The SurRural Librarian

I’ve got a few crafty blogs in my feeds these days, and occasionally I run across a perfect project for the library. Here’s a place where you can buy temporary tattoo inkjet paper, so you can make your own tattoos. Why not make some for the kids with your library logo? Or a “I remembered to return my library books today” tattoo?

Here’s a cute DIY ribbon dispenser, which would work great for organizing rolls of labels.

I am always finding inspiration for fun bookshelf ideas. Here’s a nice one made from an old ladder. Furniture with bookcases built in are everywhere - here’s a chair and here’s a bench with built-in bookcases. Or how about this Cave bookcase, the kids would go nuts!

This one has got to be my favorite. This fellow built a bookcase around his bed, but I could just imagine this surrounding a cozy reading spot for picture books.

With a new movie coming out every six hours based on a children’s book, I have learned to ignore the hype. So, it’s got to be a big deal for me to pay attention to another one. Ok, well, here’s a big deal.

Did you know that Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) have written a screenplay for Where The Wild Things Are?
Wha?

Footage from the film may or may not have been leaked online this weekend. Frankly, don’t care. I just want this thing now. I won’t post images here (big studio meanies are on patrol), if you Google them, there are plenty. They look gorgeous.

I’m a big one for finding legitimate academic uses of fun internet tidbits, so I’m sure there is a great curriculum just waiting to be written around this fabulous video. Or maybe I’ll just show it to the kindergarten on the 100th day of school.

Video at YouTube of 100 people in order of age - 1 to 100 years old - each banging a drum.

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. 

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 

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…

The Reactable is an amazing new instrument developed in Spain. It’s got a tangible interface, meaning you move the icons around - rather than point and click.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with these videos (1, 2, 3). I’m not sure if it’s the retro prague rock sound or the completely cool little blocks that thrill me the most.

Searching for a reason to show the videos in class, I realized it would be a great way to talk about the difference between command line and GUIs, and what a huge difference that’s made, making computers accessible to non-computer scientists.

The kids were agog (admittedly, it was first thing in the AM). There’s something so compelling about being able to touch what you normally click. We had a good discussion about what it would be like to be able to move your iTunes or Word around like that. They made some pretty creative comments.

Now I need to think of a way to work the Puppy Monorail into class.

both via Boing Boing

A day that would make the IT department’s collective hair stand on end. Good thing I’m the IT department.

My 5/6 students have been obsessed with Mac’s Dashboard, to a fault. We are an all Mac/Tiger school, and the students love Dashboard for the way it works and all the cool tools that are available on it. But it’s a distraction at times, and the ESPN scores are particularly non-instructive.

So to encourage their enthusiasm, but also get control over the situation, we had Dashboard day. Everyone signed a contract agreeing to only using dashboard during particular times of day (breaks) and only having pre-approved widgets on their dashboard. In return, I gave them a list of widgets that they could install at will. I found the most educational widgets I could (some really neat stuff!), told them to get rid of the ESPN widget, and let them loose.

Yes, I allowed them to install software on the computers.

I’m well aware that this would make many IT guys faint. But in this circumstance, there was really little cause for worry. Widgets just install into home directories, they’re tiny little applications, there are no Mac viruses to speak of, and I had tried them all out ahead of time. The value of having the students engage with the computers this way was so valuable that I had no qualms about letting go of a little control. And like I said, any fallout would be mine alone to deal with.

They loved it. They loved the NASA photo of the day and the morse code translator. They immediately figured out how to have the computer speak the morse code, at one point the room was filled with zany computer-voiced “dot dash dots”.

I loved seeing how excited they were about some seriously dorky applications. I loved how they helped each other figure out how things worked. We had a great conversation about why certain widgets took longer to work than others (they immediately guessed that some were getting info from the internet, while others weren’t). We discussed reliable information sources, and I showed them how we can make our own widgets (I made one for our schools RSS feed.)

I’ve heard from parents that kids came home and showed them how to find new widgets for their home computers. And I’m sure that ESPN widget is getting use there too.

My list of widgets on del.icio.us

My del.icio.us feed has been growing fast and furious lately, so much so that I needed to highlight these few fun things.

~ Accessibility Software for the Colorblind

My colorblind husband sent this one to me. Reading graphs online can be a major difficulty for some kids.

eyePilot is an easy to use, interactive software program that lets anyone
work more efficiently with the full range of colors in the computer environment.

~ The O.P.E.N. Citation Maker from the Oregon Public Education Network Clearing House is a nice, very simple citation maker. My students and I have tried so many of these, and this one is one of the simplest we’ve found yet. Very nice.

And in the category of There Has to Be an Educational Use for This…

~ The Make Blog is a consistently inspirational read. I think every science teacher in the country should be subscribing to this. It’s sad that Bre Pettis isn’t teaching in schools anymore, but this here is quite a legacy. DIY from weather balloons to bird feeders.

~ Sheesh, what am I saying. Libraries should also subscribe to Make Magazine. It’s an absolute DIY joy.

~ Finally, there is this little mind bending, guy. Cute too.
Robot with Rhythm article and videos

Another strictly adorable video here.

I have some students who are rabid for Dashboard, so I collected a list of fun widgets that have at least a modicum of educational value.
I omitted the one that gives you the Matrix digital rain. It was a tough call.
Here are my favorites…
http://del.icio.us/PamatMES/widgets

The Shouts and Murmurs page by Paul Rudnick in this week’s New Yorker provides a hilarious and very bawdy commentary on the whole affair of the Higher Power of Lucky and the you know what.

I highly recommend it, though quoting it here would get me banned by school filters.

It’s not online at the New Yorker yet, but check back if you don’t have the print copy.

I’ve always thought it would be really cool if you could hum into a search engine and it could recognize the song. I also really doubted it would ever happen.

Wrong again. midomi (beta) is a search engine based on a database of user-submitted recordings (just register and start singing). You hum or sing into your computer’s mic and it tries to give you back recordings of other folks singing the same song.

I heard that some who’ve tried it couldn’t get a match, but after playing with it last night, my whole family was able to make it work. It seems that the more a song has been recorded into its database, the greater the chances it’ll be able to match you up (makes sense).

Try Beatles tunes, or Happy Birthday.

Frankly, I can’t yet see the benefits of this beyond what’s the name of the song that goes… But it’s fun, and I think the technology’s pretty out of this world.

This you’ve got to try.
Boing Boing helped me and my young un pass a little time on a chilly day with this great find.

Pictaps is a web-toy that invites you to draw a stick-figure and then creates a delightful, gigantic animation of your figure, multiplied into a cast of thousands, doing a joyful, Busby Berkeley show-number, with dancing and cavorting and so forth.

Here’s one of our creations.

It’s things like this - free, fast and wonderful - that make me question the existence of the terrible programs for kids that schools and parents pay for. Would it really be so hard to develop a graphically interesting, fast, dynamic and educational game?

The ever-inspirational Bionic Teaching points to the groovy new Dashcode Widget Maker at Apple. At first I was a little wary that only the Beta version is available for Tiger, and only until July - but what the heck. I’ve got between now and then to see if I can come up with some fun widgets for my Dashboard crazy students.

The timing is perfect. I promised them a Dashboard day if they did a good job on their Wiki project. Since they’re excelling, I’m going to have to come through. But I want any new widgets they use to relate to school. So now I’m off to see what I can come up with. Making one for the school feed is nice and simple. Not so sure about a look-up for the library catalog, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Actually, I’m just hoping someone with mad skills comes across this and does it for me. M@, are you listening?