Wiki Main Page > NYLA YSS

New York Library Association - Youth Services Section Annual Conference

April 3, 2009

I'm so sorry I can't be at the NYLA YSS meeting on April 3, but hope that these examples and links will be useful to those who were planning to attend my session.

Most of the examples shown below have been created using free web based tools that let you create content that can be placed on your web pages with a simple copy and paste of some snippets of code. You don't need to be a programmer to make these things happen!

Fun & Games

• Mad Virus - free game downloaded from BubbleBox. Code files uploaded to server and snippet of code to have game show up on the page. This game is part of the KidsPort site being developed for Mid-Hudson Library System.
• Jigzone Jigsaw Puzzle - Jigzone is a free service. Upload your photo to jigzone, select how many pieces you want the puzzle to break into by default and get a piece of code to copy to your web page.
• Type It - A free Google Gadget that can be placed on your web page. This one was created by aBowman. There are tons of other free, fun gadgets that you can put on your web pages.
• PacMan - who can resist Pacman. :-) This and the previous game are on a demo site that I created for this session using Wordpress - free software for creating simple web sites and blogs. NYLA is offering workshops on WordPress. And I teach classes on WordPress also.
• Polls - With a blog for a web site, it's easy to add polls to the sidebar. Blogger has a polling tool built in. Polldaddy is another way to create free polls to put on your web pages.

Video

Video is such a fun tool –  many kids and teens love making videos. And it’s pretty inexpensive to do video these days. Buy an inexpensive video camera from Flip & Vado. Edit with Movie Maker (PC) or iMovie (Mac).

flickr is a great place to host short videos. For longer videos check out YouTube, blip.tv, Vimeo, TeacherTube, OurMedia among others.

• Why Vote? - Teen video competition from Pima County (AZ) Public Library
• StoryTubes - Children across the country talking about their favorite books.
• Field Reporter Camp Book Review - Lackawanna County  (PA)  Children's Library.  Videos hosted on blip.tv (free video hosting service) embedded on the library's blog (also free through blogger.com)
• Video greeting - This isn't a kids web site, but it's a great example of how you can put a video introduction on your web pages. Lauren recorded this video, posted it to flickr and then copied a snippet of code from flickr and pasted it on the introduction page of this subject research guide. 

Photos

• flickr Slide Show - Lackawanna County  (PA)  Children's Library. Note the handy little slide show on the sidebar of the blog. Photos are hosted on flickr. com and by copying a bit of code from flickr, the slide show appears on the blog.
• Tons more slide show examples - Once you put your photos on flickr, you can use all sorts of other 3rd party tools to create slide shows. This page shows a number of different examples.
• Big Huge Labs - Use the tools here to create posters, mosaics, name tags, calendars, trading cards and more. These can be printed out and/or put on your web pages.
  • Some examples of fun things I've made with big huge labs.
  • And some ideas for the Trading Cards tool.
• Family Portrait Day - A project of the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenberg County. Blog post about the project.
• Remember When - Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. One of my all time favorite library projects. They used a wiki to gather gather photos and stories from the older residents of their town. This would be a terrific multi-generational project.
• Slide Show of Read Posters on The Unquiet Library blog. Created with Slide.com 

Books & More

• Embeddable Books - Harper Collins
• Search the Catalog - Put the catalog everywhere. This search box was created with Google Gadgets. Makes it easy to embed the catalog search box anywhere you want. And people can add it to their own iGoogle home page. (Fairfax (VA) County Public Library's Teen Talk Blog)
• luv2read - San Jose PL Teen book group hosted at LibrayThing. Learn more about how to  Set up a group

Create, Express, Converse, Contribute

• Crabby Claw Dance - my simple animation. Easy to create and free from MiniVids. Only thing I don't like is that the embedded animation automatically goes on to another random animation after yours plays. Would like to see a way to turn that option off.
• Glogster
• Face Your Manga - Create a manga avatar
• Meez - more avatar fun
• Nashville PL Teen page - with avatars for each librarian 
• Cheshire PL Teen Podcasts - Terrific podcast series created by teens.  (Tons more teen podcasts listed on Libsuccess)
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Homework  

• Nashville PL Teen page - uses a tag cloud from their delicious account to lead teens to good/useful web sites. The sites have all been bookmarked and tagged on delicious.com.
• Biology Current Events Resource Page - Pageflakes is a great place to pull together the top headlines from lots of different sources to give kids a kick start on projects that you know they do every year. Easy to pull together and easy to share with students. Netvibes and iGoogle are similar services. (Example from Creekview (GA) High School - Buffy Hamilton
• Expose your databases! - Take advantage of the RSS feeds for searches in your favorite databases. This lets you put a list of articles on your web pages that is updated whenever the database gets updated. The example shows a list of articles about butterflies pulled from EBSCO Primary Search.
• Country Information Custom Search Engines - from Google - customized search engine.

More Ideas

• Library Blogs for Teens