The SurRural Librarian

Last week my junior high students tried to determine which of these sites where legitimate & which were not. This is always a fun couple of classes, because some of the sites are hilarious, and the kids enjoy it.I have to dig up new ones every couple of years because word gets out – they’re all big Tree Octopus fans. I like finding real sites that might trip them up. It was really fun breaking the news to them that the OLPC program was real. They were convinced that if there was a laptop that cool in real life, they would know about it.

It’s an excellent lesson for me every time as well. I’ve been working with these same students for a while now and I’m still surprised to see how hard this is for them. They know all the steps (find out the author, Google them, read the fine print, etc.) but they really do not yet have the life experience to pick out the fakes. It’s a good reminder of how young they still are, and how much help they still need navigating life online.

Here’s this year’s list.

• Vasco Nunez de Balboa @ All About Explorers

• Cryptomundo » Snake Longer Than School Bus Discovered!

• Google Gulp

• Dog Island Free Forever

• Carnivorous Sea Squirt !

• Tambora

• One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

• Republic Of Molossia – Official Website

• The Ova Prima Foundation

• DreamTech International [CLONES-R-US]

• BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mysterious mammal caught on film

• buydehydratedwater

• McWhortle Enterprises, Inc.

• Stick Insects

• AFP: SKoreans clone cats that glow in the dark: officials

• Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches

• Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division – dihydrogen monoxide info

• Promachoteuthis sulcus

Update – see the comments to find out which of these are legit, if you want to test yourself.

In response to a post on VTcite, I jotted down a few things I’ve learned working with kids & 2.0 tools, so I thought I’d share them here as well.

• Don’t use tools that require students to use a personal email address. (There are different ways to get around this, some sites like pbwiki now allow you to generate user logins for students. Edublogs will allow blog comments without email addresses, etc.)
• Preview drafts of student work & engage them in editing.
• The teacher should be the admin of the site and, depending on the project, require approval for posts.
• With blog projects, require students comment on each other’s posts. Encourage students to make comments brief, conversational and original.
• Protect their privacy by having students use pseudonyms and develop their online voice by always using the same pseudonym.
• Practice & teach respectful dialogue. (This does not come as easily as you would expect online. Tone is a challenge for new writers and kids love to use all caps and lots of exclamation points, they don’t realize they’re shouting.)
• Make it an assignment, not a suggested activity.
• Give students time in school to use the tool, do not expect kids to do it from home (remember the digital divide).
• Also use it as a fun time-filler for kids who finish other tasks early.

The new White House website went live during the inauguration and it’s got a blog!
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/

And look at that, blog is even in the URL. As if it needs to be repeated here, whole sale, blind filtering of blogs & wikis in schools has got to end. As if these weren’t argument enough…

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/topnews/blog-index.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/
http://www.barackobama.com/blog/
http://www.johnmccain.com/Blog/
http://vsla.info/
http://www.vermontlibraries.org/
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blogs.html

Do school tech admins really want to be adding exceptions to their filters for every single legitamate use of a blog on the web? Or can we focus on teaching our students how to search for & evaluate information online?

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.

I can not get enough of the images the Library of Congress has posted on Flickr. They are gorgeous, and completely free of copyright restrictions.

Vermont librarians – check out the large set form the Rutland State Fair. Here’s one from “Backstage at the Girlie Show”.

My 3/4th graders are seriously fired up about writing book reviews. First I asked them to write reviews of picture books for the younger grades, keeping their kindergarten reading buddies in mind as an audience. That went well enough for me to continue on with the project.

Now that I’ve opened it up to any book at all (if we don’t have it in the library, I’ve pledge to buy it) – they’re really into it. They’re excited to post them on the web, and I like helping them develop opinions and their own voice.

For inspiration, I’ve been playing them some podcasts and videos of book reviews, preferably those written by other students. We like these podcasts from the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, Ma. and these from Voices from the Inglenook. And the videos at Bookwink are very convincing. They’ve been so popular I’m now on the hunt for others.

I just started updating my Library Thing library with favorite books. I’ve simply given up on the idea of adding local notes to my catalog to keep track of my particular book needs. With LT, I can keep track of favorite books for different uses – great read-alouds, great books to book talk – as well as favorite books that go along with classroom units -insects, letter writing, pirates, etc.

Sadly, I don’t yet have a web-based OPAC (I know, shocking! welcome to the k-8 wilderness) so I can’t use Library Thing for Libraries yet, hopefully some day.

It is so easy to use, and fast. You can import books from your catalog, or from vendor purchase lists – as long as there is an ISBN on the page somewhere. And I like that other LT users have added their own scans of book covers, so I can choose the one that matches the edition I have.

Someday, I’ll get tags into my catalog. Until then, I’m loving Library Thing.

photo by striatic

My JH students are working on their annual independent research projects. This year, I’ve set them up with a shared del.icio.us account to help manage the online sources they’ll each be using. I installed the “add to del.cio.us” buttons to the browsers on all the classroom computers, including the teacher’s laptops. When the students or the teachers add a site, we just tag it with the name of the student it’s meant for. The teachers picked it up immediately, and it’s SO easy for them to bookmark sites for students at any time, anyplace.

I added their account to my network, and I subscribe to my network feed so I can keep track of who uses what whenever I’m online, which is really handy.

When I was showing them how it worked, someone raised a hand and asked if it was also a good way to find good sites on your topic. If someone else has tagged the same site you have, they might know about more good sites, right? Of course! That’s tomorrow’s lesson, but I was so excited that she saw the potential of the “social” aspect of the site before I even mentioned it.

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.

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. 

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

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.

404 Not Found

via BoingBoing 

Yesterday in the library my 5th & 6th graders made a model of the internet using cardboard boxes and yarn. Each one had to pick a role out of a hat – some kids were LANS, others ISPs, Search Engines
Commercial Websites, etc. They each had a list of computers they had to create, and they were challenged with getting them all “wired” (yarned) up properly.

They made routers, switches, firewalls, DNS & DHCP machines, printers, airports and desktops & laptops. The kids who made websites made servers with data transactions databases (complete with little paper credit cards inside, their very cute idea). We took about two sessions making the computers and one stringing them together.

I can safely say that they really grasped the whole shebang. All year we’ve been working on troubleshooting computers. (I have the rules I try to enforce that they have to check all wires and reboot at least once before they come and ask me anything, we’re working on it). And we’re always talking about and using the internet. I figured this kind of exercise might help make more concrete some of the abstract topics we’ve discussed. Seems to have worked, I’ll have a recap before school gets out to see how much they’ve retained.

This might not seem like a library lesson. But look at it this way. Many librarians teach their kids how books are made. So why not the internet? I’m hoping that understanding the inner workings of networks will impact their understanding of how everything fits together in their wired world.

And, we had fun. (Look at those IP addresses, aren’t these kids cute?.)

Here’s a tool that will certainly come in handy at school. Brings back memories of sitting on the floor with large strips of construction paper scotch-taped together, World Book encyclopedias scattered around.

Still in the Google Labs,  the Timeline Search:

With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Keep the kids on their toes, though, otherwise they just might think Theo Epstein worked for the Sox in 1918.