Week 9: Thing 23 - So, Just What is Fair Use?

I'm so glad to see that this last topic is included as one of our 23 Things. As I posted in my previous YouTube Thing, as much as we librarians can celebrate over Web 2.0 tools - it also makes our jobs much more complicated. With all the sharing and uploading and downloading and mashups and image generating...comes a great need to guide our school community to use these tools ethically. And just by visiting the many links on copyright and fair use, one can see that there certainly isn't one crystal-clear answer as to what you can and cannot use for educational purposes. And...what may be the case today, may very well change tomorrow. Put copyright and the internet together and you get one, big dynamic monster which will inevitably change forms over night.

One resource which I did find helpful in clarifying this complex issue, is Hall Davidson's Copyright Guidelines for Administrators which is posted on techLEARNING.com. It's a clear, easy-to-understand chart of various educational scenerios of fair use and copyright.

Oh, and how wonderfully ironic that the discovery excercise for California's School Library 23 Things was to find an "example or attribution that shows this program has been modified from it's original". Of course, one needs to look no further than our very own PA Library 2.0 Class - a work of Creative Commons in its very finest forms!

Week 9: Thing 22 - Digital Books

No doubt about it that both ebooks and audio books offer a nice diversity for many students. Our special support teachers love having the option of audio books for the required English books for their students. I am also starting to build a collection of ebooks in our library, thereby providing students with reference material which they can easily search through. Another wonderful benefit to these ebooks is that an unlimited number of students can view them at one time, and they can access them anywhere that has an Internet connection.

It was nice to see that there are so many free, online accesses to digital books. Though I had explored some of the resources in the past, there were others I did not know about, such as the International Music Score Library Project. What a great resource for our music teachers - I will be sure to share it with them. I did have a bit of trouble navigating through some of the sites. I had to download Adobe Shockwave on my Mac in order to run the British Library Online Gallery, and once I did the site was very slow to download and crashed two times before I gave up. Perhaps it would run better on a PC, but I'm wondering about the complications we may have at school. Often our school computers have issues with multimedia websites.

Regardless of issues, I bookmarked all these sites and plan to add a Digital Book Pathfinder on my website. I think students and teacher alike will appreciate knowing about these great, free resources.

Week 9: Thing 21 - Podcasts

Get your own at Gizmoz.com

I've been having fun browsing the various podcasts available through iTunes. So many, that surely everyone can find at least one that is of interest or pertinence to them. One that I've subscribed to for awhile now is NPR's Book Reviews. I have a feed going into my iGoogle page so that I can always see what the latest review features.

As far as creating podcasts, I'm hoping that our students get more involved with this tool now that we will be getting Macs in our school. In the past, we've used Audacity on our PC's, but it simply isn't as user-friendly as with Apple's GarageBand. Since I recently bought a MacBook Pro, I've been having a bit of fun this summer playing around with podcasts and put a welcome podcast on my library website through Glogster (another great tool that was discovered thanks to this class!)

I'm really impressed with the work that our district's middle school has done with podcasting. With much help from the library media specialist, Craig Smith, the principal broadcasts school news each month and posts them on their homepage. And on the library website, the library media specialist has his own video podcasts of book reviews. During the school year, you can hear book reviews from the students. Did I mention that they have a Mac in the middle school? No doubt about it in my opinion, Macs make multimedia projects a cinch compared to Windows!

Free Book Jackets

Okay - so maybe I should take back what I said in my previous post about Shelfari being more user-friendly than LibraryThing. Thanks to the LibrayInBlack blog, I've learned that you can now post book jackets on your website from LibraryThing's database. Of course, there are some caveats. It's not an easy process to post, and the images come from LibraryThing users, so they are not the best quality. But, it's better than nothing and worth giving it a try - which is what I'm doing here.

Week 9: Thing 20 - YouTube and Others

From what I hear from other librarians, I am one of the lucky ones whose schools have not blocked YouTube. And it's a very good thing because our teachers and students use it often every day. Our teachers find videos to reinforce a lesson such as the Tiananmen Square protests or the JFK Nixon Debates. Our students use it to upload their own video projects for classes. Yes, I am often policing students who are looking at videos which are far (sometimes very far) from educational use, but blocking its access is definitely not the answer. The benefits far out-weigh the drawbacks.

I was familiar with most of the videos which were posted on the Library 2.0 site, but the March of the Librarians was new to me. I love it...how clever!

But I do have to make mention of an important issue which CathyLib2 pointed out on her post about Wikis - copyright.
Students are often using copyrighted music to accompany their videos and it certainly is becoming a bigger issue as they are uploading these videos to YouTube for the whole world to view. Web 2.0 is great, but as CathyLib2 says, it makes it way too easy to share things that are not supposed to be shared. We librarians have a big job ahead of us!

That being said, here is a video created by a Bucknell professor about copyright laws. Although it is a bit long (and at times, hard to follow) it's a clever parody and quite effective. This just may become part of my library orientation! It certainly is an important issue which both students and teachers need to be instructed.

Week 8: Thing 19 - LibraryThing vs Shelfari

I'm quite familiar with LibraryThing. I created an account last summer and explored it at length during a summer workshop I had with the Reading Specialist and English teachers. We created a group for our high school. Our hope was for students and teachers to post book reviews to share among each other. However, we immediately ran into a glitch: you can not list books read by just a particular group - bummer. We figured that perhaps a work around would be for the reviewers to tag their reviews with our school name. But still, this does not let us view book reviews just of our school.

So, that is why I now use Shelfari. It is much more conducive for collaboration and just seems more user-friendly. I'd be curious to know how others feel. Anyone else out there who has tried both LibraryThing and Shelfari? And how about GoodReads? I've gotten a couple of invitations to join, but can't justify adding yet another online library database to my collection. Any thoughts?

Week 8: Thing 18 - Zoho!

I was a bit reluctant to try Zoho since I already use Google Docs. Why create another account which will go unused? But, being the trooper I am, I plugged away as per our assignment. And - I'm so glad I did! WOW - I can't stop exploring the many options.

First, let me explain how I use Google Docs: primarily for collaborating with my teachers. For instance, at a recent workshop with the Reading Specialist and English teachers, we all worked on the same Google Doc at the same time. We brainstormed ideas and eventually created one document which we then made public, and emailed it to our administrators for their review. Quick and easy! Google Docs also has a spreadsheet and presenter (similar to PowerPoint) available. So what could Zoho have that Google Docs does not?

Answer: a lot! Yes, it has Writer, Sheet, Notebook and Show - just like Google Docs. But...it also has Planner, Meeting, Wiki, Creator and more. One of the tools I explored is Creator. Creator allows you to gather and share data online. As a trial, I created this one below which allows readers to submit books they have read. I also added a results view to demonstrate what the collected data looks like. Want to give it a try? Please add a book you've recently read.





There are so many great ways that these tools can allow us to share and collaborate which go above and beyond document sharing. I think I may give it a try with Reading Olympics or our Book Club: students can sign-up online and also submit the books which they have read. Then, all the information can be organized and will be searchable. Love it!