3/27/2010

I have played around with Google Earth before, but I never knew about Google Moon, Sky, and Mars! Nor did I know about Google Lit Trips. I am confident that students will think a lesson with Google Lit Trips is awesome. I can visualize myself teaching a book with Google Lit Trips on the screen in my library. When I learned about Google Lit Trips, I thought about As I lay Dying by William Faulkner. This would be a great book to plot since it is about the main characters travelling for miles on foot to bury their mother. There is something about seeing a journey plotted out on Google Earth that makes one fully appreciate the magnitude.

3/19/2010

I attended online conferences this week. They were awesome! Well, some were certainly better than others. They were all great in the sense that I did not have to leave my living room to attend them. When it comes down to content, two stood out to me. The presentation produced by Rachel Boyd in New Zealand was wonderful. Six-year-old students were teaching a professional development meeting! This class used technology throughout the entire day. Math, literature, physical education, you name it, Rachel Boyd taught it through the Smart Board. Unfortunately, every classroom containing a Smart Board is a fantasy. The other presentation that stood out was not for positive reasons. I did not want to contradict most of my classmates in the discussion thread, but I was not impressed with what Konrad Glogowski had to say. It seemed like a lot of talk about nothing. "Learn with and not from" yet we were learning from his presentation. It was very abstract; nothing was concrete about it.

3/7/2010

I got a lot of the i-SAFE assignments accomplished this week. I know how serious Internet safety is, but I still could not believe the statistics presented in the videos. For example, in the pre-assessment, "11% of students say they're willing to meet somebody they met online face to face." Meeting people face to face from the Internet always seemed like an obvious hazard to me. It is on the same level as taking drugs--you just don't do it. To think that 11 out of 100 students think it is OK, is absolutely beyond me. To make things worse, "8% of students say they did meet somebody face to face." Since so many students are on social networking sites, there is an overwhelming need to make sure they know what is safe and what is not. The simple act of creating a screen name, for example, can lead to unwanted attention from predators. As one of the videos showed, a predator can narrow down their prey from every person on the planet by starting with the screen name. Something like Sportychick14 reveals that it is a female, likes to play sports, and is probably 14 years old.

2/20/2010

This week, I was made to see a different set of problems concerning copyright law that my fellow students wrote about. One student felt it was imporant to have some type of mandatory copyright seminar for students, teachers, and administration. I thought it was a good idea, but unrealistic. Schools are tight on money, so I did not see why a school would spend money on a seminar when the library media specialist is already trained. I can hear it now, "Why would we spend money on a seminar when we can just ask you about copyright?" I voiced my concern to the student on the discussion page. He responded by telling me that a teacher who is not educated on the basics would not ask the librarian because a question would never have come to them. If they do not know that they are doing something illegal, then they do not know to ask. I never looked at it from that angle. However, I still think it would be difficult to convince a school to spend the money.
Another student voiced her concern about how to approach a peer if he is breaking copyright law. Prior to this comment, I was only nervous about being correct in a copyright situation with another teacher. I had not thought about the approach. After making sure I was absolutely right, and that the situation could not be avoided any other way, I would prepare my words extremely carefully. When the time comes, I will seek advice from my fellow librarians at other schools.

2/13/10

This week I had the pleasure to visit my public library for the entire day. I shadowed the teen librarian. She told me her "copyright story" (to put it in her words). She did a teen program that involved "her kids" (her words again) acting out scenes from a book. They put the resulting product on YouTube, but the site banned the video. This was because they used the instrumental part of a song by the band Sixpence None the Richer. She contested this banning with YouTube because she believed that she was within the guidelines of the "fair use" policy. The instrumental part of the song (used for approximately ten seconds in the video) was used for a non-profit and educational purpose. As a result, YouTube put their video back online, but forwarded the matter to Warner Bros. Company to decide if they would sue her or not. It has been almost a year and she has not heard anything else about it. She said that copyright infringement is certainly a difficult matter, but experience and advice from her peers has helped her make her decisions.

1/30/2010

This week of class was slightly more stressful than the prior weeks. This is because of the newsletter project. It is more time consuming to create a newsletter than I thought it would be. I am glad that I had this experience because I have seen librarians use newsletters in their profession. When I have a career, I will know how to create one, and be prepared for the amount of time and effort it takes.
The readings were interesting this week. I was unaware of the law in terms of website accessibility. I found out that certain measures must be taken (having long descriptions of pictures, diagrams, charts) are needed for those with vision problems. I did not realize the responsibility I will have to make sure all students can access the technology in the SLMC. It is helpful to know the resources available, especially the free resources that Janet Hopkins wrote about in one of her articles.

1/23/10

This week I settled into the flow of this course. After listening to the podcast on Sunday, I set up a daily schedule. I split up the work and assigned it to different days of the week. If I keep up this method, I should manage the semester quite well. I can honestly say that I have never felt so connected to the class in an internet course before!