The SurRural Librarian

I’m playing around with Google Co-op, trying to make a better way for students to find images. Google image search - filtered or not - too often returns inappropriate images. So with this I can stipulate which sites to search, and restrict each search to just my list of sites. Getting the kids to try something different might be easier if it’s still Google (they are addicted). I especially like that I can plunk the search box right onto the classroom homepage.

One thing that’s proving a little tricky: I’d like to include Wikipedia to grab the popular culture topics, but if I do, it seems to take over the results. So, a little tweaking is in order, but it’s worth a try.

The ability to create different searches for which ever sites I want will also come in handy when I start working with the younger kids on their first web searches. This is a nice way to limit results to a manageable amount, relatively safe from crud, while still giving them a real idea of how search engines work.

no kiddin!

I love this from Clay Shirky’s reply to Michael Gorman’s silly Web 2.0 lambasting:

“Academic libraries, which in earlier days provided a service, have outsourced themselves as bouncers to publishers like Reed-Elsevier; their principal job, in the digital realm, is to prevent interested readers from gaining access to scholarly material.”

I guess the principal job of the school librarian is to prevent interested party-goers from dancing to recorded music. (See this month’s School Library Journal copyright column. I’d link to it but their site is down!)

(update: here’s the link to the SLJ copyright column. Always a mind-blowing read.)

Lest it be said that I just sit around thinking up ways to break copyright, here are two wonderful resources posted this week on Rule the Web, a immensely informative new blog from Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.

Publicdomain4u.com has about a hundred old folk and blues standards (Robert Johnson, Uncle Dave Macon, etc) available for free download.

and

Morguefile.com a searchable index of very good copyright-free images.

I can not make any guarantees as to the suitability of content for students on these sites (blues lyrics can be pretty racy!) but I did some of my typical smut-magnet test image searches and was relieved to find good, G-rated material. (Try hot girls and you actually get photos of kids at the beach, appropriately dressed. Always a good sign with search engines.)

Fellow Comic Life aficionado Tom over @ Bionic Teaching asked for examples, so here’s mine. It’s part of a unit for the primary grades on story telling, using Gooney Bird Greene to illustrate telling stories from real life. I kept the software segment extremely simple, having the students draw on paper& scan in their images, just adding text with Comic Life.

I’m planning units next year using Comic Life in almost all of my grades. It’s so completely, totally fun. I sit giggling to myself every time I create a new lesson with it, thinking this can’t possibly me my job.

Here’s a new best practice for me this year. I had great collaboration with the 3rd grade classroom teacher on this project.

Along with a research project on trees that included a lot of good hands-on scientific investigation & drawing, we had the students condense their research into a one-page document to be included in a class field guide to the trees of Vermont.

What really worked was showing the kids what it would look like when they were done, then handing them the empty template on paper to be filled in first by hand. This way they could easily which sections they still had to complete. Once they were done, they sat down to the computers and typed it up in the template.

The (slightly) professional look of the document really gave the kids a charge. I could see the difference in their attitude once they saw it coming together on the screen. Scanning and inserting their drawings was the final wow for them. They were very impressed with themselves.

On my end, it was a ridiculously simple project. I didn’t even have it together to create the template myself, I just used a Word template. (The teacher and I came up with the idea 15 minutes before class started - my typical work day.)

The only drawback to the project was using Word. The template was insanely buggy, and the classroom teacher really needed me around for all of the word processing sessions to help out. It was a real mess, and I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since. I like many of the other online & open source word processors, but it seems none have cool templates - yet. I am eagerly awaiting hearing otherwise.

Blood, they say, is thicker than water; add the right kind of ink and, sometimes, it’s stronger than steel.

Here’s a nice article by a dad who was introduced to manga by his daughter. I think teachers are particularly lucky to have the opportunity to learn about contemporary culture from spending time with so many young people. I wish more teachers would embrace the idea of checking out something new because their students recommend it.