 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're an online show, we're a webinar, webcast, whatever you want to call us. We're here online every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. central time. The show, the live show is free and open to anyone to watch as are our recordings, which we do post on our website after the show is done. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, presentations, interviews, book reviews, many training sessions. Basically anything library related, we are happy to have it on the show. We do bring in guest speakers sometimes and we do have the Nebraska Library Commission staff do presentations sometimes. And this week, it's just me here myself in my office doing my presentation. Cool tools for you and your library. This is a presentation that I did last month originally at our state conference, the Nebraska Library Association, the Nebraska School Librarians Association annual conference was last month up in South Sioux City, Nebraska. It was a great conference and I presented this and I had a room overflowing with people and I know many people couldn't get to it. That happens with many sessions at conferences. So I did decide to redo my session here on Encompass Live for anyone who couldn't attend the conference or wasn't even here in Nebraska at all. I want to just share what I was doing there. So I've got a lot of tools, all online related tools that I'm gonna be sharing here today, you'll notice that when I go through the presentation that the URLs for all these individual tools are not on any of the slides. At the very end, there's a link to our delicious account here at the Nebraska Library Commission where I've collected all of the tools, the URLs for all of them plus any extra videos, trainings, training tutorials, anything related to them, we'll all be together at the end. So that will be the URL that I'll put up on the very last slide and you can write that one down to have everything in one place. So don't try and figure out what the URLs are. Just watch this presentation, pay attention to what's going on with this issue, what the items are and whatnot, you'll get all the links at the end. Now, these are some new things that I have come across, okay? We're new to me in the last year, not necessarily new tools, new things that have only come out this year, things that are brand new, but just things that I came across and discovered and was playing in it with over the last year. So you may know some of these and already be using them in your libraries or you may be seeing them for the first time as well. So let's get started with our first cool tool. There we go, Big Huge Labs is the first one on my list today. This is a website that has a lot of things on it actually. It's a collection of all sorts of different kinds of image generators, meaning you can take things like magazine cover, movie posters, trading cards, all sorts of different things, book covers and tweak them to be whatever you want to. Put your own pictures on it and put your own texts into them and make it something personal for you, personal for something, promoting your library, some service you're doing, some program, whatever it is you want to do. And then you can download your image from here and then be able to use it somewhere else, print out a flyer, print out a sign, just post something onto your library's website, onto a Facebook page, anywhere you want to. You can download the image to use it and you can also automatically share it from the site to your Flickr account for photos or to your Facebook. They have an automatic way of doing that as well. You can put your photos onto here from all sorts of different locations that just hosted on your own computer and you can see here they have ways to automatically go to your Flickr, Instagram, Facebook or Dropbox accounts, anywhere, any of those where you might host your own photos. So this is like a lot of creativity, some pretty fun things you can do with these. Here's someone that I did a few years ago. This is my ferret to Zen and he is sitting in his litter box while he is drinking out of his water bottle on the side of his cage. So I thought that was amusing so I created this poster of the photo of my own and then added the text down there, efficiency in one end out the other. Here's another one that someone else did. This is one of the library cards. You can have trading cards like you have baseball cards, trading cards. This is one that a teen librarian did. She's a Wrangler of Teenage Library patrons and then she put down some of her skills here like you would have for gaming for example. Able to distract large groups of teens, the single roll of duct tape or two sheets of paper. She's got crafting abilities, place plus eight, patience plus 11 and an infinite imagination and sense of flight. So this is all something that is just the card shape is what was made available on the Big Huge Labs website. She put in her own photo and her own text there. So here is the website for Big Huge Labs just to show you exactly what it is they have here. And you can see there's motivational posters. You've seen the motivational or the demotivational ones that are used as being sarcastic. Movie posters, magazine covers, book covers, maps, all sorts of different things. Badges, you can do an ID card to put your picture on. Here's where the trading cards are here. So there's lots of different resources here. Are ever popular LOL cats, LOL cats, generators so you can create your own of those. So they look like a billboard to put up. So here's the trading card one. I'll just show you when you go into here. It shows you where you wanna take your photo from. As I said, look at her Instagram, Facebook and Dropbox all my connect to those or you can click browse and just look right on your own computer for whatever photos you might have on there. And then it will input that over here and you can enter any of the text, titles, description, choose colors. Depending on the item that you're doing on the Big Huge Labs site, of course we'll have different items available. So that's our first one. Big Huge Labs second item, a second cool tool is Bitstrips. This is something you may have seen it came popular in the last year or so, maybe a couple of years, where you can create little comics of yourself, post them up on your Facebook page out into the internet or you can have your friends add it into them as well if they have a Bitstrips account as well. You can use their apps for this. It's done via Facebook or you can do it on your phone or whatever mobile device you have, both Android and iOS versions of apps are available. There's a single panel comic where you can create your, where you can just have your single, just you and then or you can add in as I said, your friends. Your friends also have to have a Bitstrip account that they've set up as well. It will be able to connect to see if they have one or not and you can add them in. And there's something called the Colored Greeting Card which I thought would be nice for libraries because it's centered around something of an event, a holiday, something happening. So if you're having some sort of a Halloween event last month, you could have done something related to that. When you first go into here, you create your own avatar for yourself. So something that'll be a little character, a cartoon character of you. You can choose all sorts of things. Your hair color, what your face looks like, the clothes you're wearing. All sorts of different things you can personalize. And when you're done with this, it'll share it out to Facebook when you're on to your Twitter or Tumblr accounts. I have links to those as well. So this is just a screen of what it looks like when you're in BitStrips. This is via the Facebook app. This is one that I did my cousin Jessica. She has her own avatar. And Jessica is very impressed by Krista's costume this year. And apparently I'm dead, I'm a ghost. So here is where it goes out to, this is the app via my Facebook account which is slowly loading up here. And every day they post, they put some suggested single panel up here so you can just grab one for the day if you want to and share that one out with yourself in it or you can choose your own that you want to do. So see here is new status comics. These are just ones that they've created for you. So you can just say, here's one, Krista must be dreaming. She's a busy stewing if I've said about something. Dog of the vet. So all sorts of these are the ones that they just put up there as standard ones you just grab and spit out if you want to. You could do a friend comic. This is where you would bring in someone you know who has a BitStrips account themselves and you can put them in one of your cartoons, comics or you can do the greeting card one as I said which has the themed things for different holidays. First you'd pick a friend. Let's take, here is my other cousin, April. And then here's where you have the different things. There's New Year's Valentine's Day, Halloween, and Christmas coming up for birthdays. You can do birthday one and you can see here it puts both of us into the comic because I picked someone else first and then has different things we can say. You can change it around. So you could definitely use this and tweak it for any sort of library event for specific occasion. We do a question. Is there a charge? No, actually, oh I should have mentioned at the beginning too. I want to recognize that all of the tools that I am sharing with you this morning there are free versions of everything. So everything here is free, easy, not really anything that needs to be downloaded is mostly all web-based is what I try and grab for this. They do sometimes have additional features or something extra that might cost if you wanted to get a pro account of some sort or professional account for some of these. But everything that I'm showing you does have a free account and actually anything I've done with them I've not paid for any of these myself at all. So anything I'm linking to and showing you didn't cost me anything. You're welcome. So that is, so you may have seen a lot of these but they got really popular once and everybody was sharing them and now they've kind of, I see a lot less people using them but I think they're great. Like I said, just putting together something too that you can feed out through your libraries a Facebook page of some event going on or something where maybe your teen librarian is doing something and have created an avatar for themselves to promote it or you can download these and share them other ways as well. So next up is polling. If you want to find out what people are thinking what they want, this is something called easy polls and it is free. The basic is free as you just asked that it does have, the polls can be web-based or people can access and answer the polls on Android or iOS devices, either one. It does have some premium features so if you did want to, you could pay. There's an IP address filtering where you can block repeated votes from an IP address so if you wanna make sure someone isn't trying to just bump up all the numbers for themselves. Location tracking and having it be ad-free. Location tracking means being able to track where your votes are coming in from and then obviously ad-free. There is a small ad that comes up when you do post this, you pull out there for this. So if you wanted to pay, you could have those different features but basically it is totally free. In the easy poll, you can create a poll of asking any sort of survey questions, multiple ones, a single one. I mean, customize the color, what it looks like, what the text looks like, how the buttons appear, also it's a little personalized things on there. You have an account that you do create with it, just some basic login info, email address and set up a name for it and where you can track and view results, see what's happening and then close the poll when you're done and don't wanna ask any more questions and have any more responses come in. You can have a specific URL that you email out to people for them to go to your poll. You can just share a link out onto, of course, any of your various social media or add with HTML code, they'll give you a bit of code that you can take and insert that somewhere on a webpage you have so the poll could actually appear as a little box on the side on your library's website. So here's one that I just did, this is just enabled what a poll could look like, what's your favorite ice cream color? Ice cream flavor, sorry, not color. Chocolate, coffee, vanilla and strawberry and then people could vote for it. And this is what it would look like when you're in your account to see what people are answering, what the poll itself looks like and then if I did pay, which I did not, this is a piece of sample of the location tracking that is in here. So this is just out onto where I have put the poll, this is the URL to go to the poll on the web and you can see here, it does have been, this is the ads that come up. In this case, I don't think the ads are that big a deal because they're actually below the poll. So you see the poll first, the ad doesn't come up above it or preface it or anything. So it's actually just beneath it, the poll's first and someone could answer if they wanted to and vote, the people taking the poll don't have to have an account or anything, they just do make their vote and do it and then you can see here, they said, I did this, we've gotten one person likes coffee and one person likes strawberry. So that's how the poll could come through. So if you're looking to try and just find out some basic information, what people might want to, a service, a program, something people might want to do or how a program is doing this would be something that you could possibly use and it's for free. Okay. Next up is Google Lit Trips. Google Lit Trips is kind of like a book talk sort of thing but much more expanded for different books. Use Google Earth to create tours of locations, events, things that have happened in books. This is a program that an idea that was come up with by this one teacher and you put it out on the web and people can use the ones that are out there already for themselves or create your own. They said Google Earth is what you use to, and I'll show you an example of this to see exactly what I'm talking about. You look for locations, add little place mark pins, marking each one, put in information about that location description, what the actual location is, how it relates to the book, you can put in little quizzes, notes, you can even put in videos, extra things that you want to add in, but just things that enhance the book itself that someone's reading so it gets a little bit more involved. You do have to have Google Earth download to your computer first to use, and there's one URL that I did put in the presentation and that is in our links at the end, of course. Google.com slash Earth to see after that installed on your computer first to be able to create one or to view the ones that are already up there. There are, as I said, you can make your own, but there are pre-made ones on this website, Google, it trips for lots of books, old new books, old books, and I've got links to YouTube tutorials on how to do this as well, because it does take some time to sit down and figure out how to use a Google Earth and what things you might want to put in. You want to put together a script of sorts of what you want it to be talking about at each of the different locations before you sit down and do it. So this is the website for the Google trips main page and I will actually just go live to the page here so we can see it. So here we go. You can see here also, they are in the middle of redesigning the website, so things may change soon. We don't know exactly when, so keep that in mind as you're going here, but you can see here, they're working and revising all this. You can see once they've been doing recently this year of updating the information that's in there. And these are some of the books that are here. Just all sorts of different topics are here, anything you can think of. It is also organized by grades. So at the top K through five, grades six through eight, nine through 12, higher ed, and some special things that don't fall into a particular category. So if you're trying to share this with some younger children, you can see here are some of the titles that are under the K through five age. And you can see these have all been updated very recently. And so these are all pre-made ones that you can use. Or as I said, there is, I do have a link to show you how to make your own. But to really show you exactly what we're talking about here, I'm gonna show you one. I don't believe there's any sound on this one, but you can put audio if you want to onto it. But this is one that is already a pre-made one, just to see what we're talking about. Yeah, this one doesn't have any audio, but you see it zooms into an area in Boston, talks a little bit about the Boston, Massachusetts itself. And then it's gonna start zooming in even farther. And you can see there's the track that the ducklings went. And now we'll go to each of the different locations that you can follow through along with the story. You can see here it says the pond and the public gardens, they spent the night here and it just gives a little blurb about it. So you could have read the book or reread the book and then do this at the same time to just be more, get more involved in it. And here's one with the question about what about this area? So we'll watch this whole thing. Let's just give you an idea of what a Google lit trip would look like. So just a great way to enhance the reading of a book. Oh, the question, does it have fantasy locations? For example, Game of Thrones. Good question. I don't know if it does because if it's using Google Earth, it would have to be something where they could actually go unless someone's created something that is, see literary locations. Unless someone is created like Westeros or something in Google Earth, that's the only way I would know to do it. If there's somewhere else that's got, yeah. Okay, you say not yet. No, then this particular thing is based on using Google Earth as your basis of where you create the whole thing. So unless there's some other program out there where you could take this idea of putting different tour through a fantasy location, that would be something that could be done. But no, not in here, since it's all Google Earth-based, it has to be a real place. Good question though, maybe they'll come up with that. So that's Google lit trips. I think it was really fun. I've gotten a little caught up in watching too many of them sometimes. When you do create them, you can send people to a website to watch some. They'll give you a URL that you can go to to, excuse me, send people there. Or you can save file to your desktop to watch it there as well so you don't have to be online necessarily. This is one that someone actually posted it and posted it up to YouTube. So I grabbed it and brought it to show you what they actually look like. It was the easiest way to do it. But you can save them to your desktop to then share that way and have people watch the different lit trips that you've created. Or of course, using the ones that are already on the site. There's lots of them there, as I said, for all different ages, definitely take a look at them. There we go. All right, our next tool is NetGalley. NetGalley is something that is advanced reader copies, ARCs. If you've gone to many ALA, PLA conferences, you may have picked up all these piles and piles of books that you then ship back home to your library. This is electronic versions of those. So forthcoming books before they're coming out so you can take a look at them ahead of time to see if there's something you might like, if it's something to be good for your library or for your patrons. It's officially described as being for professional readers, which they define as book reviewers, journalists, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, or anyone who reads and recommends books. The idea is you'll go in here, you will get copies of these, and then you read the books and actually give feedback to the publisher. So these are the advanced reader copies before the final copies of the books have been done. As opposed to the ones we used to just get and read and use that to decide if we want anything, if you want to buy them or not. In this case, they want you to have to, but they want you to have you give feedback and say what you thought of the book, tell the publishers what was a good, was a bad, you think it could be, something could be changed, whatever. You have to fill in a profile on the website for this one with a lot more information than most of these services because they wanna know what you are like, what kind of a reader you are, what kind of things you might really want to read. The publishers are gonna use that information to decide if they're gonna let you have certain of these things. And isn't an automatic thing where here's a whole bunch of books, get all the ones you want. You have to request particular titles that you want to review. So you need to go in there and check it out and see what kind of books there and say I'd like to review this one, I'd like to have access to this one and the publishers will then look at your profile information and what you've done before on the site and decide if they're gonna give you access or not. So good way to get just a heads up on what kind of books are coming out from all sorts of different publishers. This is just a screenshot of the site that I did and you can see there's lots of different categories that you can go through too so you can narrow this down too. Children's fiction, children's nonfiction, biographies, comics and graphic novels, entertainment, cooking, food and wine, all sorts of different areas. And here we go, go to the site here. So here's the, and here's where you sign in, join for free as it doesn't cost anything to do this, they just want input from people who not just read the books but are gonna be recommending them to other people if they wanna get connected to those of us who may tell people these are good books that they might want to buy or just want to read. Let's see, here's fine titles. You can go by title, you can browse publishers if you know there's a certain publisher that you're interested in and here's some of the recent ones that have been added and they've got ones that they're highlighting and then here's all the other categories that did come up in the screenshot I had there so you can see all the other adult fiction, non-fiction, outdoors in nature, religion, spirituality, romance. You can also search by title, author, publisher so you can do more refined search if you're looking for some particular series that's coming up, you can look for something in particular to see if a particular title is in here. Question we have, the Cayman. Once you get access to the e-book, does the arc stay in your account or can you download it to keep? Good question. I am not sure how long it stays. See, you download it to whatever device that you want. You like, does it expire similar to, it says till it is archived. Okay, it may be because these are advanced reader copies at a certain point, they're no longer the actual copy of the book, that's true and so once it's been published, it would no longer even be in the system so that would be something that it would be removed from your account, correct? Yeah, someone else just answered until it's archived, usually around when it's published, then the advanced reader copy is removed from the system so then it would also be removed from your account at the same time because then they have the final copy ready and published. Any other questions? All right, don't forget, you can type in your questions at any time, just give a reminder of that. Use the questions section and you're good to have our interface, type in. If you have a microphone, let me know and I can unmute you and you can ask your question that way. All right, so that was NetGalley. Really cool for doing book selection, deciding as I said, what kind of books you might wanna buy for the library and get a preview of what the actual book will be more than just title and blurb, you can read the actual copy of the book. So our next cool tool is something really fun. Take some work to use, but it's called Photosynth and this is where you take a series of photos, quite a few, and merge them into a 3D model of it. It sounds kind of really convoluted, but it's really cool thing where you can just, rather if you don't have a video camera and you want to create a video of something, this is a way of doing it. It's kind of jumps around to things, but it's kind of a cool, you take a whole bunch of pictures and make a video of an area, maybe of your book stacks of a statue of something in your library. You can use any kind of camera you want from your cell phone up to the most fanciest DSLR type camera. Any camera will work for it, which is great. You take a lot of photos of this because you're gonna create a video using them and if you know if you watch videos, like animated things, it takes a lot, at least 20 to 50 pictures so that they overlap each other as creating from your still pictures this video version of whatever it was you were looking at. You save them into the system and what they call your library there and then you can share them out anywhere you want to. You can send someone a URL to go specifically to the video that you've created or the photosynth, I'll use the right word. There's embed codes, you can bed it into a website as well since you wanna give it like be a tour of your library or something or a tour of the garden behind your library. You can put that actual in bed somewhere or you can share it out to the usual social networking type places, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. And just give you a better idea what we're talking about here. This is one that was actually done by one of our staff here at the Library Commission, Michael Sowers, our Technology Innovation Librarian did this one and this is of our staffs here in the Library Commission and I'll just go to the actual video that doesn't really embed well into the slides. Here it loads it up. And you can see here, I'm just gonna hit. Yeah, and this doesn't have audio but it's just, you can see here, it's actual whole bunch of still shots and you can see on the sides maybe a little choppy coming through. It is kind of 3D-ish as you're going through. So this is a whole bunch of photos he took and then if the system put it to the program, photos and put them together and made it a video. So he could have turned a corner and made it more and done something like that but this he just went straight down one of our rows of stacks. Let's see how much I'll take here. Nope, and then reverse back out. So that's just one example that there are lots of other ones you can do. Let's see if I can, the examples of straight ones like that that you do or going around here, a spin, have something in the center like an object, whoops, go back down here. In this case, they've got a motorcycle. So you would circle it to make a video of the item that you're trying to highlight. They do take a little bit of time to load up. So this one you just circle around as you say, whoops. Oh, back to the sides, no, no, no. Hold on just a second. Okay, jumping, trying to go to that new one actually crashed my Firefox. Not cool, all right. May have had too many things open, all at once, all these different tabs. So we're gonna close some of this up here to clean it up a bit. There we go, there. So anyway, you can see here, this is the spinning one where you'd have the item in the middle and you'd circle around it and that would be what you end up with afterwards in 3D. Panorama where you put yourself in the center and look outside outwards into every direction. So you do a panorama. So maybe if you're standing in the middle of your children's routine area and you can do a panorama view of everything that you're seeing around you and put that up as also another tour. And then the walking one is the one that we just showed you just went the straight through. So there's lots of cool things you can do with this. Oh, here's one, they did it very cool. But it's interesting because if you take enough photos, as you can see here, it goes so smoothly. It just looks like an actual video, not a choppy whole bunch of still pictures, but it's actually taken with a whole bunch of photos, done with a whole bunch of photos. So if you don't have a video camera and you wanna do something video-like or just something a little different, this would be a really cool thing to use. So sticking in the video theme, our next tool is Mozilla's Popcorn Maker. This is an online tool, totally online, where you can remix videos, audio, images, anything you want to create some new mash-up video. It's really easy, it's a browser interface, nothing that you have to download or install, no special video editing software. Popcorn Maker is actually part of something called WebMaker, which is a suite of tools developed by Mozilla, as you can see at the top of their logo there. Mozilla, yes, the Firefox people, the company that produces without Firefox browser, to help people create new web content while learning how the web works. So there's other tools that are part of this WebMaker suite. Of this particular one is Popcorn Maker. And you create something brand new using content from other places on the web and combining it with your own tags and your own links. And what's great about this is that you don't have to learn programming or video editing or anything, it just takes all these things for you and very easily in that browser interface, simply as you just drag and drop them in there to create your final item. When you put it in there, you can put in your own text, items, links to other information, which is really interesting. So if you have some sort of a picture or a video that you have there and you wanna link someone out to your library's website or out to some other resource, it's about that video or whatever you've put in there. And it actually makes the video, the link in the Popcorn Maker video is a hot link, it's a live link. So when you click on it, it automatically pops them out to where that website is but pauses the video at the same time. So they can open up the new tab, it will automatically open up a new tab, take them to whatever website you want to, but the video pauses and waits for them to come back to then hit, to continue again and watch the rest of the video. So that is really cool. I thought that was a really cool thing because a lot of videos or things may have links that you wanna go to, but you've gotta go to them and come back and the video's moving, whatever. You can import video to create yours from YouTube or Vimeo, audio from Clip or SoundCloud, two websites that just do audio clips. And then also to other places, you can grab things from two map locations, pictures from your Flickr item, definite entries from Wikipedia, all these different things can be put together to create your final remixed mashup video. So you can grab all sorts of things you can think of out there and smash them up into something totally new. And this is one that actually is from one of our librarians here, Valparaiso Public Library here in Nebraska did this one. It's a tour of their library that she used a popcorn maker to do. And I'm gonna actually go out to the website for this one that she's got it on. Go, let it load up a bit. There we go. You can see she's got both screen book covers, little animated clips were brought in from the web that she found through the tool. So that just gives you an idea of how this could work. I'll just pause that for now when you watch the whole thing. And as I said, this is WebMaker is the whole suite of tools from Mozilla where they have the tools here. Popcorn Maker is the video creation. You can use, they have an app maker to make mobile apps yourself, make websites using Thimble and see behind the scenes using this thing called X-ray goggles that they have. So all things that can just help you learn more about what the in Childly Internet works and create your new resources. Something else that is good to know too is this is not, even though this is all web-based tools here in this WebMaker suite of tools, you do not have to, and it's from Mozilla Firefox, you do not have to be using Firefox. They will work in many other browsers as well. They've made them open for anyone. So if you use IE or Chrome or something else, definitely can try and use those as well. They also have, let's see, I think it's going to explore, a gallery of pre-made videos and tools. Let's see, where that you can use, there we go, the gallery, to experiment with. So if you don't want to start from scratch and figure out how to do this, they've got, well, this is, here we go, some pre-made ones that are already up here that you can then take and then remix yourself. So if you're not sure about what you might want to do or how to create one just from a blank slate, they have them right here on purpose where you can just take these that have already been started and then do whatever you want with it to remix it and make it your own and learn how to create your own mashup. So that is the Mozilla Popcorn Maker. Another tool that can be used to make videos is PowToon. And this creates animated videos. Online videos that have characters, a little animated characters, cartoon characters, stick figures, and also different things that are available in there that you can use to create a final product. It is a free, but there is also premium and education plans that you can get depending on if you want to get some more resources, some more characters, if you want to pay extra, you can get more characters to be able to use. And there is an educational plan as well, which you could use with companies from the school or if you're a school library, that is something that you could use there. There's characters, there's backgrounds, you can choose props, everything, just click and drag and drop like a lot of these tools that we've been showing into your final product. You can add your own pictures, you can do your own library's logo in there as well. It also has a built-in Flickr search, Creative Commons Flickr search, meaning any photos that come in have been licensed Creative Commons available so that they are allowed to be used for repurposing. That is something I'll mention while I'm not talking about that right now. If you are doing any of these mashups with Popcorn Maker or this or any other tools, make sure that you've looked to see if they are allowed to be used. Some people post their things up there and have no problem, post their pictures and things on the internet and have no problem with it, but you do need to double check the licensing to see if they do or they have all rights reserved, moded on it. In Flickr and many of these photo websites, it is the option given to the owners of the photos to designate whether it is all rights reserved, meaning you can't, and various versions of Creative Commons. Yes, you can use it, but only for non-commercial purposes. No, you can't use it, contact me, whatever it is. Yes, you can use it for anything you want, I don't care, but in Powtunes, they automatically do a search into Flickr for you for any kind of picture you want and limit it just to the Creative Commons license photos that are allowed to be reused for this kind of thing. In Powtunes for the audio, there are music tracks that they have licensed for this that you can just grab from or you can record your own narration if you want to do your own over talking on it. You can then publish it out to YouTube to share, so that's where it links to put all of your videos on. You can also have them on their own website, but if you are on publishing to YouTube. Something else cool that this company has done is they have a free online book available on their website called The Power of Cartoon Marketing that you can just download and use to get your ideas about what to do and to learn how to market things better. And that's what we're trying to do here is market our services, our library, what we do. And it's a free online book that you can get and it has step-by-step instructions on how to create some of these animated videos as well. So I definitely recommend taking a look at that for anything you want to do. But even if you're not going to use Powtunes, it's just a general thing about marketing and using cartoons and videos of this type to do that kind of thing. So this is just a screenshot of the interface. This is, here on the right-hand side are all the different characters. You can see that they're in different poses and they are animated. So if I made this one go, she would wave her hand back and forth. So you can click and drag all of these in if you want to. At the top here, there are the different styles. So different types of characters. There's these kind of animated ones. I said there's stick figures. There's actually a hand that's a photo of a hand that can come in and do things. All sorts of different ideas. And there's different props you can have them use. You can add the sounds you want to, add text. There's a timeline down here at the bottom of the interface so you can see where and when things are happening and judge when you want things to come in and out and move around. It's all click, drag and drop, soft interface here on the website, nothing to download and install. And as I said with some of the previous things, you don't really need to know video editing and things like that. You just need to know how to click and drag things and see if you like where they are and if not, move them around and put them somewhere else. So I have a couple of examples that people have done with this one using Powtoon. This is from a library talking about the nonfiction section of the library. And this one does have audio as well, so we'll get that going. You can see what this one. The nonfiction section of the library is full of books about real things. Why can you find books of poetry and books about hotels in the nonfiction section? OK, the nonfiction section mostly has books that are about real things. There are a lot of books that are nonfiction. How is a penguin supposed to find anything? Easy. You just have to know the sections that this guy, Melville Dewey, created. Each section has a number. All the books in that section go along with that number. The number's on the spine of the book. Sorry, tell me about these sections and numbers. The zeros are general topics like world record books and books about the alien. So that's just a given example. Didn't need to watch the whole thing. Many of us know how to look up Dewey, books in the library using Dewey. You can see there all of those. That little black stick figure was from the Powtoons and how the things animated in and out and the audio recorded over it all from the program itself. And you can see there the photo of obviously the Guinness World Records was something that was they imported themselves. So this is a question, can you customize the characters like importing a photo of yourself? I don't think you'd be able to do that, but you could. As you can see here, import photos and then do things to them to make them a little animated as well. The characters that come from over here, that's not something know that you would necessarily be able to put your own face on one of these. No. But you could import pictures of yourself and make it a little animated, multiple pictures of yourself and make it a little animated thing. That would be something you could do, yeah. But these things are not editable. There's a whole bunch of choices, as you can see of different things that they're doing, running in, standing, jumping, laying down that you would be able to use. Here's another one. This one I found on the Powtoons website. This is something, an introduction to the library itself. And this uses some of the different. So now this one of those hands coming up, that's one of the, I guess we call it a character. Like the people that come in characters, this is where you can have this hand come in and out of your video doing different things. And they're all premade in there. And you see at the end there, they do have their little ad, so to speak, created using Powtoons. And if you notice on the one that was also up on YouTube that I showed you, they do have the little created using Powtoons in the lower right corner. So it is branded, so to speak, for that. It is free, like I said, everything else. You can share your video, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, wherever you want to email people. The link can be shared anywhere. I said there is the premium account that you can get if you want more features. They've gone to the business plans if you want to jump there. Or there are educational accounts as well. And educational is in classrooms. So if you're a school library, this would be great if you wanted to, as a public library, work with a school library to get one of these accounts so you can work together to work with a school to get their account with some more, you just get more features, more resources. But there's still a lot of things that are on the free website, free account that you could definitely use. So, and our next tool is something a little more fun. Well, I think all of these are fun. I played with all of them as I was doing this. I think all purpose games. This is where you can create your own free online games. Games as far as multiple choice questions and quizzes and things that you can have people interact with to learn something, either to learn about the library or learn about a topic or a resource, something that you can just want to teach someone with asking questions back and forth. You do need to create an account to make your own game to create it, but people who you will send this to do not have to have their own account to play your games or to answer your quizzes. There's a couple of different conversions of them. I'm going to show you the different types that there are next. Once you've created your game and picked what your topic's going to be, what your questions are going to be, what your answers are, you then have a URL that you send out through all the usual places, of course. You can email it, you can put it on your different social networking sites, whatever you want to send people to the website to actually check out your game. So here's some that we have. There's one that's a planet to the solar system. And this is one of the versions of, you have dots, there's a blue dots on the screen and people have to pick which planet is which. There's also this, this is another one of the states of the United States. People have to choose by a shape, which state is which, and then one about in the library. What is some things that we're learning about? This particular library. So I'll just go to one of these and open it up here. It should pop over in a second. There we go. Close on this down. All right, so this is the planets of the solar system one. This is on the Purpose Games website. As great as the URLs are pretty simple. This one is purposegames.com slash game slash 161. You hit start over here to start the game. And one thing they do have is, does have a timer, keeping track of what, how long it's taking you to do the quiz. And you can click on, once you get the correct one, it goes on to the next, not saying here, I want you to show me Neptune, Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Mars. And yes, according to this game, Pluto is no longer a planet. Some of us may have a different opinion, but once you're done with it, you see you get your score, how long it took you to get. I got a couple wrong, of course. And then it compares you actually to other people who might be playing this game as well, who have played this game. So you can see yourself compared. It's a little fun thing to just learn something or then see what's going on. You can create an account if you're as you're playing, if you just say you really want to get competitive with people as well. This is one of the library one, it's a different kind of game you can create where it's just questions, multiple choice questions. Where's the library card in the large wooden cabinet, between Cattel Spie and Catalonia in the dictionary and the library online website behind the JC Penney catalog. So someone had a little fun with this. And this is also this particular quiz, obviously it's specific to whichever list library is, but you could go through all of this and see I'll do the wrong one. And then you can see it counts outside, there was 10 questions. So same thing, you go through all of this and at the end you'd have your results. You see some of these questions are very, or some of the answers are very fun. And there's a result for that one. Only a few people will play this one. This is me previously, I did a little better previous. And you're at 90%, I think I did one wrong on this one. So this is a multiple choice type of quiz. This was the dots and then this one would be finding different shapes. So you can create your own kind of game on here. You can look at the games that are on the website and see if there's other ones that you want to try out. This is where I found all these. I just did a search actually on here off of library one, I just typed in library and it came up and here, so you can just see what other games people have put on here. Feel free to use some of these if you wanted to, maybe just if there's a topic that you're trying to teach or trying to share, these are all out there for anyone who wants to use them. Of course double check to make sure they're correct. Or you can make your own account and create your own game from scratch. So it's just something more interesting to get information out there to share something. Could be something about a book similar to those Google lit trips, a quiz about a book about a location, something like that. So we're almost to the end of our hour here. Does anybody have any questions or comments, any other questions or comments about any of the tools that I've shown here, anything else related to them that you want to know more about, you want to see or any tools that you have that you think might be interesting to share? It's great you've been asking questions throughout the whole show, that's what I like. Keep thinking, no need to wait or anything of course. Nope, no last questions. Okay, that is my final official tool, the Purpose Games, but we do have one bonus tool here at the end. All of these tools that I showed you today that I learned about and experimented with this past year were all part of our Nebraska Learns 2.0 program. So yes, this is a little sly advertisement for that. This is an ongoing program that we have here at the Library and Commission and been doing for quite a few years. If you've ever done any of those 23 things programs, 23 things where you have something that you learn every week and you do a lesson about it and learn about it, this is along those same lines. We had that back in 2008, 2009, we did a 23 things program where we did a 16-week program where people learned about different tools, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, things like that. When our program was done, people wanted some of our final comments where people wanted to do another one and many places, some states, some organizations have done a second round of those kind of 23 things programs, just learning some new tool, new resource, something new. We went a different way and decided on ongoing. Once a month, we post up a new service, a new tool, a new resource that you can use and give our librarians, give you a month to learn about it, play with it, test it, post up a blog post, letting us know what you did with it. If you are in Nebraska Library, you can earn continuing education credits from our continuing education department here at the Nebraska Library Commission. If you're outside of Nebraska, we welcome you to come here and see what we're sharing each month. It's checking with your continuing education people to see if they would give you credits for doing whatever the thing or learning the new tool is. We also do as part of a book thing, you can see here we have some links to, once a month, we post up a book, something that for you to read during the month or if you've read it beforehand, that's fine too. Sometimes they're very specific about libraries. Sometimes they seem to not be necessarily related but once you start reading them, you realize there are some things that they relate to librarianship and libraries. So you can also read the book and earn continuing education credits from Nebraska libraries, would earn them from our continuing education department outside of Nebraska. If you can earn them from yours. So this is where all of these tools that I just showed you all were done in the last year on Nebraska Learns 2.0. So if you wanna join us there, there's the website for joining us and see what we're gonna be doing over the next year. So there's me and my contact information and this is the URL that you wanna write down. I'll leave this screen up. This is where all the links for all the tools that I shared are already saved there actually and I'm posted. So you can go there to look them all up. Also I've got some extra things that I put in there, some links to tutorials about some of the tools, some resources that will help you use them. If I found some articles, I found some also video tutorials. I've added them there as well. So write down that URL, delicious.com, forward slash nlc underscore reference, forward slash ncompass live, all is one word, comma cool tools to all is one word. And you will get all of the links. Anybody have any last minute questions, comments, thoughts? Thank you very much. I hope you all have a great day too. All right, thank you very much for attending. That will wrap it up for this week's edition of Encompass Live. The show is being recorded and will be posted to our website. This is our Encompass Live main website. It'll be over here in our archived Encompass Live sessions. I will post up, let's see, do I have a previous one? Well, that one just says recording links. We will have the recording, the PowerPoint presentation and that URL to the links will all be posted as they are here in these previous ones that we've done. Should be up maybe later today. That will wrap it up for this week. Hope you'll join us for our next week's show, which is a very interesting topic, maybe scary to some librarians. Books and water don't mix or how we survive the water disaster. Earlier this year, a library here in Nebraska, Wahoo Nebraska Public Library had their water suppression fire system pipe burst out of the blue in their library and destroyed a lot of things. And so they've just opened up again within the last month and Denise Lover who's the live director there is gonna come and share with us what happened, how they dealt with it, how they got themselves back up and were able to reopen the library. So definitely sign up for that if you wanna find out how to deal with some of these kind of disasters in your library. Then that, thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye-bye.