The SurRural Librarian

Speaking of free, here are two vendors offering free trials to their databases for National Library Week.

Greenwood: http://libraryweek.greenwood.com/
Thompson Gale: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/libraryweek

I’ve been having some fun on PBS Teacher Source. There are lesson plans and links to some great media sites. I’m pretty disgusted by many of the sites targeted at teachers and kids. The content is often mediocre and the design beyond gross. And the amount of adds… oy!

Teacher Source does recommend some doosies, but I’ve also found some good ones. Some of the fun places they sent me to are Asia for Educators
and Mountain Voices.

There is so much media available online, and the kids really respond to it. I’m finding something for just about every lesson. The internets still just blow my mind.

This month I’ve been working with my 5th – 8th graders on their online research skills. Two misconceptions they have (and I’m sure they got these ideas from adults) is that every page ending in .edu is legitimate, and every .org is a non-profit.

After years of working in colleges where every undergraduate & staff member gets web space, I’ve seen plenty of ridiculous information on urls ending in .edu like this and this.

So imagine my horror to see this story:

Filter-Savvy Students Barred from Most of Web
As of October 20, students of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District headquartered in Palmer, Alaska, are no longer able to retrieve websites on classroom or media-center computers unless the site ends in a .gov or .edu domain name, the site is a database whose content is licensed by the district, or the district has approved an educator’s request that the site be unblocked.

Not only is it patently ridiculous to assume that every .edu site is educational, but it’s an insult to our students to filter the internet this way (or any way, frankly). It reminds me of the day I accidentally shut down internet access in a high school in China by typing in the url of a site I wanted to show the students, instead of using their pre-approved bookmarks. Hmm, now what’s the difference between the Chinese form of government and our own? I’ve forgotten.

In the continuing noise about Wikipedia versus Britannica (and others), I have yet to hear anyone mention the one thing that on first glance is the most glaring difference between them.

Today I was working with the JH kids online. At one point, one student was on Wikipedia and the student next to him was on Britannica. The one on Britannica started asking me questions about the honkin big, blinking, ugly adds. (They’re becoming quite critical of all the advertising they’re seeing online, it’s great).

Britannica is covered in cheesy flashing advertisement. There is none on Wikipedia.

Now, you might say there is some thinly veiled advertising inside Wikipedia, with some companies writing up their own products. But I’ve found they do a pretty good job of weeding those out and leaving more informative posts behind.

So, Wikipedia is free. And there are no adds. That’s two more big thumbs up in my book.

Today the Junior High kids and I jumped into online research for their class sustainability project. Last year (my first) things didn’t go so well online. Today was so much better, I hope we can keep it up.

I needed to convince them to pay attention to their sources. So before unleashing them on the internet, I told them about the bogus, hateful martinlutherking dot org. (link to ALA description) It’s the first non-sponsored hit on Google, sadly, but that fact certainly helped me get my point across. They were shocked.

When I discussed with them the list of questions I wanted them to answer, they embraced the idea quickly, and really gave it a good try. Here are the questions I asked them to try and answer.

• Who is the Author or Authoring Organization?
• Do you recognize them as an authoritative source?
  Do another search if you need to.
• If you’re just using one part of the web site – what is the Home Page?
• What is the date written? (if available)
• Is there an “About” section? Or a Mission Statement?
• Contact Details – is there a physical address? An email address?

I explained that not being able to answer these questions didn’t necessarily mean they should avoid the site, but that they should talk to me and together we’d investigate further. Just these few questions got them to slow down and be much more guarded about what they were reading. It went really, very well.

BTW – that site is surely the first hit on Google because of its popularity as a teaching tool among librarians. It would be great if we all could stop linking to it from web pages. The more links, the better the ranking. It’s gross that we’re helping keep it on top.