Thing 19 REVISED: Social Reading & Book Stuff

Another THING packed with great resources and information! After browsing through the information topics, I decided to explore a few of the resources that particularly stood out to me. I began by reading Edudemic's article "10 Websites to Help Students Connect with Books". I found it so helpful that I tweeted it out to my followers (MCSDlibrary) so that others may also explore some of the sites.

After that I checked out the Reading 2.0 LibGuides site - but I found it to be overwhelming. Too much information in all those tabs made my head spin. I'm sure it's a great resource, and if I have an afternoon to spend browsing through it sometime, I will likely re-visit it.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at the International Children's Digital Library. I love the philosophy of this website, and shared it with my colleague at the elementary level so she can add it as a resource on the District's elementary library webpages.  I also shared it with my Middle and High school foreign language teachers, and two of the three wrote back almost immediately thanking me for sharing the great resource with them.

Some of the resources in this THING were already familiar to me: Overdrive and GoodReads. However, both are things I've just barely touched the surface on.  I have the overdrive app on my iPhone and have knowledge of its use through our local public library system.

For the purpose of this activity, I chose to dig deeper into what GoodReads has to offer. I was intrigued with the idea of creating the widget to add to my library webpage and using it to make book recommendations. I spent some time researching how exactly to add a widget, and determined that it will require the assistance of my tech support guy.  Hopefully he will teach me how to add widgets on my own. I look forward to learning how to use the GoodReads widget on my webpages to make recommendations. Neat idea!