Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

What’s your bookprint? Scholastic wants readers to connect with each other based on their favorite books at their site, You Are What You Read.

At YAWYR, readers share the five books that most influenced their lives (their bookprint). After they create their bookprints, they can find other users who like the same books, and interact with them (or, in social networking parlance, “friend” them). You can also browse various celebrities’ bookprints — getting a recommendation for, say, Charlotte’s Web from Taylor Swift might carry more weight than a recommendation from you (no offense).

For more ideas on how to use YAWYR in class, there’s a teachers guide with activities like Pass it On, in which students pair up, ask questions about what books they like, and find books for each other at the library. There’s also a sample letter to parents designed to get Mom and Dad on board and support reading activities at home.

You Are What You Read

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BY LESLEY RICHARDSON

The McCormick Freedom Project is committed to helping American citizens understand their First Amendment rights. The Libraries and the First Amendment exhibit has been created to make us think critically about our freedom of speech and it shows how the library is one of the first lines of defense in making sure that materials, however controversial, should be available to the American public. (more…)

BY BILL FERRIS

You now can access lots of free audio and video from the Library of Congress on iTunes U. There’s a lot of great material suitable for a history class, such as early films made by Edison himself (or his company, at least). There are also fascinating oral histories from actual slaves in the Voices from the Days of Slavery collection. For a look at how people entertained themselves before TV, radio and the interweb came to be, you can look at early American animation, and even olde timey Vaudeville performances.

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BY BILL FERRIS

Do something subversive this week — read a book.

It’s time once again for the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week (September 26 through October 3). Every year, hundreds of books are banned or challenged by people or groups who try to restrict others’ access to certain books.

You can help raise awareness of these censorship attempts by celebrating BBW. The ALA has lots of ideas, including some creative display ideas, sending a letter to the editor, and spreading public service announcements.

Of course, it’s also a good occasion to pick up one of these oft-challenged books to see what all the fuss is about. It may provide good discussion fodder for your class, as well as prompt a debate about who should decide what books are available to whom.

Banned Books Week

BY BILL FERRIS

For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.

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BY GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

For people with a vision disability, technology can be invaluable. From screen-reading programs to the general accessibility features in an operating system, technology has narrowed the divide in ways that previous generations may not have imagined. However, getting quality books in hand can still be a challenge. Instead of sending cases of cassettes or CDs, or enlarged (and often abridged) books by mail, technology has enabled instant access to books via the web.  Bookshare is an online library that provides immediate access to a huge library of books available in multiple formats for people with vision disabilities.

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Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.

Samsung Focus on Learning Grant Program — Deadline: June 15
Need a Samsung 850DX document camera? Samsung is giving away 50 of them to educators who can demonstrate a need for them.

Universe Adventure Student Video Contest — Deadline: June 15
The Berkley Center for Cosmological Physics and the Honeywell Corporation will give $1,500 in money and new equipment to the students who can create a YouTube video that “demonstrates one of the key fundamental scientific principles or physical laws that governs cosmology or astrophysics in the universe.”

Thomson Gale TEAMS Award –Deadline: June 15
Thomson Gale and the Library Media Connection will award $2,500 cash to three K-12 public or private school teachers who have collaborated with media specialists in the past school year.

New Science Teacher Academy — Deadline: June 30
Second- and third-year science teachers can become a fellow at the New Science Teacher Academy for one year by winning this grant from the National Science Teacher Association.

Coca-Cola Foundation Education Grants –Deadline: Rolling
Coke will support all kinds of educational causes, including dropout prevention, maintaining water quality, recycling and maintaining access to education programs. Plus there’s no deadline. Take a look at their application guidelines and see what you can propose. -BILL FERRIS

The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.

Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.

These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.

The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.

An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK

World Digital Library

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Welcome to the first Random Roundup, in which we spotlight otherwise-unrelated articles that all happen to share some arbitrary criterion — in this case, Jurassic Park, which we apparently reference pretty often. In addition to realizing that my pop culture knowledge apparently stopped in 2001, I felt these articles deserve a second look from readers. If you enjoy these, try poking around the archives and see what other ancient articles you might unearth. -BILL FERRIS

Teen Tech Week begins March 8
“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This warning by Jeff Goldblum in the cinematic classic Jurassic Park is as true for discussing the hazards of reckless information consumption as it is for warning of the dangers cloning giant prehistoric monsters. Kinda.

Dragon DNA and other genetics fun: Genetics Web Lab Directory
However, you will certainly find something you can use in your classroom to help your students understand the difference between factual genetics exploration and wishful thinking.

Be part of a Tyrannosaurus dig at Unearthing T.rex
While we can’t see these elite predators in action now that Jurassic Park 4 has been canceled, we can take a look at the excavation of a dead one.

Watch Genetics in Action: DNA from the Beginning
Being an English major, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around some of the sciences. Most of my knowledge of genetics and DNA comes from Jurassic Park. Lucky for me I found a slick site called DNA from the Beginning, which uses flash animation to spell out DNA basics.

Extract DNA from Bananas
Thanks to this experiment, genetic research has never seemed so simple. Remember the lessons of Jurassic Park, though, and be careful while messing around with the building blocks of life. You don’t want to have a bananasaurus on your hands. On second thought, yes you do.

Awesomeosaurus: New Carnivorous Dinosaur Discovered
That’s right, paleontologists have found a new dinosaur. This new species is one of the largest carnivorous dinos ever, which is way cooler than if it they’d found an herbivore. These critters apparently roamed Africa 95 million years ago, along with Jurassic Park III star, Spinosaurus, which surely led to some thrilling territorial struggles.

Photo credit: niznoz on Flickr.

“Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This warning by Jeff Goldblum in the cinematic classic Jurassic Park is as true for discussing the hazards of reckless information consumption as it is for warning of the dangers cloning giant prehistoric monsters. Kinda.

When using technology to find information, the consequences aren’t as high as, say, the possibility of getting torn to shreds by a velociraptor, but that doesn’t mean your students shouldn’t learn how to be competent, ethical technology users. That’s why the Young Adult Library Services Association launched Teen Tech Week, happening this year March 8-14.

The theme of this year’s Teen Tech Week is “Press Play.” Not to be confused with a so-so Aerosmith album, YALSA describes the “Push Play” theme like this:

“One way to interpret the theme is to emphasize the word ‘play.’ Play can be about teens creating and sharing their own content for the fun of it, like videos, music, and digital artwork. Play through games can be encouraged with tournaments, tech trivia contests, and video games. The theme can also take a more educational direction. Teens can ‘press play’ on various digital devices to learn more about the world around them. They can press play to watch film documentaries, listen to an audiobook, get online homework help, learn a new language and more.”

The Teen Tech week website has lots of ideas for activities and resources, so hop on over there for more information, and make sure your students know the best strategies for using technology for learning. -BILL FERRIS

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Word Source is a site that calls itself “the social dictionary,” and at first, that made me very skeptical. It’s not that I dislike people, but I believe some things are better experienced alone. Is there a more blissfully solitary activity than looking up a word? Discovering its origin? Its subtle shades of meaning? Why does my dictionary have to be social now, too?

Of course, using reference sources isn’t so exciting for everyone, and that’s precisely why Word Source is great. The site lets you tag and rate each word, indicating that you like or dislike it, that you can say it five times fast, that it caused you to fail an English test, or that it makes you feel “all warm and fuzzy inside.” Searchers can then see how other users feel about a particular word. How many high school students would love to exact revenge on a prickly SAT word by tagging that it makes them nauseous?

There are other features that even this anti-social librarian loves, like the advanced search options, which let you search an exact word, a prefix, or a suffix, and which allow the use of wild card characters when you’re not quite sure how a word is spelled. And for those who don’t like bells and whistles, you can look up a word without even visiting the website, by typing word.sc/[your word] into your browser’s address bar. For example, try typing in word.sc/social.

Word Source also does a simultaneous Flickr search to find photos of your word, which is great if you’re searching for a noun, and not so great if you’re searching for an adjective. A search for “Pomeranian” yielded, of course, thousands of adorable photos of dogs, but a search for “concomitant” yielded an out-of-focus shot of someone’s bare foot. The Flickr-searching feature is cute, but it only works as well as people’s Flickr tags. Which is to say, unfortunately, not very well.

Still, there’s lots to like about Word Source, especially for those students for whom “look it up” sounds like a prison sentence. -EMILY JACK

Word Source

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There’s a lively discussion in the comments over at the Reference Extract planning site: some visitors are skeptical (to say the least) about the need for a search engine that gives results “weighted towards sites most often referred to by librarians at institutions such as the Library of Congress.”

But both teachers and librarians know that students encounter a great deal of non-credible and un-credible as well as incredible content on the web, content that students are all too prone to take at face value. And there are similar projects out there: KidZui, which we covered last month, is not just a search engine but an entire browser built to lead kids toward websites approved by teachers. New search engines such as Cuil, which we covered back in August, do emerge. So a project like this — and Reference Extract is an ambitious project–isn’t out in left field, whether or not it’s a Google-killer.

If you read through the proposal, there’s lots of interesting data to support the project, and there’s some good geek food for those who’d like to know how the search engine will work (they’re going to pull out and index the URLs from QuestionPoint and use the Find retrieval engine from OCLC, or possibly Nutch . . . oh, never mind). The folks who are going to build this search engine prove with studies and pretty graphs that librarians are perceived as credible and that different librarians do tend to send researchers to the same websites.

So what do you think? Would you be likely to use and encourage your students to use a search engine “built for maximum credibility”? -AMANDA FRENCH

Reference Extract planning site

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Don’t be deterred by the terms-of-use warning on the front page, which cautions you to “surf at your own risk.”    The Florida Virtual Library is an excellent resource for student exploration, research, and reference, compiling an abundance of links to support education. If you find “objectionable content” here, you’ll find it at Disneyworld.

The Florida Virtual Library mimics the experience of walking into a library building, but without all those fussy right angles.  The quirky, colorful interface is engaging enough to appeal to students without screaming, “Hey kids, I’m rad!  This site is da bomb!  See?  I talk like you!  I’m down!  Hey kids!  Come back!”

The FVL is the library of the Florida Virtual School, an award-winning institution that’s been excelling in online education for more than ten years.  Lucky for us, they’ve made the library accessible to the general public.

The site’s well-labeled collections of links cover every major curriculum area, and include things like collections of primary resources, entry points for learning about current events, a writing center, information about college and careers, and portals for teachers and parents.

A word about site navigation: using your browser’s “back” button doesn’t always seem to work, so it’s best to rely on the FVL’s internal navigation tabs.

Add this one to your bag of tricks when you’re looking for a one-stop place to send students for conducting online research. -EMILY JACK

The Florida Virtual Library

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By now you’re surely familiar with Google Book Search, the project to digitize and display millions of books, which began in 2004. You’ve doubtless noticed that ordinary Google searches now turn up results from books, so that a student’s search for “Silas Marner” will point her not just to Wikipedia, but to the text and page images of the book itself on http://books.google.com. You may even have heard that Google recently settled a lawsuit brought by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over whether the search company had the right to scan in-copyright material and display parts of such material in search results.

It is our delightful task, however, to tell you about something we’re guessing you haven’t heard of: Google Book Search previews. You can now use Google Book Search’s “Preview Wizard” to generate a little virtual book that will fit in a small square of your web page or blog. All you need is the book’s ISBN number, access to your web site’s underlying code, and the courage to copy and paste snippets of JavaScript. (If you have a WordPress blog, use Design and Widgets to insert the code; if you have a Blogger.com blog, use Layout and Edit HTML.) By default, what appears is a picture of the book’s cover with clickable arrows that let you page back and forth in the book, though you might want to choose other display options. Some books will grant you access to the full text, while others will give you only a few pages or chapters, but in both cases this widget is a great way to encourage your screen-dazed students toward books.

It’s also worth noting that libraries, bookstores, and book-oriented sites are taking advantage of the same technology on a larger scale; Google Book Search previews are available from the websites of WorldCat, LibraryThing, GoodReads, Books-a-Million, and many more. Happy reading (online)! — AMANDA FRENCH

Google Book Search Preview Wizard

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Do you know someone who’s helped improve literacy for children and adults? Are you that person, and are looking for some way you could finally get some recognition from your colleagues and loved ones? If so, you need to know about the Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year award.

The Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year award honors “educators who demonstrate an impact on families through early childhood education, school-based programs, adult literacy and ESL programs, parenting education, library literacy programs and community literacy programs.” The winning teacher will receive $7500 for his or her program, plus a trip to the National Conference on Family Literacy in Orlando March 1 – 3, 2009. Finalists, of which there will be several, get $500 each. Not bad.

Nominations are due by December 5. If this applies to someone you know, nominate him or her today. Educators who work to boost literacy for an entire family certainly deserve some recognition. -BILL FERRIS

Toyota Family Literacy Teacher of the Year

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