Rollyo

Not sure how I feel about this one - I am trying to think of potential uses... I can see using this on webpages I make to search within the website, or using it within my homeschool. For example, if I want Madison to do research on butterflys, I can set up a search engine that would only retrieve content from websites I deem safe, and I would be able to control what information she finds on the internet. It would make more work for me, but it would also allow me to feel more comfortable with my children learning to use the internet.

So here is the "Rollyo" I made - the pages I included were about homeschooling in general, and about the specific method of classical homeschooling...

Select...23thingsClassical HomeschoolSearch The Web

Librarything - Again...

Here is another cool thing you can do with librarything.com - make a widget (shown below) which will link to the books in your library at amazon.com. Now here is the really cool part - if you set up an amazon associate account, you will earn a percentage of the sales price (4%-10%) when someone orders from your link. So check out my books and order some!!

Librarything.com

Oh, my inner dork is about to really show. I am so, so, SOOOOO excited about this website. Not joking. I used to be a teacher and have 500+ childrens books at home, which I "cataloged" into a Excel spreadsheet with title, author, publication date, awards won, etc, so that I would know exactly what books I owned and be able to loan them out to my students. Now, I am no longer a teacher, but I am about to start homeschooling my daughter, and I think this would be a great way to keep track of the books I own, and I will be able to access the list from anywhere. I wonder if I could access this page from an iPhone (when I get one....) And it will be much, MUCH easier to add new books. Now I only need to recatalog the 500 books I have in storage...

Here is a link to my catalong online - http://www.librarything.com/catalog/mrsamy

As of today, there are only two items, but I will be adding more.

Slide.com

Another image generator I found is slide.com Using the photos you have online (at flickr, but also at many other websites like myspace, facebook, etc.), you can easily create slideshows to post on your blog/website/etc. Here is one I made with random pictures of Madison:

What a cutie!

I created this image with the Big Huge Labs website - http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ It was really fun to play with now that I have uploaded a bunch of pictures into flickr and can easily access them.

RSS Feeds/Bloglines

Here is a link that will *hopefully* take you to my RSS feed at Bloglines: http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=mrsamy

This was a really neat excercise. I had heard the term RSS before, but had no idea what it meant/how to use it/how it would be helpful. Even after starting the initial assignment, I was skeptical. While I do spend a lot of time on the internet, I didn't realize how much of it was spent going to websites that could be used with Bloglines. Lately, I have been looking into homeschooling my daughter, and have been frequenting a lot of blogs to read about how different moms homeschool. By using RSS with bloglines, I can now have all of those blogs centrally located and save myself time by logging into one account to check all updates. My mother also has a blog and frequently complains that I never read it. I added her blog site as well, so when I check in on the blogs I like to read, I can see if she has updated without any extra work.

So, in conclusion, although initially I felt like this was probably going to be a waste of my time, I see RSS as a very helpful tool for people who spend a lot of time on the internet, especially those who read blogs/daily new articles/etc, and I will most likely continue to use my bloglines account at least periodically in the future.