The SurRural Librarian

Wired has an article on Wikipedia Scanner you should read and distribute to your teachers.

It’s a searchable database of changes made to Wikipedia matched to IP address from which those changes were made, showing that people at Walmart, Diebold, the CIA, Microsoft, members of Congress and many others have been whitewashing their Wikipedia entries (I hope no one is surprised).

Not only is this a great thing to discuss with students when teaching about transparency & legitimacy on Wikipedia, but it’s a great example of someone harnessing publicly available databases to create a super new tool. Very Cool!

via NPR’s Morning Edition

There’s also this post on Resource Shelf about a new color-coding system for Wikipedia entries. I’m not sure how well this will work, but it’s an interesting idea.

World Book is holding a contest for the best kid-produced video on evaluating websites.

A couple of things made me giggle about this.

They (wisely) promote looking for bias, among other criteria, while judging sites. I wonder how many kids will point out the bias in a (not free) encyclopedia making a big hoopla about evaluation criteria.

And the video by these hipster “Rhett & Link” guys. I had to look them up in Wikipedia to find out who they are. I wonder if there’s a World Book entry on them.

Heck, the big prize is a Macbook, and it could be a fun media project for the kids. There will be winners in three categories: K-8, 9-12 & post-secondary.

via School Library Journal

Done with H. Potter, The Golden Compass & Narnia, and needing something new? You’ve just GOT to read Un Lun Dun by China Mieville. I haven’t enjoyed a book this much in some time. This review from Salon is pretty great, so I’ll just link.

“Un Lun Dun” is a novel you can safely give to young readers without fear that they will come back wanting to enroll in a boarding school, take up the broadsword or join the Church of England.

Honesty, do NOT miss this book. What a joy!

If you maintain your own web site, these adorable error code comics by Apelad can make mistakes so much more fun. CC licensed, I’ll be using these on our school’s site. The kids will enjoy them.

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via BoingBoing 

I’ve been looking for fun stickers to hand out to the kids who remember to return their books. (Gratuitous pandering, I admit). I haven’t found any library-related stickers that I like at all. Then I remembered  moo.com was making stickers now. w00t! I love my business cards I got from them, so I have high hopes for the stickers.

I’m using some (copyright-free) images from morguefile and editing them with pikifix to make my own silly stickers to hand out at book return time.

This one looks like I made it in 1979, it appeals to the gen-exer in me.

Thanks to Shonda on LM_Net for pointing out this great, fun puzzle making tool from Flash Gear. I’m embarrassed to say how long I spent trying to find good puzzles that fit in with classroom curriculum for my students’ free computer time last year. Now, I can easily make my own, in seconds. Perfect for those last minute teacher requests.

Here’s a puzzle of my current summer project…