Wow! It is almost the end of the year and I can't believe that there is so little time left.
Not only is my district reconfiguring the 7-9 schools into K-8 in two years, I move to be TL in a new school in September.
I am trying to decide whether purchasing texts for grade 9 is worth it for one year....and wondering where the middle schools are going to put the K-6 collection, plus thinking about shelving, tables, etc.....
I believe it’s my job to educate my students on fair use, plagiarism, copyright and the like. I do not believe it’s my job toensure that the labels and studios are able to squeeze any possiblepenny out of any school or student that they can, or help them locateand prosecute young downloaders.
I must have been out of the room when they slipped that into my job description.
However, I do take this topic seriously and spend a good deal of time on it with my students. They learn the law and we have fruitful and provocative discussions concerning abuse of power,greed and the sometimes downright silliness that current copyright lawencourages.
Here are two great new resources that cropped up this week on Boing Boing.
A site & curriculum:
Teaching copyright: Richard Esguerra registered the domain TeachingCopyright.org as a site for collecting curriculum materials for K-12 teachers who arebeing asked to explain copyright to their kids. Today, teachers areoverwhelmed by slick, self-interested “curriculum” generated by theMPAA and their ilk, which presents a one-sided, inaccurate view ofcopyright. Richard produced some curriculum himself, and anotherstudent, Julianne Gale, supplemented his work with a brilliant lesson plan (pdf) for kids in grades 6-8.
And an out of this world video on Fair Use (yours to download. get it now, before Disney forces them to take it down.) Fair(y) Use Tale,using tiny cuts from many different Disney films mashed together toexplain fair use.
Educators are constantly penalized and frustrated by restrictive copyright. Isn’t it our duty to protect Fair Use and encouragelegislation that expands it? Why are we spending so much effortcomplaining about teachers who show films in class? Why don’t we focusmore on how we can protect the rights of our teachers and students,rather than those of the corporations?
A while back I created a series of YouTube based videos on Google's Special operators. TeachLibrarianNing seems like the perfect place to post the links!
There are more pictures and a description of the day here: http://lib.surruralist.net/2007/05/22/boxesyarnweb/
Hello;
I and six of my peers are hosting a regional, annual conference for librarians and teachers on the joys of liesure reading, called 'Books Abound', October, 2007. We anticipate 125 attendees. As an icebreaker we thought trading cards would be fun. Collect a set and win a chance at a prize!
But trading cards are a little harder than first thought. A set of 12 to 16 cards might be nice, on a literary theme, character, etc., but no such animal, to my limited research exists for easy creation/acquisition.
Thoughts?
Irene and I decided to work on a library guidebook. It is now available on the common drive. We are having our LAG committee look and make suggestions. Actually, since it is the end of the school year, I don't think they are looking right now.
Anyway, I wanted to make a PDF file because you can have chapters on the left. That way, people could click and jump from section to section. I explained to one of our tech teachers what I wanted, and he suggested using Word, saving the document as a html, and setting bookmarks and hyperlinks. Now, I have done something similar when I was handcoding webpaged. It is funny how I never thought of doing it in Word. If anyone wants to know how, leave a comment, and I will post the gory details. It is not hard.
So, now I have a document with a Table of Contents at the top. Click on each name (like Copyright), and you will be taken down to that section. We put information about study halls, classroom use of the library, lab (lab is part of the library), circulation, copyright, textbook room (yes, we deal with that, too), and equipment. We probably have more sections, but I can't think of them right now.
We have permission from the principal to speak at the regular teacher meeting for five minutes and the new teacher for ten. We will mention the handbook and go briefly over copyright. For the new teachers, we will print out a copy of the handbook. They get so much information in that one meeting, we thought it was best not just to mention the common drive version but to also give them a hardcopy version.
By Guest Blogger Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Still Summer
There are these phrases that spring from the pens of pundits and spread outward through the culture.
"Yuppie" (the derivation of which scarcely anyone considers anymore, but which was supposed coined by erstwhile essayist Bob Greene to mean Young Upwardly Mobile Person) is a good example. There are scads of other such phrases: Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were called "Teflon presidents," in that it seemed they go do wrong and have the wrong slip off them as easily as a fried egg slides off Teflon..(our current president must be the Saran Wrap president because he never even gets the egg on him in the first place). "Gaydar" was created long ago to describe the ability to sense someone's homosexual orientation.
"Chick lit" once meant a certain kind of writing.
It was, of course, by a woman. And it was originally used to describe a story based on topics that, while important, might not change the world -- from dating to Botox to minor infidelity to dating to the importance of girlfriends in crises involving dating to the married-man-dilemma to dating to body angst to dating. Reading "chick lit" ( some of which is very skillfully written indeed) one was a sort of guilty pleasure, accepted as such and described as such.
Now this parasol has grown larger, to the size of a pop-up tent that is used to cover a much wider slice of writing.
Now, the term chick lit often is used to describe anything written by a chick -- that is, by a woman. It doesn't matter what the story is. It can be a narrative of any description, from historical fiction to domestic drama to psychological suspense. I suppose the exceptions are FBI and police procedurals and medical thrillers. The exception is, it seems, if the writer is not a European American. If she is writing after living under the burka or comes from a war-torn nation or is an African lawyer writing about a topic as harrowing as genital mutilation, no critic will call what she writes "chick lit." Such subjects are so serious they might well have been written by actual men.
I use the example of Tom Perrotta's novel 'Little Children' for several reasons -- among them that it recently was made into a feature film.
Tom Perrotta wrote a very good and wry and funny and poignant book about suburban life, about a stay-home dad and various mothers both over-ambitious and predatory. Critics wrote, "What is Tom Perrotta but an American Chekhov, whose characters even at their most ridiculous seem blessed and ennobled by a luminous human aura?" and ""Suburban comedies don't come any sharper."
But they do; and women write them.
When women write them, readers and analysts don't marvel at the writer's ability to "get inside" the mores and behaviors and (ahem) "feelings" of suburbia any more than they did when John Updike started doing this a long time ago.
Women are supposed to be able to do that.
When women write them, there is an absence of congratulatory acclaim, of the kind Perrotta enjoyed -- although he is a wonderful and versatile writer.
When men write such books, they never are called "chick lit," although usually the main difference is that the word "feel" is never used or even described and the affect in a book written by any man is flatter (there is, therefore, as in the Hemingway fallacy, a greater presumption of genius).
Now, I don't think of myself as a chick who writes chick lit, although I am undeniably a chick. Actually, I probably am not a chick, since I think of this term as reserved for people who might also be called "babes," people who are younger than I and wondering what to wear clubbing or to the winter formal. But I'm a woman and a writer of sorts and so I hear this term often, directed at my work.
I write stories; and many of the stories have women in them. They are (therefore) chick-chick lit...by a chick about chicks. But they are considered chick lit even when some of the main characters are men -- partially, I think, because these men may have feelings, even if they don't express them as a woman would. For example, if they were to lose their wives and children in a great fire, they would not react simply by staring a the horizon or scrubbing at a spot of dust on one of their shoes (which is what I mean about that "flat" thing, the sure sign of genius, as is the refusal to use quotation marks). If always BY a chick and FEATURING at least one chick, my books are not always for chicks (at least not entirely); although chicks (women) purchase more than 80% of all books, presumably while men are staring at the horizon, wondering why they never got to go to sea or war (not my idea, but Dr. Johnson's).
In any case, although I would like to say that this has to stop, it's not going to because it's a convenient way for anything written by a women to be wadded up inside an apron and dismissed -- by observers who are men and also, regrettably, other women. Nathaniel Hawthorne came right out and said that he considered women writers (among them Charlotte Bronte) annoying scribblers who oughtn't to be allowed to persevere. We have come a long way since then.
We aren't as honest.
Jackie's first YA novel, 'Now You See Her' -- the tale of a driven young actress who fakes her own abduction - is now on sale. 'Still Summer,' the suspenseful story of four women stranded at sea, appears in hardcover in August, 2007, as well as the new form paperback of 'Cage of Stars.'
SEOmoz’s new Web 2.0 Awards were announced yesterday. Last year’s list led me to tools that became a regular part of my life online. There’s lots to explore. Some are already favorites. Some look like great fodder for pathfinders. Others present some cool potential for incorporating in learning activities.
Among the categories:
Have been reading Friedman (The New York Time ) spin on globalisation and of course was interested in his perspective (it is driven by economic models raising questions centred on key indicators of globalisation - insourcing, open-sourcing, informing, offshoring and outsourcing).
For teacher librarians who have focused on connecting students beyond their classmates (1970s-1980s e-pals, electronic book raps come to mind) then his concept of the flattened world is probably a comfortable image in our bid to connect and lead our students in learning across social and geographic spaces. Up until advent of Web 2, we have not had really seamless, robust and fast ways to keep the energy, curiosity and passion up – key attributes in engaged learning.
It takes a well known writer to put a spin on something that has significant merit for teacher librarians. How does the concept of the flat world and all it conjures resonate with where you are as a teacher librarian? Like anything, we can internalise an idea and build new experiences/ new spins but where does the concept lead you.
Have a look a this – the quintessential use of Web 2 for learning and teaching?
