Group items tagged

The Battle Commander and the Commentator read furiously throughout 2011, reread, looked at what others were admiring, read more, argued, reread, agreed, disagreed, read some more, and by early December (in order to give time for our SLJ man-behind-the-curtain to begin recruiting judges) came up with our contenders. Then we had to keep it a secret from all of you for weeks and weeks!  So here we are mighty chuffed (using last year's winner's lovely term) at last to be announcing this year's list. (The brackets can be viewed here with a downloadable version available here.)

One of the things that has surprised me lately is the number of emails I get with questions about Pinterest. I thought it might be handy to put some tips together. I know I am not the first librarian to write about Pinterest, by any means! I hope this helps someone out there though.

How do I use Pinterest? 
There is a pretty good help page. You can email me if you want an invite, and I'll try to send one on. If you have any questions, I will try to answer them, but I am a librarian not a Pinterest staffer. It is also important to remember that Pinterest is still a start-up and is somewhat prone to crashing. A victim of its own popularity, if you will.

Terrific copyright lesson! Purely by chance, Danita Cahill discovered she was a victim of a kind of theft.
A few weeks ago, the freelance writer and photographer in Lebanon was told by her daughter Alyssa St. Clair that one of her photographs was being used by someone. So Cahill turned detective to track down who pirated her work.

Though Twitter's contribution to the world of social media and progressive society was at one time a strongly argued point, there is no doubt today that the popular social media platform has become a valuable tool for various aspects of education. Sure, Twitter can be the perfect place to waste hours on mundane details about people's lives or worthless celebrity gossip. But, the microblogging platform also enables us to create and participate in meaningful conversations concerning education, technology, and society.

Has everyone in OASL seen the new webpage? It is beautiful, useful, and easy to navigate!

I think there is also a perception that if we don't have the paper books then we don't need the library or the librarians in schools. I think it's flawed logic. Information is changing its format; yes, it's online, it's an ebook, it's a book you can download onto an iPad, but it's still information. Kids need to know how to evaluate it even more so now than before because there is much more of it. Kids need to be able to determine whether it is useful or valid information. Librarians take the lead in helping educate students through the information jungle, and with even more sources and formats, the role of the librarian becomes even more critical. So even though paper books are becoming less prominent, the skills needed are even more advanced than what was needed before. School librarians are critical to helping students navigate through this information explosion.

From Jen Blair: Have you ever... tried to print up something from the Internet and it ends up being 8 pages long because of all the "extra stuff" around the edges? Or it's a crossword puzzle that ends up covering 3 pages that you would somehow have to tape together? Don't be frustrated! Save paper! Use: http://www.printfriendly.com/ Simply go to the above site, paste in the URL you are wanting to print, and watch the magic as your 3 page printout somehow gets cut down to ONE!

In the Share a Story-Shape a Future introductory entry today, I indicated this posting would be a list of blogs I hope you will find useful in your efforts to become more familiar with a wide array of multicultural books and customs. The list is not comprehensive, but it is a list I can indeed recommend to you given my familiarity with these blogs. Let's get acquainted!

10 ways schools are teaching internet safety
Using third-party resources and having students act as investigators are some of the many ways educators are teaching about online safety and responsibility

Great story to introduce computer use/safety.

Standards for the 21st-Century Learner offer vision for teaching and learning to both guide and beckon our profession as education leaders. They will both shape the library program and serve as a tool for school librarians to use to shape the learning of students in the school.

Libraries are increasingly getting hip to using Twitter as a tool, with many offering the service as a point of contact with librarians. But Twitter is an excellent tool for librarian learning as well, offering lots of great opportunities for discussion. Many Twitter chats exist for the literary and library world, and we've discovered 20 of the absolute best for librarians to check out.

"Librarians, teachers and parents have told us how hard it is for students to understand web searching. Boolify allows students to visualize and interact with the abstract concept behind the search process--it is intuitive and easy to use with your class or in your library. Search results are presented through Google's "SafeSearch STRICT" technology to prevent objectionable content from appearing in their search results. There are two important caveats: a) no filtering technology is 100% secure, as this blog posting astutely points out and 2) we are unable to control or modify the results that we provide, beyond the filtering settings available through Google."

Use twitter as a terrific resource...

This was taken as excerpts from Melissa Dalton's post on Libs-Or: Oregon Poetic Voices (OPV) is a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that complements existing print collections of poetry across the state and is funded by the Library Services and Technology Act FFY2010. The state of Oregon possesses an unusually high number of nationally recognized writers, a very high proportion of whom are award-winning and otherwise notable poets. Additionally, there are active communities of emerging poets around the state, and poetry is regularly taught in the English curriculum of most Oregon schools. Until Oregon Poetic Voices began in 2010, there was no publicly accessible archive of recorded poetry by Oregon poets that could be used to maintain a record of poetry in performance, which is a vitally important aspect of interpretation and a valuable teaching tool. The Oregon Poetic Voices archive currently publishes over 200 prominent and emerging Oregon poets, including their biographies and poem texts alongside their recordings, and will soon feature historic performances recorded by KBOO, Fishtrap, and the Mountain Writers Series. There are also resources for educators, including curriculum guides and links to information about teaching poetry. http://listsmart.osl.state.or.us/pipermail/libs-or/2011-July/010664.html

Recognizing the need for poetry in our lives, the Oregon Poetic Voices Project (OPV) has begun to create a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that will complement existing print collections of poetry across the state.

Banned book map thru Google map with details around the US w/banned books from 2007-present. Terrific resource for Banned Book Week for MS/HS!

This is ODE's mega-information page about the Common Core Standards. Explore to find many useful resources.

The title says it all. ODE also has a second page with links to the ELA & Literacy standards: http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/real/newspaper/newspaper_section.aspx?subjectcd=ELA.

The title explains it. There's also another ODE page for the CCS math standards: http://www.ode.state.or.us/teachlearn/real/newspaper/newspaper_section.aspx?subjectcd=ELA

Google programs organized in a useful manner!