Blogs

I've heard about blogging but never really understood what it is. I've perused what a few people had to say in the TeacherLibrarian Ning and their comments were interesting and food for thought. As one completely new to blogs, my initial concern is that there is so much to say and millions of opinions to be heard! I also feel like I did when I first went online. There is sooo much information and so many people, it is difficult to navigate through everything.

I'm trying to figure out how I could use this particular forum in a classroom or library setting. I like how UCD has the discussion going; that is particularly helpful. In the classroom, I suppose I could post a question about a particular reading and have students respond. But I'm still trying to figure out how I could use blogging in a library...

Dear TeacherLibrarianNing-ers,

This is to invite you all to join this newly formed group at: Building a Culture of Collaboration Group

It is my belief that as teacher-librarians we must continually develop and refine our collaborative skills and strategies in order to serve as effective instructional partners.

Share your successes. Share your challenges. Share your ideal of what you believe classroom-library collaboration can mean for you, your classroom teacher colleagues, and the students, families, and communities you serve.

Join us!

Best,
Judi

OK, here goes.

I'm Becky and I'm a little stressed at the moment because this is graduation eve for my stepson. There are about a million family members at our house right now and they're not likely to leave any time soon. The good news is that we'll get to see Stefan play in the 2A HS All Star Baseball game on Sunday.

I'm librarian for Center MS/HS/Public library. It's pretty tiny, but becoming mightier all the time. Looking forward to reading my cohort's posts.

Wow! It is almost the end of the year and I can't believe that there is so little time left.

Not only is my district reconfiguring the 7-9 schools into K-8 in two years, I move to be TL in a new school in September.

I am trying to decide whether purchasing texts for grade 9 is worth it for one year....and wondering where the middle schools are going to put the K-6 collection, plus thinking about shelving, tables, etc.....

I believe it’s my job to educate my students on fair use, plagiarism, copyright and the like. I do not believe it’s my job toensure that the labels and studios are able to squeeze any possiblepenny out of any school or student that they can, or help them locateand prosecute young downloaders.

I must have been out of the room when they slipped that into my job description.

However, I do take this topic seriously and spend a good deal of time on it with my students. They learn the law and we have fruitful and provocative discussions concerning abuse of power,greed and the sometimes downright silliness that current copyright lawencourages.

Here are two great new resources that cropped up this week on Boing Boing.

A site & curriculum:

Teaching copyright: Richard Esguerra registered the domain TeachingCopyright.org as a site for collecting curriculum materials for K-12 teachers who arebeing asked to explain copyright to their kids. Today, teachers areoverwhelmed by slick, self-interested “curriculum” generated by theMPAA and their ilk, which presents a one-sided, inaccurate view ofcopyright. Richard produced some curriculum himself, and anotherstudent, Julianne Gale, supplemented his work with a brilliant lesson plan (pdf) for kids in grades 6-8.

And an out of this world video on Fair Use (yours to download. get it now, before Disney forces them to take it down.) Fair(y) Use Tale,using tiny cuts from many different Disney films mashed together toexplain fair use.

Coral Cache link to MP4 download

Link to Stanford page for the film

Educators are constantly penalized and frustrated by restrictive copyright. Isn’t it our duty to protect Fair Use and encouragelegislation that expands it? Why are we spending so much effortcomplaining about teachers who show films in class? Why don’t we focusmore on how we can protect the rights of our teachers and students,rather than those of the corporations?

A while back I created a series of YouTube based videos on Google's Special operators. TeachLibrarianNing seems like the perfect place to post the links!

• You can login to the 21st Century Information Fluency site, which give you access to all of the videos without actually login directly into you tube: Google Advanced Operators
  
• You can use our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/21cif

There are more pictures and a description of the day here: http://lib.surruralist.net/2007/05/22/boxesyarnweb/

Hello;

I and six of my peers are hosting a regional, annual conference for librarians and teachers on the joys of liesure reading, called 'Books Abound', October, 2007. We anticipate 125 attendees. As an icebreaker we thought trading cards would be fun. Collect a set and win a chance at a prize!

But trading cards are a little harder than first thought. A set of 12 to 16 cards might be nice, on a literary theme, character, etc., but no such animal, to my limited research exists for easy creation/acquisition.

Thoughts?