The SurRural Librarian

My school has started using Google Calendar for a couple of different applications. I particularly like that we can use it to display our basketball practice schedule on the website, there’s a nice Wordpress widget for Google Cal:

The widget allows for different views, I like the week view - others swear by the agenda. The nice thing is that everyone on the staff sees the need for an online calendar we can all access, and no one seems to mind having to add a new toy to the to their Do List. Google certainly does make it pretty easy to figure their apps out. I’m also enjoying Google docs & the new Picasa plugin for Macs.

I had a lovely walk Sunday with the dogs and this week’s On The Media podcast. The entire show is about books. There is a fun segment on the new Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds a paperbacks as you wait. Coolest part? There are only six in the world and one will be living at Vermont’s own Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.

The NYPL had one for a while. Here’s an article from SLJ. With beasts like this on the premises, libraries could get immediate access to books for loan. Could it finally (finally!) finish off interlibrary borrowing? I’ve got my fingers crossed.

So far, it sounds like the majority of works they offer are in the public domain. I hope more publishers see the potential soon, I want to order up a Double Grande Trollope. Oh wait - is that - hey! cool, I’ll see you in Manchester.

Vermont Librarians! Get your students posting on the DCF Blog. The creation of yet another wonderful Vermont librarian.

Opinions, I want to hear opinions. Voting time will be here too soon.

My students have started composing posts in Word so we can talk about them, and spell check, before posting. They’ll start appearing online soon. I would love for these kids to be able to respond to each other and share their thoughts about these books. One vote is not enough, I want to hear what your kids have to say.

My Junior High students are writing a Wikipedia entry on our school. It’s a great way to get them involved with the content creation side of things, good editing practice and fun.*

There are so many good ways to use Wikipedia and to teach it. It’s crucial to address it early and often. Wikipedia is often the first entry in any Google or Ask search, and people often use it without knowing what wiki is.

I hear adults say many silly things about Wikipedia. I hope the frenzy dies down soon, but in the meantime I need to get this off my chest. Here are a few things I’d like adults to remember when they talk about Wikipedia with students.

Wikipedia is a wiki, not the other way around. The word wiki isn’t synonymous with Wikipedia. That’s like saying all cheese is wiz.

Wikipedia is not out to get you. It’s a huge effort and there are many good-intentioned people working to make it a very informative site. It’s just a wiki, not a plot to disseminate inaccuracies.

Please do not intentionally add erroneous information to Wikipedia to make a point. This is vandalism. It’s not very good modeling.

If you find erroneous information in Wikipedia, change it!

Of course it shouldn’t be your only source of information. And of course it shouldn’t be in a bibliography. Not only is it written by anonymous folks on the internets, it’s an encyclopedia. Last time I checked, an encyclopedia wasn’t a valid bibliographic entry.

Everyone should read at least these two pages before using or teaching Wikipedia:

Ten Things You Might Not Know About Wikipedia

Researching With Wikipedia

And if you take the time to teach Wikipedia use to your students (and I hope you do), I recommend sharing this classic video clip:

Stephen Colbert on Wikiality
(I embed the video in my site to avoid the distracting adds & links. I also skip the first minute to avoid the silly drug reference. It’s worth it, a brilliant piece of comedy.)

*If you’re curious, here’s how we’ve structured the Wikipedia project. Everyone is responsible for one section, then we’ll be swapping sections to go through an editing process. We’re using Google Docs to co-write the entry for now, so we don’t have to be “live” with the material until we’re ready. Our principal will also have access to our document to lend a hand with the big picture. So far the toughest part has been keeping the pieces neutral and without personal narrative. Once we post to Wikipedia, it’ll be fun to see other people come in and edit (I’m sure we’ll get some townspeople interested). I wonder if it will be hard for the students to let go.

I was just setting up a new blog over at Edublogs for a teacher friend of mine. Edublog is a free (with optional upgrade) blog hosting site targeted specifically at educators. It runs Wordpress blogs and they offer a nice array of pre-loaded themes, plugins and widgets, I was pretty impressed.

Since I host my own blogs, I’m used to complete control over how things looks (I find the inability to edit themes on Edublogs particularly nettlesome) but for someone without the ability, time or interest to host their own, this is a nice alternative. And it is a joy to let someone else worry about upgrades and administration for once.

I checked into it because a colleague has a school-related blog on Blogger and was wondering about the ease of students to stumble upon less savory blogs there. That’s a great reason to use education sites, that whole “go to next blog” thing. Some folks are more nervous about 2.0 applications in the classroom than others, and I think it’s a good idea to do what we can to put them at ease.

Checking out the widgets I saw they had one for Picasa, so I thought I’d try that out too. It’s yet another very nice service from Google. They have a simple uploading utility, you can just drag in pictures (even from iPhoto - which I find doesn’t work well with all applications) and click upload. Using the widget, they appear on the blog immediately, which should work nicely for my friend while she’s traveling.

I did have a bit of a fight with the Google Maps plugin, and decided that just linking from a static picture of my map to the one I saved on Google was a more elegant way to go.

And considering that the spam filter on this blog has caught over 23,000 spams (!) I’m glad Edublog is offering that plugin as well.

I love Wordpress, and I find the themes so much prettier than Blogger. I definitely recommend checking out Edublogs if you’re thinking about starting your first blog.

I try to not refer to things I read on LM_Net here or in daily conversation, I get too riled. But this one, I can’t pass up.

There was a thread this weekend in support of librarians who read on the job.

I almost fell off my chair when I saw so many responses from librarians who do this! I can’t imagine having the time. If I have one minute free, I’m planning with teachers - usually while standing in the hallway in between classes. Most of the librarians I know are so completely over-booked that they don’t even bother to subscribe to that listserv.

What I want most to respond to is the idea that those of us who do not read on the job do not keep up with our collections.

Ahem.

Like many school librarians I know, I believe reading the books I buy for the students to be a MAJOR part of my job. Of course, this part always takes place outside of school. Of course if there was a SSR period that I was around for I’d love to pop in and read with the kids, but I’m usually teaching other classes. Of course modeling is great, but when I can chat with the students about the books they’ve read, that’s great modeling too - they know I’ve read it, they don’t have to see me read it. When I booktalk a book, I’ve always read it, the kids know it, expect it and always follow up with me after they’re read books they know I’ve read. We talk about books - we’re librarians!

I simply cannot imagine what they’re thinking. How unapproachable is someone reading a book? How expendable?

Read them at home people. Here’s my evening reading routine - picture books, LM_Net, RSS feeds (blogs & professional journal alerts), YA novel, done. Turn off the TV. We’re teachers, we’ve got great hours. We’ve got the time to read outside of the library and still have a life.

This is a fun way to exercise those problem solving skills. It requires a little math and a little understanding of how websites work. I showed this to the Junior High and asked them to figure out how to site worked. They were freaked out by it and the teacher was flummoxed, so they really had to work as a group to figure it out. It took some time. I did the same exercise with the teachers to start a prof. dev. workshop, they liked it too.

Flash Mind Reader

Need a hint? Pay attention to the final number in each equation.