23 The end or the beginning....

We've made it! Didn't think it was going to happen, especially as the end was drawing near but we pulled out all stops and made a big effort. It has been a worthwhile journey and we have learnt lots which we didn't know before - particularly liked Bloglines, Del.icio.us and Zoho Writer and the image generators are a bit of fun. We could see ourselves playing around with these. The most annoying thing about the learning program was the amount of time it took - 15 mins per day was wildly innacurate. By the time we listened to a podcast, read articles or watched training videos and then explored a site, 15 minutes had turned into an hour or more! And then there was signing up to all sorts of different sites and remembering logins and passwords. For those of us who don't like to subscribe to a myriad of sites this was a bit of a barrier to overcome too.

Anyway we have come through the other side and feel confident in our knowledge of these applications and can even boast that we now know more than a certain teenager in the household....!

As this is our parting post we thought we would add another photo of us as we are very cute.

22 eAudiobooks

We had a bit of a browse around the eAudibooks site and although there's nothing there that we fancy listening to ourselves we can see that it's a great way to supply titles which may be out of print. The other great advantage is that there is no worry on the part of the borrower about having to return their items! We could see real uses for audiobooks in the area of travel guides -instead of lugging several travel guides on holiday relevant bits out of several guides could be loaded onto one's iPod and listened to at leisure while touring. Don't know why we always think about things in a travel context!! Anyone would think that was all we wanted to do!

21 Podcasts

We have had a look around both Podcastalley and Podcast.net and can see that there is a lot of interesting material out there waiting to be listened to. We had added a Rick Steve's travel podcast to our Bloglines earlier when learning about RSS feeds but have now added a podcast called Talking with Tallis : Listen to conversations with thought-leaders spanning Web 2.0, Libraries, and the Semantic Web - should make riveting listening! Checked out some Book Review podcasts and even heard Nancy Pearl delivering her weekly book review - libraries could certainly make links to these sorts of podcasts available to their users. Also, there is great potential for libraries to make podcasts of their in-house programs e.g. Storytimes, Book talks, Author talks etc. and thus reach a far wider audience than those who physically attend.

20 YouTube

It's easy enough to search on YouTube and I suppose some may see it as worthwhile pastime but ho hum once again who wants to sit in front of a screen all their life?? We can't really see any real application for it in a library setting but maybe we're just not visionary mice. We found a natty video of a singing mouse who gets his cheese but unfortunately comes to a sticky end - we did debate amongst ourselves as to whether we should post it, but, ahh what the heck. However embedding the html text wasn't quite so straight forward and we were grateful for the Help page on YouTube.

19 Discovering Web 2.0 tools

We are fast running out of time to complete our learnings so we didn't spend a lot of time exploring but went straight to the award winners. Naturally the travel category caught our eye and from there we spent a bit of time exploring Realtravel - looks good and we think we may spend a bit of time in the future browsing this one. Handy for the keen traveller who wants some inside information on travel destinations and hotels etc. There is the opportunity to develop your itinerary, search for the best hotel and flight deals and read other traveller's blogs for tips. There's different ways of searching too - by destination or type of holiday e.g beach, safari etc. Check it out!

18 Web based apps

We like it! Having never heard of these type of applications before this was very exciting. The best feature is being able to access a document from any computer. The toolbar was straight forward enough and actually even easier to use than Word, although at times it was a tad slow to respond due to the internet connection - need to explore working offline to see if this changes things. The concept of being able to share documents and have others make changes to a document could be really useful.

17 PBWiki

Well we added our blog to PBWiki Learning 2.0 wiki and think it worked - except the brackets are stil appearing??? Don't know about that one...
Had a play and added one of our recent favourite travel spots.