The SurRural Librarian

Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing) has a brand-spanking-new YA Sci Fi novel out called Little Brother.

Cool guy that he is, he’s posted electronic copies of the book online for free. Instead of accepting offers of donations from grateful readers, he’s set up a site where potential donors can send a hard copy of the book to a school or library that requests it.

How does it work, you ask? Welllll, our budget spent for the year, I thought I’d see. On Wednesday I asked to be added to the list of libraries and our name & address were posted on their site. Today (Friday) I received a copy in the mail from an anonymous donor! How coool is that?

See his site for more details.

And Thank You Anonymous!! I’ll be spending my Mother’s Day in the hammock with our new copy of Little Brother (librarian’s privilege). By Monday - it’ll be in the hands of a student.

Pre-readers review: great title, super cover and jacket blurbs from Scott Westerfeld & Neil Gaiman. Ooooh!

I’ve made a new page (see above) with links to materials from some of the presentations I’ve given recently. The latest is the DCF Conference session I did yesterday in Stowe.

“Using Fun Technology to Promote Student Engagement”

As usual I talked far too much and for too long, but the audience was great and had excellent input & questions. We have so much fun at school with these DCF projects, I was so jazzed to share it all. Thanks to Grace Greene for inviting me to speak!

Last week I went to a talk in Second Life by Doug Johnson on copyright (you all should have been there, great talk.) I’ve been playing around with 2nd Life just a bit - in fact, I even held a class in there for my graduate students one night. I am not a gamer (Well - there was one weekend in the 1989 with the Mario Bros. But just one, I swear!). I think Second Life is pretty silly. But - I’ve got to tell you - I really like this idea of having conferences & talks in there and I would love to encourage more people to check it out.

Here’s why. Here’s a short list of conferences for Vermont school librarians:

Vermont Library Conference
VSLA Fall Conference
Red Clover Conference
DCF Conference
VITA - Learn
Dynamic Landscapes
Vermont Open Source and Education Conference
Windham County Reads Annual Breakfast
Materials Review sessions

And that’s just the local organizations!
Then I’ve got
NEEMA
AASL
ALA
& other cool places I’ll just never get to - that national conference for IT in schools, Computers in Libraries, the conference for picture book artists, children’s book authors, author talks at book stores, local chapter meetings of various organizations, etc.

Even at MIT I couldn’t take this much time off. Missing classes more than once or twice a year just does not seem OK to me, especially when I truly can not make the argument that it’s integral to my professional development. As much as I enjoy talking with other school librarians, the benefit I’ve gotten from the presentations has been variable.

And then there’s the expense to myself & the earth in terms of travel. Most Vermont happenings are over two hours away from me. Here in Green Liberal Vermont, it’s frustrating that so many groups are encouraging so much travel. District-wide professional development is a 45 min drive, with no fuel reimbursement.

So - I ask you. Can we just think about this 2nd Life thing a bit? I know it’s a little odd. The avatars are usually pretty racy. Figuring out how to move around and not accidentally take off your garments can be tricky. But there are plenty of (professionally legitimate!) ways to safely try it on…

www.iste.org/secondlife

And check out the links here at the Blue Skunk Blog

Extra cred if you can find my avatar in that screen shot on Blue Skunk. Hint: I’m the freaky one.

(cc. image by Roberto Rizzato)

I’ve got a few crafty blogs in my feeds these days, and occasionally I run across a perfect project for the library. Here’s a place where you can buy temporary tattoo inkjet paper, so you can make your own tattoos. Why not make some for the kids with your library logo? Or a “I remembered to return my library books today” tattoo?

Here’s a cute DIY ribbon dispenser, which would work great for organizing rolls of labels.

I am always finding inspiration for fun bookshelf ideas. Here’s a nice one made from an old ladder. Furniture with bookcases built in are everywhere - here’s a chair and here’s a bench with built-in bookcases. Or how about this Cave bookcase, the kids would go nuts!

This one has got to be my favorite. This fellow built a bookcase around his bed, but I could just imagine this surrounding a cozy reading spot for picture books.

After a short discussion on lm-net & further discussions at Blue Skunk on hyper-compliance with copyright, I thought I should mention a couple of handy applications for teachers needing to download video for use in class. We hear so often from teachers who can’t access online videos at school due to strict filtering. It’s ridiculous to cut off this wealth of free, useful material for instruction and I do hope some are successful in convincing their schools to re-think their policies. (Chant with me now…fair use, fair use, fair use)

In the meantime,

Download Helper is a very easy to use Firefox extension that will quickly grab any material you need from a website, and Miro is my favorite application for viewing media files of many types. Easy peasy.

The Boston Public Library has been rapidly adding photos from their archives to their Flickr pages, including sets of great oldey-timey New England postcards.

They wrote to Jessamyn that they’re hoping to use the “No known copyright restrictions” license the Library of Congress uses.

How cool is that?!

I’m aware that this sounds needlessly geeky. However, if you’ve got a school full of Intel-based Macs and are in the business of finding fun literacy games, you know how many are in the (up to now) inaccessible Shockwave format.

Well, weep no more young gamers.

Adobe has finally release a version that runs natively on Intels. Hurrah!

(tip: get the full installer.)

has entire picture books online! I’ve bought many picture books (based on reviews) that have turned out to be dogs. I always check Amazon to see if they have a “Search Inside” version - but often they don’t. This is even better - you can check out the entire book. The selection is pretty small now, but I hope they keep it up. A handy collection development tool, and it’s fun watching the pages turn.

Here in Vermont, we’re having a perfect storm of book awards. Voting for this year’s books and lists for next year are popping up all over.

The DCF committee is now offering online voting (yay Steve!) and their super new list is up too. (pdf) They’re going to get big props from my kids for including Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It probably won’t completely make up for the lack of Rick Riordan books, but it’s a start.

The 2008/09 Red Clover list is online.

Librarians need to send in the votes for both the DCF & Red Clover awards by Friday, April 11.

The Green Mountain Book Award tallies are due May 2nd, forms for reporting can be found one their site. The new list isn’t online yet, but was sent out to the listservs. Great books. (Sarah Vowell - wow!)

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl by Barry Lyga
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
Black and White by Paul Volponi
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Bucking the Sarge by Christopher Paul Curtis
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Inexcusable by Chris Lynch
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Nick Vizzini
Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado with Vince Rause
The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci

Hold the fort, here’s a very handy search engine.

Compfight is a super easy way to search Flickr for images. It’s got a very simple interface, it feeds you back loads of clickable thumbnails, allows you to limit to Creative Commons licensed material, and gives you the option of searching full-text or just tags.

With more opportunities to publish student research projects online, it seems to me we should really be pushing the use of CC-licensed images in student work. I’ll definitely be showing this to the students. (and Safe Search is the default. nice.)

This is the form I use with students for evaluating websites. After much tweaking and borrowing I find this works pretty well for most of my students as well as teachers I work with. I don’t share things like this often enough because I’m never satisfied, but I saw a request on a listserv for evaluation forms, so thought I’d post mine. Anyone should feel free to borrow/edit at will.

site_evaluation_pburke.pdf

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Here’s one wacky business decision

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. … As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.

With the shift, the Oakland-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.

I know many school librarians struggle to get students to try different search engines. But now that it sounds like Ask will be as cheesy as Yahoo! Kids, I think we need to focus energy on teaching more in-depth Google strategies, instead of trying to buck the trend.

With a new movie coming out every six hours based on a children’s book, I have learned to ignore the hype. So, it’s got to be a big deal for me to pay attention to another one. Ok, well, here’s a big deal.

Did you know that Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) have written a screenplay for Where The Wild Things Are?
Wha?

Footage from the film may or may not have been leaked online this weekend. Frankly, don’t care. I just want this thing now. I won’t post images here (big studio meanies are on patrol), if you Google them, there are plenty. They look gorgeous.

The 5/6 are hard at work on their DCF projects. Everyone is working on a project using at least two computer applications and a good amount of creativity inspired by their favorite book on the DCF list. We’ve got comics, book covers, bookmarks and posters galore to share at the DCF conference in May.

A number of my students were swept away by TuxPaint & Comic Life. They really worked hard creating comic versions of their chosen novels, squeezing in computer time whenever they could.

The Kindergarten and Primary classes greatly enjoyed Max’s Words by Kate Banks, a Red Clover book. We took inspiration from Max’s huge piles of words cut from magazines to sort our own collection of words (much thanks goes to the kindergartener at home willing to help with the cutting). Students came up with their own sorting schemes, including number of letters, first letters, vowel sounds, even width of font. The results look like nonsensical ransom notes. (If you’ve got the time, get the students to cut out their own words.)

The book is a great read-aloud and the project was a fun & simple literacy lesson. Yay, Red Clover!