I am becoming an ICT nerd.

I've been having a busy few days exploring some new online applications that I hope will be useful in my everyday life.

First, I signed up for LibraryThing. Do you use LibraryThing? I'd heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was. Then when I visited The University of Technology Sydney's library for my study visit, one of the presentations was about using social networking in the library. They mentioned Facebook, Twitter, and LibraryThing. So I thought I'd give it a try.

LibraryThing is pretty fun! I've started adding books to "My Library", and you'll notice on my blog sidebar I have a LibraryThing widget. If you click on any of the covers, it will open up a window with a catalogue record of the book, including my rating and review if I've written a review. Cool huh!?

Second, I decided that I'd have a go of Evernote. I blogged a little bit about it here, and I decided to take the plunge and try it out.

So far, I LOVE IT!!!

For my MEd, I have to construct a portfolio which contains a critical evaluation of my learning during the course and an assessment of how this learning will enable me to be an effective teacher librarian in the future. I'm going to need to collect a lot of information to write an excellent portfolio, so I've decided to use Evernote to facilitate this process.

Here's a screen shot of my Evernote window:

On the right hand side is the "note" that I was most recently working on, which happens to be a text document. It's some ideas about what themes I will concentrate on when I'm writing my portfolio.

In the centre is a list of all the notes that I've made so far. On the left hand side is a toolbar for managing my "notebooks".

What is super fantastic about Evernote is the simplicity of doing anything that I want to do with just one or two clicks. I emailed my theme ideas for my portfolio to my supervisor straight from Evernote - no middleman needed! I also grabbed the screen shot that you see above in Evernote, right clicked on it and chose "picture" so I could import it straight into this post. And that leads me to my next discovery...

I get a lot of great information via Twitter. I follow quite a lot of librarians and teacher librarians, and I know that I'll be able to use lots of the links and information that they tweet in my portfolio. I needed to find an easy way to grab tweets that I like and store them in Evernote. And along came Seesmic.

Seesmic is a platform for Twitter so that you don't have to use the Twitter.com website to access your timeline. It has the excellent function that I can highlight a tweet, click the Evernote icon on my toolbar, and it sends a copy of the tweet as a "note" to my Evernote account. If the tweet contains a link to a website, when in Evernote I just double-click on the link and it takes me straight there! Sweet :)

Yes, it's been time-consuming to set up these new applications, and yes, I'm still learning how to get the best out of them. But I'm loving it!

Why I love Twitter

I've been using Twitter for over a month now, and I'm finding it to be an excellent source of information on just about anything! I choose to follow an eclectic mix of fellow bloggers, celebrities, journalists, librarians, educators and organisations. Everyone from Smoochiefrog to Audrey Nay to No Country for Young Women to the United Nations to Mia Freedman. Some tweets entertain me, some allow me to engage in a conversation, and some contain links to information that is relevant to my daily life as a mum, teacher and student of librarianship.

I've also changed the website bookmarking tool that I use; I'm now using delicious rather than the favourites tab on internet explorer. Why? Delicious uses "tags" to organise my bookmarks rather than folders. This allows for overlap; the fact that some websites fit into more than one category. Also, I've discovered packrati.us via Twitter, which automatically bookmarks the links in my tweets for me. There are a number of setting options, and I've chosen to make sure that anything that I retweet gets bookmarked. It's so easy! If a tweet comes through on my timeline with an interesting link, I retweet straight away. Not only am I passing on the link/information to my followers, I'm also automatically bookmarking the link for myself. Super!

The only problem that I'm having is keeping up with the flow of information! So far I'm following 111 tweeps, and I'm very careful about adding more and increasing the amount of information flowing my way! Here is a small selection from the vast amount of wonderful information relating to libraries, teacher librarians, using technology in learning, reading and publishing that I've collected so far. Of course I've found out a lot of other stuff too, but here I'm only including information that is particularly related to reading, learning and teaching.

Twitter4Librarians is a resource page designed to help librarians better use Twitter. I found it via @sandynay, who retweeted it from @infodivabronx.

Education and Second Life is a blog post by Judy at hey jude (@heyjudeonline on Twitter) that includes a video showing how Teen Second Life is being used in the classroom.

MAEVE Magazine is a free online magazine which sets out to provide an alternative to the mainstream women's mags. I found out about it via @JulesyParker who writes for MAEVE and blogs at Beautiful You.

Internet Safety is a blog post by Ruth at skerricks (@ruth_skerricks on Twitter) which discusses how to successfully teach students about internet safety and includes links to other articles and documents.

If you are a teacher or a librarian, or the mother of school age kids, you may find some of the above information interesting or useful. Even if you're not, I hope that this post inspires you to use Twitter to gather information that is meaningful to you.

Happy tweeting!