Conference Reports

Kansas Library Conference: Staying Connected Beyond the Conference

In this session Joshua Neff, Erin Downey Howerton, and Brenda Hough described some of the tools they find most useful for collaborating and connecting with colleagues. Among the technologies they highlighted were:

Blogs. Erin showed the blog she uses for communicating with K-12 teachers (she is the K-12 liaison for the Johnson County Public Library): http://schoolingdotus.blogspot.com/

Wikis. They mentioned the wiki created for Library Camp KS as an example: http://librarycampks.wetpaint.com. They also highly recommended the video Wikis in Plain English as a good introduction to what wikis are about.

Discussion Forums. They suggested using Tangler to embed live discussion forums on websites.

Twitter. All three recommended Twitter as a useful tool for soliciting ideas and opinions from a community of friends. Twitter is a micro-blogging application that supports RSS feeds and has a limit of 140 characters per post.

Other sites (not necessarily tools for staying connected) they recommended were:

Cyber 6 Pack 4 Educators. This is a wiki intended to keep K-12 educators informed about useful Web 2.0 tools for the classroom.

Library Society of the World. A wiki "dedicated to furthering the role of librarians, archivists, information professionals, and information educators through communication and collaboration."

Icanhaz.com. A tool for converting long urls to short ones. This tool allows you to choose part of the short url.

Jason Coleman

Kansas Library Conference: Tech Tools for Check Out

The session I'd planned to attend from 11-11:50 morning on Thursday, April 10th was canceled so I popped into this session. Brian, the presenter, works for Cytek, one of the approved vendors for state contracts with KAN-ED. He demonstrated several products and provided personal recommendations, which I found quite sincere and compelling. Here are a few of his recommendations:

Digital Camcorder: The Panasonic SDR-SW20R is a full feature digital camera that is incredibly durable.

Digital Camera: The Casio Exilim is as an excellent low-end camera/camcorder. I was impressed with the quality of the video he shot with this camera (he showed us footage from a family vacation).

MP3 player: Creative MuVo V100

At the end of his talk, he demonstrated whiteboard paper. This is a roll of a material (not really paper) that can be cut and posted on walls. It functions like a whiteboard.

Jason Coleman