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conf-nyla-yss

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Saved by pollyalida
on April 13, 2009 at 3:24:27 pm
 

Wiki Main Page > NYLA YSS

 

New York Library Association - Youth Services Section Annual Conference

 

April 3, 2009

 

Be All It Can Be: Your Library’s Web Pages for Children and Teens—Learn how to use photos (flickr.com, slide shows), blogs, videos on YouTube, podcasts, and other technologies to increase the value of the content of your library’s Web page for your young patrons and their families.

 

I'm so sorry I can't be at the NYLA YSS meeting on April 3. Huge thanks to Lindsay Stratton and her colleague from Pioneer Library System for filling in at the last minute.

 

 

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 fun  things happen!

 

Photos

  • Flickr - Upload, tag, organize, and share photos and small videos. Plays well with other 3rd party tools to modify your images.
    • 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.

 

More examples:

 

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).

 

  • YouTube
    • Patrons can subscribe to your library video channel and receive updates via RSS; create and upload videos for and by kids and teens
  • blip.tv
  • Vimeo
    • Free and paid versions - no ads with paid version
    • Badge widget to create video montages
  • TeacherTube, OurMedia among others.
  • flickr is a great place to host short - 90 seconds or less - videos.

 

More examples:

  • 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.

 

 

Engage, Connect, Communicate

  • Polls – I think it’s a proven fact: put up a quick poll, and people will answer it!
    • Blog poll widget – most blog platforms (Blogger, TypePad, etc) come with poll widgets. Select, configure, and add. Insti-poll. Be sure to turn on “view results” so people get instant feedback.
    • Blogger Reactions – Page elements > Edit Blog Posts – This seems to be new, at any rate I’d never noticed it until preparing for this presentation! You can turn this on so that a mini-poll – responses are funny, interesting, or cool – are attached to every post.
    • Polldaddy - Create your poll, copy the code, and embed in Blogger sidebar or directly into any page that supports Java
  • Meebo
    • Give your patrons the opportunity to communicate via chat with library staff regardless of the IM client used. Insert a widget right into the sidebar or your blog or page.
  • Twitter feed
    • If you use Twitter, you can generate an RSS feed which you can insert into your blog. This automatically updates your page every time you update your Twitter feed. Twitter also allows your patrons another way to get current information about library events.
  • Addthis
    • I am personally addicted to starring, sharing, and posting cool things I read to my Facebook page or iGoogle page. This site allows you to create a button that you can add to your page which lets visitors select what they want to do with a post: email, post to delicious, post to facebook, digg, etc. This also gets your information out way beyond your webpage.

 

Books & Reading

  • Catalog Search - Create your own widget to search your OPAC. Embed in your page and people can add it to their own iGoogle home page.
  • RSS feeds from the catalog
    • Catalog search results – if your catalog provides RSS feeds
    • Delicious tags – work around if your catalog does not provide RSS feeds.Find the books you want to feature, bookmark them on delicious.com. Use a unique tag to identify them and use the RSS feed to get them into your web page.

 

More examples:

 

Homework     

  • Create research guides using
    • Delicious tags

      • Nashville PL Teen page - uses a tag cloud from their delicious account to lead teens to good/useful web sites.

    • Custom Start pages - Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes
      • Biology Current Events Resource Page - 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. 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.

  • Screencasts - Use Screentoaster to create short instructional videos that explain 'things'. This one by Steve Cauffman of the CT State Library shows tips about using their statewide databases.

 

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.

     

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.

  • Wordle Word Clouds - Create beautiful images from words at Wordle. Print out as posters, put them on your pages. This blog post by Steve Campion talks about ideas for games based on Wordles.

  • Books with Bite - Glogster is a great too for creating posters with images, text, hotlinks, audio, video and more.

  • New Tools Workshop - Glogster 'posters' can be embedded on your pages too. Joyce Valenza used this one to create a  colorful and fun entry page for a wiki site (and check out all the terrific 2.0 tools here!)

  • Face Your Manga - Create a manga avatar

  • Meez - more avatar fun

  • Pixton - create your own comics

 

More examples:

Etc.

  • Library News, events, etc - You can use twitter, the popular microblogging tool, to post updates to your web pages. Set up an account with twitter. Post your news and updates. Use the RSS feed from your twitter account to put the updates on your web site. (example on sidebar of my test blog) Parents and teens can follow you directly on twitter, see your updates on the web page and even get your updates on their cell phones. Gets your news out to more people in more places with a minimum of effort. 

  • Namechk - see where your preferred username is - or is not - already in use
  • Statistics - keep track of site usage (even if nobody is leaving comments they are probably still visiting...)

 

"Inspiration Sites" and more

**RSS to Javascript/HTML - Huh??

  • Many of the examples on this page rely on RSS feeds converted to javascript. The Javascript code is copied and pasted into the HTML code on your web page. Magic happens and the headlines or news or whatever will then show up on your page. When new headlines are added to the original site, they'll appear on your page too.

  • Find the information you want to put on your page,

  • Check to see if it has an RSS feed

  • Copy the URL for the RSS feed

  • Go to feed2js and follow the directions there

  • feed2js will create some code for you to copy and paste to your web site.

     

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