The Twitter Trio (7) - I'd follow you anywhere

Here are three of my tweeps that I'm so glad that I follow:

1. Tess Alfonsin @ReadingCountess

Reader, Writer, Mother of all boys, Teacher of tweens, Dreamer

Tess has a blog called Recycle Your Reads, and I'm also Tess' friend on Goodreads, where she is very active. She lists lots of books about teaching reading - I'm going to pilfer from her bookshelves whenever possible!

2. Bobbi Newman @librarianbyday

I'm not that kind of librarian

Bobbi has a blog called Librarian by Day and also writes on the Libraries and Transliteracy blog.

3. Steph Westwood @2sparkley

mum, wife, infant school teacher with a SMARTBOARD, author

Steph has a blog called Bits and Pieces Place. She tweets lots of great links that are applicable to me, being Australian like I am.

The Twitter Trio is a weekly feature at my blog, where I highlight interesting things that I have found via Twitter.

The Twitter Trio (6)

Twitter has led me to many educators and librarians that write fantastic, informative blogs. Today I'm going to feature three that I have found particularly helpful.

1. librarified

A recent interesting post was Women in American Librarianship and Valuing Women's Work. An excerpt:

The answer is that there were women leaders and that their values (not some sort of womanly deficiency they all had) shaped American librarianship. I also just finished WOMEN AND THE VALUES OF AMERICAN LIBRARIANSHIP (Ide House, 1994) by Sydney Chambers and Carolynne Myall and they provide tons of examples. Here are just a very few:

•Public libraries were formed out of community libraries that were originally started by women in most cases. In 1933 the ALA “credited women’s clubs with the repsonsibility for initiating 75 percent of the public libraries in existence at that time” (p. 17).

•Isadore Gilbert Mudge built Columbia University’s reference collection and taught library school students her methods of conducting a reference interview. (p. 29)

•Adelaide Hasse was a founder of special librarianship, developed a classification scheme, and helped form the US Government Documents service. (p. 31)

•“[O]f the four insitutions established before 1900 which later became charter members of the Association of American Library Schools, the founding directors of three were women,” Katherine Sharp, Mary Wright Plummer, and Alice Kroeger. (p. 36)

•Mary Wright Plummer was the head of the library school at the Pratt Institute Free Library from 1895 to 1911, the Principal of the library school at NYPL from 1911 to 1916, and was President of ALA from 1915 to 1916–years before women were even allowed to vote! (p. 35)

•The director of the LA Public Library from 1889 to 1895 was Tessa Kelso–and this was decades before women got the vote. (p. 43)

While women who held leadership positions often did so at local or state or regional levels, women were also library founders, innovators in their fields, library directors, library school founders, and even served as the president of ALA before their country trusted them to vote.

2. Librarians Matter
 
A recent interesting post was How does Google work? Infographic.
 

3. The Unquiet Librarian

This blog is written by the teacher librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia - Buffy J Hamilton. Isn't that an awesome name for a librarian!?! To me, it sounds like she might be slaying vampires during lunchtime :)

Trust me, READ HER BLOG! It is just as cool as her name sounds.

The Twitter Trio (5) (With Hot Guys!!!)

1. Goodreads

I inadvertently joined Goodreads this week :)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about joining LibraryThing (read post here). LibraryThing is an online cataloguing tool for your books. I signed up, and started adding books to "my library". I got a cool widget for my blog (look at the right sidebar), and if you click on any of the book covers a popup will give you the catalogue record for the book and my rating and review if I have written one. I've been pretty happy using LibraryThing except for one thing - LibraryThing is billed as a social networking site, but I'm not feeling very social about it. There is an option for adding friends, and you can visit other members' profiles to leave comments, but it's not really working for me.

On the other hand, Goodreads is connected to Twitter. I followed a link in a tweet about a book, Goodreads asked me to sign in to Twitter to allow it to connect, and hey presto (!) I was signed up with a Goodreads account. At first I was a bit annoyed; I felt that Twitter had hijacked me a bit a-la-Facebook. But very quickly I had 15 new friends and was receiving updates about what they were reading and I was feeling the love! So far I've only added one book, Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld, which is my current read. But for social networking, it seems that Goodreads has got it all over LibraryThing.

2. Hot Guys Reading Books

Now here's a blog that's got it all for the discerning, book-reading gal!

A sample:

Now, not everyone's idea of "hot" is the same, but I think if you check out this blog you'll find that there's something for everyone :)

3. Online Tools

I've tagged a million-and-one webpages "TBR" (to be read) since starting to use Twitter. I mark them, then when I've got some time I go back and look through them in more detail to decide whether or not they are "keepers".

Here are some online tools that I have tagged to check out later. If you use them, please leave me a comment to let me know if they're good!

Pho.to "Enhance, share, and have fun with your photos for free."

Producteev "Task management that works the way you do."

Veezzle "Free stock photos."

Aviary "Photo-editing, logos, web templates ...and more. Music creator, screen capture..."

I hope that this post has introduced you to something new. The Twitter Trio is a weekly feature on my blog.

The Twitter Trio (4)

1. Wordia

Wordia is a new online dictionary that brings words to life via videos. Check out this video for the word cliche.

2. WGBH Open Vault

Open Vault is a Media Library and Archives. Search through the archive of broadcast series and programs. Here below is a link to Dr Martin Luther King Jr's famous "I have a Dream" speech.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I Have a Dream Speech - WGBH Open Vault

3. The UNDP-Olympus-AFP Foundation Photo Contest

The Millenium Development Goals are a global undertaking to end poverty. The goals are:

Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Achieve universal primary education

Promote gender equality and empower women

Reduce child mortality

Improve maternal health

Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Ensure environmental sustainability

Develop a Global Partnership for Development

Contestants can enter photos that focus on progress towards the millenium goals. The photo below was taken by GB Mukherji shows a maths teacher with high school students. Some day, the teacher told the photographer, one of them will become a scientist.

The Twitter Trio is a weekly feature on my blog. My goal is to share resources and information that I have found via Twitter with my readers.

The Twitter Trio (3)

This week I'm going to feature three blogs that are new to me. All of them were discovered via Twitter. Here's what happened - someone that I follow tweeted a link to a particular post on the blog, I clicked on the link to read the post, I liked the post and the blog so much that I started to follow the blog.

1. Blogging 'Bout Boys

Since I've been following this blog, Jennifer, a freelance writer and homeschooling mum of four boys, has tackled such topics as Gender Intensification, Life With Boys and Birth Control and Boys. She doesn't shy away from the difficult issues. As a mum of one daughter and one son, I truly appreciate Jennifer's insights. I want to do as good a job as possible parenting both my children. Boys can be difficult for Mums to parent for a number of reasons, especially as we've never been boys ourselves so we don't really know what it's like! Also boys can sometimes seem messy, overly energetic, strong-willed and disobedient! I'm glad to have found this source of support.

2. One Year. 156 Fears. Life Changing.

Joy is also a freelance writer who is using this blog to document how she is facing her fears by trying new things. The post that led me to this blog was Fearing the Worst, I recommend that you read it if you need a little help getting your life into perspective.

3. Montessori for Everyone - Montessori Blog

The post that got me interested in this blog was this one titled The Power of Reading Aloud to Children. I don't know a lot about the Montessori Philosophy of education, but I've always been intrigued by it. I'm sure I'll learn more by following this blog.

So there you have it - this week's Twitter roundup. If you've found something interesting via Twitter, please leave me a comment. Or better yet, follow me on Twitter so we can tweet about it!

The Twitter Trio (2)

Here's episode two of my new weekend feature in which I let you know about interesting things I have learned via Twitter.

1. Evernote

Found via @ruth_skerricks.

In this post on Ruth's blog Skerricks, she mentioned that Evernote is an application for collecting and sorting information. Now as a student of librarianship, lifelong learner, and lover of anything to do with finding and using information more effectively, I was intrigued. Ruth's post led me to this post on The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled "Take a Minute to Collect Your Thoughts". Written by Shawn Miller, this post is an account of how he uses Evernote to create a "personal database" to use for research, writing and generating ideas.

It seems to me that it might take a while to learn how to use Evernote, but it looks like it might be worth it.

2. Blogging Do's and Don'ts

@dsfunctionalmom shared this great post on Wednesday: "What NOT to do if you want people to actually read your blog!"

On a similar note, @bookladysblog wrote this guest post at The Book Case called "So, you wanna be a book blogger..."

3. Did you know that millions of women and girls in developing countries miss up to 50 days of school or work every year because they do not have access to affordable sanitary pads when they menstruate?

via @miafreedman

Watch this video:

The Twitter Trio

I posted a while ago about how much I enjoy Twitter, how much information I'm discovering, how I like to pass on anything particularly interesting that I find, and how I find it difficult to keep up with the flow of information. Read the post here.

I have decided to attempt a regular weekend post featuring three interesting finds via Twitter, and I'm calling it The Twitter Trio.

1. AASL Blog Post

"If what we do is so important then why doesn't anyone but us know it?" May 20, 2010.

Found via @sandynay.

This is the official blog of the American Association of School Librarians. Written by Cassandra Barnett, the post discusses advocacy issues, and how teacher librarians must argue the importance of their role within the school. The post itself is interesting, but I'm particularly glad to have discovered the blog itself so I can add it to my Library and Education Blogs list.

2. The Blog of Tim Ferriss Post

"Tim Ferriss Scam! Practical Tactics for Dealing with Haters" May 18th, 2010.

Found via @miafreedman.

This is an inspiring article about accomplishing your objectives without reacting to every criticism you receive. I think that this is a great lesson for me, and I particularly like this bit: “Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers."

3. Prezi - The zooming presentation editor.

Move over powerpoint, Prezi is here. I have embedded an example below so you can appreciate the wonder that is Prezi. I have chosen the presentation "Math is not linear" because I am a maths teacher and I love what the creator, Alison Blank, has to say about the teaching and learning of mathematics.

Math is not linear on Prezi

See you next weekend for another exciting instalment of The Twitter Trio!