Dear Librarian,

Summer is the perfect time to enjoy leisurely reading–you have time, you’re on vacation, and you get to relax!  This summer you could choose among the list below for reading.  Or you could open up a Shelfari account to see what others are reading.  Become Eddie Reads’ friend–our library eagle, Ann Krembs’ friend, or Gizelle Rodriques’.  Once you all start joining you can make a network of your friends.  You can even add the Shelfari application to your Facebook profile! 

Here are two lists of the most popular, most recommended books read this year by ASB middle and high school students:

Shelfari is a social networker for readers!  It’s awesome!  By creating an account you can add the books you’ve read to your shelf.  You can write comments about them.  You can star them according to their greatness.  You can make a new shelf of what you’d like to read.  But the best part…is you can add friends!  By adding friends you can see what they are reading, comment on what they are reading, and receive recommendations about what to read next.  Shelfari is perfect for creating a virtual connection to others who read great books just like you! 

Getting a Netvibes account is super easy.  You just need an email–which you all have.  And you just need to choose which applications you want to add to your page.  Once you’ve made your account and you’ve started to add your favorite widgets, you can go into the settings (in the upper right hand corner) and change your wallpaper and theme.  (That’s where I chose the chetah theme.  For summer, I’ve now switched to daisies!)  Once you get used to your first page, you can start adding tabs and create a del.icio.us type tab or even your favorite blogs tab.  The options are endless.  Click here to start your own Netvibes.

Yes!  In fact, there are.  In real life we have what’s called etiquette.  Of course you can guess the online word: netiquette!  There are special guidelines for adding comments to blogs.  First and foremost, know that adding comments to blogs is appreciated–especially since the blogger usually writes for a dialogue to occur.  Not all blogs need comments, but you could guess that all comments are appreciated.  But, it’s important to follow the same rules you would in person.  Let’s call them the three p’s: be polite, be positive, and be poignant.  That last one means you should always comment with a point in mind. 

If you want more reliable guidelines for commenting on blogs, you should definitely read the Lifehacker’s tips. 

Well, actually there is a site that has daily difficult puzzles and riddles that I often cannot solve.  It’s called Smartkit, and they consider themselves a “brain gym and puzzle playground.”  This site has tons of tricky riddles, fun games, interesting puzzles, and not to mention intriguing articles.  You can even subscribe to a feed from this site, so you can get the daily puzzle or riddle of the day.  Make sure to post a comment to guess at the answer, but be patient; they solution isn’t given until 24-48 hours later.  I’m still trying to solve the horse puzzle found on the home page in the middle of the first bar.  If you find the answer, please let me know! 

Visuwords is as cool as the Visual Thesaurus–if not even more! It’s actually what the Visual Thesaurus used to be like. Now that Visual Thesaurus is a paid for subscription, it has gotten a little heavy and it’s not as user friendly. But Visuword on the other hand is totally easy. It’s my new recommendation for a graphic dictionary. Try it out!

Happy Earth Day!  Besides being conscious about your water, paper, electiricity, recycling, and prodcut usage, you can also go to this link and become a part of the virtual Earth Day Network.  The EDN, which was started by the founders of Earth Day, is a network promoting environmental citizenship and year round, worldwide action.  By creating this network, Earth Day literally becomes worldwide on the WWW with over millions of people participating in making our Earth a better place. 

Yes!  Many writers also keep up a daily blog.  Here are a few of the best ones that I’ve found.

Laurie Halse Anderson
	Maureen Johnson
Scott Westerfeld
	E. Lockhart

Well, since this blog is under Edublogs, the theme cannot be edited.  Therefore the little feed icon cannot be added to a sidebar–since there isn’t a sidebar.  But, you can do one of two things to receive notification of new posts on the Dear Librarian:

First, you could look at your Internet tool bar up above.  You will probably see a little orange icon with a white radio wave like image inside.  Click on that, and you can add this blog to your feeds.  It looks like this:

Or second, you can go to your feed reader and copy this url address when you click on “add a feed” while on your reader.  Add this url: http://dearlibrarian.edublogs.org/

By doing either of those two things, you will receive notification when a Dear Librarian post has been added.  Feed away!

Solving jigsaw puzzles is quite fun!  And, it seems to be true: once you start, you can’t stop.  Well, that’s ok; keep solving because working on jigsaw puzzles does have some benefits.  For example, when solving a puzzle you increase these skills: reasoning, deducing, analyzing, sequencing, and developing logical thought and problem solving skills. What’s more important though is the fun.  Solving a jigsaw puzzle especially with friends is fun.  If you’re solo though without a physical puzzle here are some great online versions: JigZone.com,  National Geographic Puzzles, or Crea Soft.  They all include an easy, average, and hard version.  I solved this soccer ball puzzle in 10 minutes and 24 seconds.  How fast can you?