The SurRural Librarian

As previously mentioned, my old hard drive has met its maker, so I am currently trying to recreate my life with a new slate. All was going well until I had to install the Flash player. (Have you tried to do anything without Flash these days? It’s impossible. The world has gone Flash crazy.) For some reason, Flash has some permissions issues on Macs.

By what I see on lm-net, many of us don’t realize one of the easiest & quickest ways to get an answer to a computer problem is simply to Google it. Don’t spam a list, for heavens sake. Google the exact error message - you’ll turn up the answer in a split second. In case you happen upon this same Flash issue, here’s a step by step solution:
http://www.table38.com/blog.php

The bad news is you have to use the command line. Many of us shut down completely at the thought. I was working at a time when I had to use heinous Unix commands to simply check my email, but I still shiver at the thought of opening up a terminal session. I embraced point & click like no one’s business and I still need to call my personal tech support (thanks M@) whenever I need to speak Unix. That said, it does come up and (same goes for HTML) we’d all be better librarians if we were just a little bit more comfortable with this kind of thing. A little code won’t kill you, it will help you understand a little more about your computer and hopefully empower you to tackle the bigger issues.

Just in time, Jessamyn linked to this helpful, and very chipper, tutorial Life on the Command Line

sudo go learn something

Last year’s  I Remembered My Library Books stickers were a huge hit with the kids. So much so that I decided to get a little crazier with them and make new subject spine labels. I’ve never been a big fan of those labels. The types available from the vendors are boring, cheesy and take up too much space on the spine. But three years of frantically searching for dragon books in the fiction section for apoplectic third graders has pushed me to new limits.

The array of Creative Commons licensed material on flickr is vast and what better way to spend a humid day on the porch than searching for fun pictures? And it gives me another excuse to play with Comic Life fonts. Using the fabulous flickr search engine Compfight gives you 250 thumbnails per page - which are a great size to judge whether a photo will work as a tiny spine sticker.

I also put into practice a little (Mac) tip I saw blogged last year. To keep track of ownership & permissions for these images, I’m pasting the profile url into the Spotlight Comments for each file (apple - i). Then I can email the owners of the images I use to let them know the joy they’ve brought to our little library shelves.

After a short discussion on lm-net & further discussions at Blue Skunk on hyper-compliance with copyright, I thought I should mention a couple of handy applications for teachers needing to download video for use in class. We hear so often from teachers who can’t access online videos at school due to strict filtering. It’s ridiculous to cut off this wealth of free, useful material for instruction and I do hope some are successful in convincing their schools to re-think their policies. (Chant with me now…fair use, fair use, fair use)

In the meantime,

Download Helper is a very easy to use Firefox extension that will quickly grab any material you need from a website, and Miro is my favorite application for viewing media files of many types. Easy peasy.

I’m aware that this sounds needlessly geeky. However, if you’ve got a school full of Intel-based Macs and are in the business of finding fun literacy games, you know how many are in the (up to now) inaccessible Shockwave format.

Well, weep no more young gamers.

Adobe has finally release a version that runs natively on Intels. Hurrah!

(tip: get the full installer.)

I’ve been using Net News Wire Lite for a couple of years and really like it. I’ve always been too cheep to buy the regular version. But now the full-blown Net News Wire is now a free download. Can I say w00t? Or is that now unfashionable?

Thanks M@

I’ll admit that the loathing for powerpoint I developed after years attending academic library conferences has made it difficult for me to see any educational application of the product.
I know, I’m wrong.

First my 5/6th graders had to convince me it was easier than iPhoto. Easier than a Mac application?! no. I relented and gave them the choice, the entire class chose ppt.

Then working with the 3rd graders on their slideshows sent me into a tizzy at the last minute because you can’t transfer them to different computers. You can do that with ppt, of course.

But it was working with the 1st grade this week on their “mitten”-inspired slideshow that just brought my little house of hate tumbling down.

Did you know you can save a ppt as a movie?!*

So, you can insert photos - sound - even film clips into a slideshow and save the whole thing as a movie. Stick it on the web, burn it to DVD, share it with the parents. I’m sorry, it’s cool. It just is. Ask the kids.

*Macs only. Apparently even Microsoft falls for the Apple marketing that PC users are too straight to make movies.

This snow day has given me a moment to try out this site (found via the always helpful Librarian in Black).

The Math Worksheet Site.com is a nicely designed, easy to use site which generates customizable math worksheets - that simple. It’s not a collection of worksheets. It generates as many worksheets as you need, with different problems every time. It’s a great resource, and the fees are reasonable, even for teeny tiny schools like mine. I’ve been playing with a test login, just in time to show my faculty at our tech meeting tomorrow. Looks like it might be a winner.

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.

Chris over at Infomancy posted a link to this great Firefox download manager plugin called DownThemAll. I just snagged every handout from the AASL conference for my perusal in a matter of seconds. Great plugin, great resource. Thanks Chris!

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.

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

Here’s an excellent free online tool for converting files from one format to another. An elegantly simple solution for those students who have PCs at home and Macs in school, or teachers trying to share material with each other.

I also like the ability to save YouTube videos to your computer, since it’s tough to project YouTube in class, you never know what comments or other videos are going to come up when you view a vid there. I do wonder about the implications of downloading material to your computer than might be copyright protected, unbeknownst to you. Something to watch out for.

This really is an excellent tool, and free. Awesome.

via Joyce Valenza

Update: I just realized it does not support Appleworks, something my teachers would love. Still, great for many other uses - especially those music files.