Thing #7

I really like the iGoogle homepage option. It is nice to have the current information that you need in one place. There are many things that could be helpful to teachers: current political issues, new scientific information, the dictionary and thesaurus and much more. Daily weather data could be recorded for a month and then analyzed in the science class and graphs created for math. After browsing the most popular gadgets I used the search term “literature” and found many gadgets that were of interest to me as a librarian; literary quotes, book reviews, best seller lists, and much more. The “Writer’s Idea Bank” looks like it would be very helpful to teachers and students alike. The only problem with iGoogle is that there are so many things that I want to include on my homepage that it is going to be too crowded.

I created a Google notebook. I started a list of best selling children’s books and featured a few selected books. I wanted to share the notebook because I thought it would be good for librarians to add their favorite picks but I decided not to publish it because of copyright concerns. I linked every entry back to the original website but I’m not sure if that is sufficient. So to be safe, I decided not to make it public. If I share it with selected people, I must know their Google email addresses. I think that this is a great tool.

I also think that the calendar could be very helpful for posting the library schedule. I would like to purchase my own domain name and explore this option further when I have more time.