Thing #18

This "thing" really showed how far behind I was on all the 2.0 tools. The Web2.0 Awards were presented in May 2007 and I hadn't even heard of 2.0 until our staff development in October 2007! But that's OK, because as I was looking over all the awards in all the categories, I thought, "Hey, I didn't know about these before but now there are several that I do know about and some that I use on a daily basis." I have really come along way!

As I was browsing the awards and looking at the winners, I noticed lots of 2.0 tools that I recognized and had practice with thanks to our 23 things. A few I already knew about were Technorati, Bloglines, and Library Thing. So I started looking for something I knew nothing about (there were lots) and I found 2 that I am now hooked on.

OneSentence is a place where people can write true, "one sentence stories" about their life, their day, or anything. Once you write your one sentence and submit it, one person (the master of the site) decides if your sentence is worthy of publishing on the site. If it is, you will receive a email letting you know your sentence will be published. If it isn't, try again. I submitted a sentence about a day in the life of a librarian; I'm anxiously awaiting to see if it's published. If it is, I'll be sure to toot my own horn and let you know.

Another tool that I found was Guess-the-Google. It's a super fun game where you try to guess the ONE keyword that pulled up the TWENTY Google images. You are ultimately trying to find that one word that all the pictures have in common, but...you only have 20 seconds. Once I started, it was hard to stop.

When I first thought of these two tools and there "usability" in the library, I really didn't think there was any, but the more I thought about it, the more the "teacher" came out in me and BAM, I had some ideas. OneSentence to me is a lot like "get the gist." (Get the Gist is a reading strategy I learned in the Texas Third Grade Reading Academy.) As a third grade teacher, I would have students give me the gist of a story or paragraph in a sentence using ten words or less. It was difficult for nine year olds to do this, but it really got them thinking about the important details and how to use each word wisely. Librarians (or teachers) could create a wiki (or dedicate one page of a wiki) to one sentence book reviews or one sentence summaries. The wiki would be available for students who wanted to share about the books they read or it would be a great place to send students looking for a book. Guess the Google isn't something that could be used in the library directly, but the "backwards" way that you have to think is something that should be practiced by all students. I don't think students would be able to access the game from school due to the filters and I do feel like many of the images are only appropriate for older students, but the thinking that goes on while playing the game is definitely higher level. It's like classifying or sorting but on a different level and for sure out of the box. If you haven't played it yet, check it out. Beware: you might become addicted.