Marbled Paper Endsheets

Thing 3: Image Banks If you are consuming social media, you understand the need for eye-catching photos. Even Twitter, with its character limitations is all about the images. I love when a chosen image is the perfectly aligns with a message. There are many sources for free and legal use images, and I looked at flickr. There’s a reason flickr has stayed around as a reliable source: it has what you need, and is reliable. You still have to do your due diligence in making sure an image is either copyright free or you are willing to pay for it. I wouldn’t hesitate to use flickr and plan to do so in the video creating and social media posting I do for my job. Thing 4: Communicating Visually This was super-fun and I learned new apps and tried a couple of them out. I loved Photofunia, where they allow you to load your own image into one of their own. For instance, a photo of a hand grabbing a record album from a stack – you can put your own album title and photo on their image, or on

I decided to use PowToon to create my video, because I am already familiar with Screen-Cast-O-Matic, and also use Camtasia, and have animated Powerpoint. I tried out a template in PowToon, and wow, was that easy. In about 7 minutes, I created the video. Now that I've done one, and saw how easy it was, I want to really think through some of our topics and write a good script. I will collect additional images and video clips that I want to upload into the finished product, but I think this will be a really useful tool for some quick promotional materials. We also just recently subscribed to GoAnimate, which seems very similar to PowToon. Depending on next year's budget, if GoAnimate gets cut, I'll easily switch to PowToon.

My daughter is really the expert at making photos beautiful, but I'm always happy to try out things to make sharing images easy and fun. I tried two of these apps, and here are my results. #rudai23 #thing PhotoFunia This was really easy and had some fun choices. I can see using it for our libraries, for some announcements and advertising. My daughter's boyfriend is a Minneapolis rapper, so I thought this was cool: My daughter is an actress, and I used a photo of her at the Cannes Film Festival for the big screen: My other daughter is flying out to see a friend in NYC, so... The only downside to using PhotoFunia that I can see is that one might tire of the options. Quik Next, I knew I had a couple sets of recent photos that would be good to try in video form, so I tried out Quik. Here is my sisters and mom when we went to tour the really cool Art Barn at St. Olaf College:   My daughter likes to be in control of her pets. They are always so adorable toge

I love image banks. I love images. I think most people do, and it shows in social media. How many people prefer reading a paragraph post on facebook to looking at an image? I used flickr for this thing and looked at photos of one of many obsessions: library card catalogs. I haven't used flickr for quite some time, so it was fun to dig around in there again. I recently heard a talk at a library conference called Visual Literacy: From Fake News to Fair Use, by Emily Barney, librarian at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Part of her job is to find original sources of images for faculty, and she talked about how she does that, using reverse image searches. I have been trying out her tactics, and it's been interesting to see how people can distort an image for their own use.

I am going to my first national library conference (PLA), and I'm very excited. My current position, Information Services Librarian in a consortium, finds me actually working with vendors, which means I will meet a few people in person with whom I have been chatting by email. I am hoping to bring back a few tips on staff training and community involvement, as well as some STE(A)M and program ideas  for our region. I am excited to visit Philadelphia for the first time, and plan on doing a little sight seeing. I am even signed up to throw axes as a fund raising for Every Library. Trying to decide which t-shirt to accompany my buffalo plaid, for representing Minnesota: