doing class presentations, or recommending to teachers and students when I am doing outreaches to school. Adults who have commenced studies may not be aware of this site, so if I see any patrons using powerpoint for a slideshow I will check if they are aware of this site.

Often times we like to use slideshows for our church services and recently one of our youth leaders created one for the opening of our new church facility so I am always interested to find out what programmes they are using.

Looking forward to the next activity now......

Jesus Freak