The Elephant Song - Cool Tunes for Kids by Eric Herman

Fun song and video, check it out!
For more great videos by Eric Herman visit:
http://www.erichermanmusic.com/

Relax and Reflect

All in all I enjoyed exploring and revisiting Web 2.0.

I thought it was a very worthwhile experience and it drove home how deep and wide and useful the web can be, and also how confusing! I feel as though I've only scratched the surface of some of the amazing features available and will definitely go back and explore some of the areas. Wiki's and Blogging were the topics I found most useful.

As a part-time children's librarian I found it difficult to squeeze in the time to work on Web 2.0 until summer reading got under way. I enjoyed reading other people's comments on the process. I'd definitely like to participate in other trainings similar to this one.

Gaming

My daughter is a big fan of all the free online games, from crossword puzzles to MahJong she's explored them all. I asked her to give me a tour of some of her favorites and quickly got hooked on MahJong...

I found some of the games to be annoying and some to be oddly satisfying, MahJong is my particular fav, very relaxing and when I win I love the tidiness of it all!

Google Earth

I'm one of those folks who loves maps. Google Earth is fascinating. I used it to "look around" Quebec city and was amazed at how much I could "see." I like the photo feature and also the fact that I could plug in the address of the hotel I'm staying in and get a feel for how to navigate the city from that point.

I also looked for my house and others in my family. It was interesting that I was unable to zoom in closely to my father's house. He lives in a rural area rather off the beaten track, all other family members, who live in more populated areas, were easy to see.

Avatars & Second Life

Hey...this was kinda fun! I've heard about Second Life but I've never visited before. Much more complex than I ever imagined! Including information services! Wow! I see the appeal, very creative, but not for me. I've already got enough of a second life with family, a new career...

Whew! Where do the folks who are doing this find the time?

I loved the idea of using Google earth to make a virtual world. Not sure I really understood the whole process as presented in the VBH video, but it sounded interesting.

Online Applications & Tools

Google Docs is great! I used it while I was a student at the UW and it is a great time saver and organizer when working on group papers. I've also used it at work when putting together booktalks or bibliographies, I can go to Google from any computer I'm on and chip away at whatever it is I'm currently putting together.
I like the large Google Doc format better than ZoHo. The text area is bigger and easier to work with, other than that they both seemed about the same.

Search Engines

It was good to go back into essentials of a Google search and look around, I haven't really had time to do that in the last year. It reminded me of a few things I can do to make my searches more effective and it also prompted me to add a few of the search features.

Finding a search engine you like for most people is probably all in what you get used to. I've been using Google almost exclusively and I like it because I know how to use it, am familiar with the format and pretty fast getting to what I want. The other search engines I tried all seemed clunky in one way or another, but that is no doubt due to my inexperience with the format.
I do go to other search engines to use specific search features from time to time.

I know my kids prefer Yahoo, for whatever reason, perhaps because it's the one they used first when learning websearch in school and now they just feel the most comfortable with it.