Thing 22: Creatively Shared

Thing 22 led me to try out a lot of new tools!  At first I thought I would get less out of this, because I have done a lot of resource sharing and I love my Feedly already.  There are so many possibilities though, and I had a lot I've been wanting to share from conferences this year, so it was good timing.
I had so much fun creating my Tumblr blog, but unfortunately it doesn't look like I will be able to use it academically because it is blocked at school, due to the inappropriate content, which I haven't found a way to block.  I'm disappointed about that, because I loved the display and ease of sharing multiple media types.  I am Co-Leading a PD course on Teaching Leadership in which we are talking about new literacies, and blogging was one of the topics this past week, so I had hoped to share Tumblr as an option to use with students, but think I will hold off until we figure out a way to limit the blogs "pushed" to you.
I was able to immediately implement edshelf though, as I needed some updates to my webpage.  I created a collection and embedded it right on my Instructional Resources page.    I love it when it loads well.  There is so much purpose and potential, however it does load slowly and sometimes not at all.  I'm excited to use this the next time I do an in depth inquiry project with students.  I plan to create a collection, embed it on my web page and also print out a poster with QR codes to the tools.
While I was working on my website I also discovered Tint, which creates a feed widget to embed on your website from social media sites.  I wanted to have my library Facebook page display on my website homepage, so I could easily keep them both updated, because I have been struggling to keep my webpage fresh this year, with all of the other things on my plate.

Finally, I created a resource for teachers to share some of my conference reflections from this past season.  In the past Ihave used Smore for this purpose, but when I went to create this one it told me that I had already used my flier credits, and would have to purchase more.  This was disappointing, but gave me the motivation to use Canva for a new purpose.  Canva is a tool that I discovered earlier this year, and have used it to create posters for events in the library and for PD opportunities.  It was a little awkward to use as a newsletter, because it didn't have templates created for this purpose, but in the end it came out okay.
Once again Cool Tools has pushed me to "Stop planning and start creating" with new tools and for new purposes.  Thanks for the inspiration and motivation!