Wednesday, October 24, 2012

New Red Dot Book Awards website ready

UPDATED 25Oct12:  only good news now!

www.reddotawards.com is back online!  Bug resolved (thank goodness)....

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OK, good news, bad news...


The new Red Dot website is ready for exploration (read: please let me know if any links don't work - you are my beta testers).

Go to: https://sites.google.com/site/reddotbookawards20122013/

The bad news is that in shifting the domain name -- www.reddotawards.com -- from the 2011-2012 Google Site to the 2012-2013 one, I encountered a bug.  I can't get the new site to take on the "www.reddotawards.com" name.  It's small comfort that others in the world are just as frustrated with Google right now.  I've read their same sagas online: we did everything the instructions said to do, but Google balks.  And the bug is such that I can't even set "www.reddotawards.com" back to the old site.

Patience.....

Meanwhile, use the long link above and let me know what I've missed.

I'll promote it with a bit more fanfare and explanation once I get the *^&$#% short link working.

Thanks,

Katie
(katie.appleton.day@gmail.com)

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Two great new sites for Online Book Shopping

I recently learned about two new online book vendor sites that have quickly become as important to me as Book Depository and OpenTrolley.

It's a book price comparison site for Singapore, which opened on August 24 of this year.
Forget about switching between Internet browser tabs - you can now shop on just one tab with oo.sg, a website that consolidates the best deals from 9 websites. With literary offerings from power e-retailers such as Amazon, Kinokuniya, Popular, Betterworldbooks, Bookdepository, Fishpond, Noqstore, and Opentrolley.
Yes, you type in a title or ISBN and it tells you the cheapest cost - including shipping costs.

One of the book sources it uses is
a free worldwide-shipping book supplier, very similar to Book Depository.  In fact, I'm noticing that they're coming in slightly cheaper than Book Depository most of the time.

I also like how they provide the Kinokuniya costs, where possible.

I'll be pushing out some Red Dot Book promotions soon -- so if you haven't started ordering your copies, you might try these in addition to other suppliers.

Speaking of new sources of books, here's a link to our new Suppliers shared Google Doc.  I just added these two to it.  Feel free to add more.  Anyone can edit the document.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Brush up on your research skills with Research Toolkit.

The next round of the Victorian Personal Learning Network has been announced, with the first ever Victorian PLN short course kicking off on November 12 and running for 4 units. The Research Toolkit course will explore reliable online resources, effective search techniques and tools for organisation and referencing.
The online course is self paced and will feature webinars with research experts. It’s a great way for teachers and library staff to brush up on their skills and keep up to date with new tools and techniques. Research Toolkit is also a good refresher for previous participants in the Victorian PLN course looking to reinforce and further develop many of their own research skills.
Teachers at the Australian International School have been participating in Vic PLN  courses for several years. It's a great way to keep up your teaching skills and awareness of new learning and teaching resources.
Here's a post about this from Bright Ideas, the blog of the School Library Association of Victoria.
Here's a link to previous Vic PLN courses.