Week #3 Thing #7

My technology "thing" is LibraryThing.

It is a good way to keep track of your books, it's better than a file box and easier to sort through. Of course like anything, you have to make a plan to enter books in. It's free under 200 books, so obviously I'll have to pay a yearly fee to really get full use out of it. I decided to enter chapter books and only the picture books that I use for lessons, rather than every picture book I've read. It shows the book cover, which is really helpful to me visually. There are places for comments and tags. I'm tagging my books by grade level and use the tag "puppet" to remind myself that there is puppet tie in or "song" to remind me of a song tie in.

You can enter the books by ISBN, so actually I had two that needed to be returned to the library. My husband was on the computer - I handed them to him this morning and all he had to do was open a new window, log in, enter the ISBN, select a book cover that looked like the book in his hand and log out. Later when I go to my profile and see books without comments I can flesh them out. I do still have an older Excel spreadsheet of books to enter in. And yes, you can make it private.

Library Thing

Okay, while we're at it. I have four preschool classes each week. Here's a YouTube subscriber I've found to find the tunes to those preschool songs that I need to sing and motion to each week. By the time I've practiced them all weekend my family is ready to reenact "Lemmings to the Sea..."

Cullensabc's Videos

YouTube is such a mixed bag. You can find some very valuable stuff - but even at home when I'm looking at fun, funky humor content (non-kid) it seems to be over-run with horrible comments language-wise. Sure you can flag awful stuff, but has anyone seen a filter that makes it safe for kids to check out?

Oh, and my comment on another blog was a far more serious post regarding young people using the internet on "Library Hikers" site.