Little Owls under flowering Crabapple

Cherry Blossoms by Japanese Bridge
Purple Wisteria in full bloom cascading over a garden pond and waterfall.

Little girl and her mum enjoying the garden on Open Day 2005

Inside the Potting Shed.

Steps leading to our Japanese Garden

Our Garden "Springhill"

These photos were taken during our Open Garden weekend in September 2005.

The woodland area has silver birches and crabapples,underplanted with azaelas,Japanese windflowers,daffodils,bluebells and hellebores.
We have a Japanese Garden and I love this photo taken by our son,as I feel it has a definite oriental look .
This kookaburra was most interested
in proceedings and spent most of the day sitting in our oak tree watching the people that passed through the garden.
This photo is of our son's partner admiring a beautiful flowering cherry tree
The kookaburra is still taking a great interest in what's going on .

No.23.Last Activity,What a Journey!

Wow!!what a challenge and an incredible experience.I truly doubted I could do this program but was determined to have a go.It was like setting sail into unknown waters.Apart from workflows I had only rudimentary computer skills when I began the journey.Now terms like blogs,wikis,RSS feeds,bloglines,zoho writer,tags,flickr,podcasts,youTube and much more have some meaning.I found the program utterly absorbing and enjoyed each activity,even when sometimes I had to try again and again.

I must thank management for its foresight in giving staff this wonderful opportunity to go forward with the latest technology and to learn about all the exciting and boundless information out there waiting to be explored and integrated into everyday use in the library or for our personal use.I love blogging and will continue to use my blog Springhillparklands as a Garden Journal,hopefully with some photos .

Week 9 No 22 NetLibrary/OverDrive trial.

Well this one took the longest time,five hours over the Christmas period trying to establish a NetLibrary account through the plcmc website.I kept going around in circles,so in desperation I joined the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County online,using my husband's Diners Club card,thinking maybe that was a way to get into NetLibrary.Maybe I will just have to plan a trip to America to use it.

Unfortunately I had not yet read the email relating to this activity.Have now tried to access OverDrive trial site through the Intranet,but the page could'nt be displayed.I tried the refresh button and all the other options sounded very compicated,so after trying to join NetLibrary think I'll give all that a miss and perhaps try again later,as I have already tried several times to access the site.I don't have a MP3 player so could'nt download material.

Never mind I guess the P.L.C.M.C.library card will be a great reminder of this wonderful Learning 2.0 program

No 21 Podcasts

After searching through all the podcast sites listed in activity 21,I decided to use the rss feed of a podcast site listed on the bloglines website.I accessed www.podder.org and was interested in Movies you should see.I subscribed to their website and copied the rss feed onto my bloglines account.Sounds simple ,well let me tell you it took a bit of perservence and several attempts before much to my delight the feed appeared on my bloglines.

No 21 Podcasts

After several hours immersed in the to date unknown world of podcasts,I hope I now have more idea of what podcasts can offer.I explored podcast.net,which I found to be the most exciting and interesting to me.I chose Recreation and Hobbies and was able to click on Gardening in Melbourne at the top of the page,where I found a comprehensive list of Nurseries and Garden Suppliers.This linked to melbourneandvictoria.com websites,with an alphabetical list off all things garden related.What a find!,after all the American based material.

podcastalley.com was a show for teens by teens,a bit out of my league.

Yahoo podcasts produced some sites for libraries and librarians.libvibe,the library
news podcast seemed to be the most informative.

I must organise some speakers for our computer,so I can actually listen to some podcasts.

No 2 0 Discover youTube

I found youTube fascinating.Trawling through some sites,I came across the page for the Australian OPen Garden Scheme,it was like meeting an old friend,as we have opened our garden in the past and hope to do so again in September next year.I then did a search for gardens in the video section,there were no matches,but I has sucess with a search for flowers.I found youTube an area where you can have fun,some of the videos are very clever,this is definitely a site I will return to and explore furter.

After much clicking on icons and some trial and error,hey presto,what a surprise!the video image of a flower below,suddenly appeared on my blog.It was like hitting the jackpot at the pokies.

youTube-flower-mi...

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Week 8 Web 2.0 Awards

I read several of the nominees for the Web 2.0 Awards.Although there were no actual award winners in the Travel category,only honorable mentions,I found travbuddy.com.very interesting,this would be a great site to meet people travelling to the same destination.get travel tips and share travel experiences.A feature of this site would be that it would be much more up to date than any travel book.Any political unrest,terrorist threats or dangerous situations would be likely to be discussed on the site.I can see a useful purpose for this web site in a library setting.Rather than try to find a book on a particular country,accessing the travbuddy.com site would be quicker and give first hand experiences.

I also found myspace.com,the 3rd placegetter in the category of Social Networking an eye opener,as my 17 year old niece spends hours a week on the site,as do many of her school friends.This site seems like a great idea as people with common interests can share ideas and experiences,and no young person ,or any person need be lonely.