Book Drive - Dewey Donation System!!!

I actually saw a link to this on Go Fug Yourself. I love that blog and I love that they had a link to this book drive.

If you know how the education budget for school districts are then you know this is a great idea.

Check out Dewey Donation System to find out more.

clipped from deweydonationsystem.org clipped from deweydonationsystem.org

Eric Heuvel's "The Search"

I want to order this graphic novel for our library. I think, that it will present the Holocaust in another medium that some students will find more accessible, similar to how they viewed the 9/11 report graphic novel.
I am actually having trouble finding out where to order it so maybe someone out there can help with that.
It is an interesting review in the NYT and also another interesting example of how the graphic novel is changing. Though, I do questions some things like the graphic novel version of Beowulf or the Odyssey but maybe it's not that much different from the abridged children's version of the Iliad or Alice In Wonderland.
I am also fascinated by the fact that it is considered a textbook.

clipped from www.nytimes.com No Laughs, No Thrills, and Villains All Too Real Among other things, the book, building on the obvious precedent of Art Spiegelman's "Maus," shows how far comics have come as a cultural medium taken seriously here, but also that the Holocaust has come a long way too, as a topic to be freshly considered by a new generation of German teenagers. clipped from www.nytimes.com The visual style of “The Search” is clear, simple, pastel-colored, in a classic Belgian-Franco comic tradition. “Less is more,” Mr. Heuvel, the artist, said in a recent telephone conversation, acknowledging that he pilfered liberally from Tintin’s inventor, Hergé. “We spent endless hours making sure that the Nazi costumes were kept to a minimum because boys can glorify these things.” She added: “More and more young German students do too. They are sensitive to the idea that the subject is not just about Germans and Jews. It’s about people and life.”

Product Placement, even in your kids books

It is the trend. It's annoying. But do the kids mind? Probably not. Nick Hornby's book is riddled with the names "Starbucks" and Tony Hawk's biography. Did it stop me from reading? No. Did it annoy the crap out of me like the way Pepsi is so prominently displayed in certain movies? YES! Here's a NYT article on the issue and 2 writers opinions. Interesting reading.

clipped from www.nytimes.com In Books for Young, Two Views on Product Placement Specifying a character’s brand of lipstick, shoes or handbag is a commonly accepted way to add an aura of reality or consumer aspiration to books aimed at young readers: just think of “The Gossip Girl,” with that series’s abundant references to Prada and Burberry. But what if writers and publishers enlisted companies to sponsor those branded mentions, as is the widespread practice in Hollywood?

Clipmarks.com makes Mashable's list of 13 great tools for the web

This is pretty cool so I thought I would clip it to my blog.

clipped from mashable.com clipped from mashable.com Highlighters Clipmarks.com - Cutting clippings out of newspapers and magazines is as old as printing, but until Clipmarks came along, it was just a dream on the web. The service will allow you to tag, store, organize the “clips just about any way you want to. You can then share snippets of Web pages by email, on websites, and more. An amazing tool for any number of uses. clipped from mashable.com BlinkList.com Del.icio.us StumbleUpon.com clipped from mashable.com Diigo.com Firenoodle i-Lighter.com Hooeey.com MyBlogLog.com Slifeshare.com HyperiGo.com Iterasi.com Wists.com clipped from mashable.com The web is a big and wonderful place, full of exciting pages and information that we all would like to go back to from time to time. Then comes the problem when you open your bookmarks and… you can’t remember the name of the site, or what folder you put it in, or you find a bookmark and you can’t remember why you saved it! Well, you’re not the only one - that’s why over the years people have been coming up with new and intuitive ways to bookmark and save content.

My first screencast

I feel like a this is very Fisher Price but whatever. I am hoping this file loads and you can witness my first screencast. It took me about 2 periods with the sun beating down on the back of my head but I did it! YAY! ME!

The software I used is Camtasia Studio. You can use Jing Project, which is free open source software. They are both offered by Tech Smith. I find Camtasia pretty easy to use. For this screencast, I recorded both audio and video at the same time but you are able to record them separately if you wanted to. The software is fairly easy to use and also comes with easy to follow tutorials. It is weird something happened with Pan/Scan so it is panning at bizarre moments but this is only with the AVI version. My other version is much nicer.

My first screencast

I feel like a this is very Fisher Price but whatever. I am hoping this file loads and you can witness my first screencast. It took me about 2 periods with the sun beating down on the back of my head but I did it! YAY! ME!

The software I used is Camtasia Studio. You can use Jing Project, which is free open source software. They are both offered by Tech Smith. I find Camtasia pretty easy to use. For this screencast, I recorded both audio and video at the same time but you are able to record them separately if you wanted to. The software is fairly easy to use and also comes with easy to follow tutorials.

Teacher Librarians - School Librarians - we are not obsolete!

Rob Darrow (California Dreamin' Blog) posted this. How exciting is this news?
And now story time:
In grad school during orientation week, one of our esteemed professors asked, "Is there anyone interested in school librarianship?" The crickets started chirping. Throughout my entire 2 years, the only thing I heard about school librarianship was that it was an obsolete job and that you would be the first person given the pink slip when the budget needed to be shifted. However, from the looks of it, it is becoming more and more in demand.
I pretty much fell into my job. I never thought about working at a school, let a lone working with teenagers. But here I am and it is the most interesting and challenging job I have ever had. It's great to see that certain states see the importance of this position and how it is an asset to a good education program.

clipped from blogs.ala.org Unanimous! On to the House.... Olympia continues to mystify and thrill us. After passing out of Ways and Means yesterday, we expected to wait to be scheduled in the Senate Rules Committee. But .... SB#6380 was heard by and passed through the Rules committee this morning, and then went for a full Senate floor vote this afternoon. Senators McAuliffe, Eide, Marr, Brown, Honeyford, Hargrove, and Parlette spoke in support of the bill, and it in was UNANIMOUSLY PASSED just after 4pm this afternoon. There will be more info. posted at the blog later http://librariesfordemocracy.org/fundfuture/ But we wanted you to know the great news.

Jupiter & Saturn have siblings? WOW!

Dewitte clipped this on Voxed about it so I'm going to use it as one of my questions for a new class project we will eventually start in the Lib/Tech class we offer at the school.
Basically, I will have to come up with interesting questions for students to research online. They will then need to find the correct information and evaluate the site they use. This will be reinforcing the skills at evaluating websites. Questions they need to keep in mind: who created this site? when is the site updated? who links to this article? what types of people/sites does this main site link to?

clipped from physicsworld.com Siblings of Jupiter and Saturn discovered Astronomers have discovered a pair of planets orbiting a star 5000 light years away that together look remarkably like a scaled-down version of our own solar system. The planets, which were spotted using a technique called gravitational microlensing, are both smaller than Jupiter and Saturn and are orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun. The discovery suggests that star systems like our own might be more common than we think.

Why it's good to use a variety of services...Not just Google

I saw a link to this on Twitter. How frightening is that? someone can just phish for your identity and then if you only use one company everything you have ever done with that company is just deleted? Frightening.

clipped from www.zephoria.org February 8, 2008 a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn't realize that he'd fallen into a phisher's net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google's customer service and their response basically boiled down to "that sucks, we can't restore anything, sign up for a new account." Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

Semanal Project

I made my first video last week and then David Lee King posted this. I might join. Who knows "Tall Guy, Short Girl" just might happen in the next couple of weeks. Don't steal my title please. It's been in talks for awhile with one of my favorite people. If you want to help design a shirt or logo for me that would be cool though? hee hee

clipped from semanal.org [ Published by admin on January 3, 2008 (2008-01-03T09:44:52-0800) ] " rel="bookmark" href="http://semanal.org/2008/01/03/semanal-intro/">Semanal: One Video Per Week For All of 2008 5 Comments . Semanal is an open project where you post one video a week. You can join in the fun at anytime. We are a group of video creators who are encouraging each other, instead of stifling each other with rules. Post the video on your own blog, but link to it here. Just click on the current week and put your links in the comment fields. See how others are doing it. You can watch people’s videos in our page, but please go comment directly to on the creator’s site. You’ll find many inspired videos each week by people from all over the world. Please join our discussion group where we talk to each other about weekly themes and tips to make our work look better. You can go to our About page to read the history of this project. Email us at help@semanal.org if you have any questions. Let’s see what you got!

Will Richardson's "Finish this sentence..."

I follow Will Richardson on Twitter. Today he twittered:

"Finish this sentence: "The world has changed, content is cheap and collaboration is easy. As educators, we must..."

I am going to think about it and post something later. But what do you want to say about this? What would you contribute to this discussion?

Scholarship & the Read/Write Web

During my undergraduate and graduate years, the libraries I used struggled with the ever increasing cost of scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Today, faculty in Harvard's arts & sciences department are going to vote on whether they want to publish their research on an open-access server maintained by the library.
This is a great move. I know, I am completely biased. I love reading other people's research - a lot of librarians and educators - already use their blogs as a means of sharing their work and also working with others. I
However, I do wonder about what types of issues with come up once this starts and people begin access it. There are issues of plagiarism, how it will effect existing journals, how it will effect those specific fields and I am just not sure if the detriment will out weigh the benefits.

clipped from www.nytimes.com At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free. Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

Tech & Schools - it's a tool

I love that comment "Technology is just a tool, not an end in itself. It will never replace good teaching."
I think, we need to keep in mind that there is a balance that needs to be forged between technology and teaching.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com North Point High School for Science, Technology and Industry in Waldorf went with ceiling-mounted LCD projectors but nixed the idea of laptops for all students. "Our philosophy is to have whatever technology our teachers want to do their jobs better available to them," Principal Kim Hill told me. "Technology is just a tool, not an end in itself. It will never replace good teaching." A School That's Too High on Gizmos

Free E-Books from HarperCollins

Free electronic books from HarperCollins. That's pretty amazing. I will definitely be checking this out.

I am not sure if it will increase their sales but it is definitely something that needed to start happening awhile ago. And I believe with the availability of Kindle, more people will become interested in reading e-books.

clipped from www.nytimes.com HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine. Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter.

YA Review: "This is What I did:" by Ann Dee Ellis (rated 4 stars)

This Is What I Did:

by Ann Dee Ellis

Ann Dee Ellis’ debut novel “This Is What I Did:” is intense, horrific, mildly humorous and definitely a page turner. In 157 pages, Ellis’ moves back and forth through Logan’s (the narrator) memories and his present experiences. From the dust jacket, Ellis states that “Logan came from not knowing how to be. Not knowing what to do. Not knowing how to talk about it in a world where everyone else seems to know what’s going on. How do they know what’s going on? How do they know how to be? In the end, I figured out you just have to do whatever you can do.”
Logan is no longer best friends with Zylar. Logan no longer lives in Mullholland. Logan no longer rides his bike by his crush, Cami’s house. Logan no longer plays with his twin brothers. Logan no longer talks. Logan no longer does anything.
Written more like a screenplay and interspersed with images of handwritten notes and tiny silhouetted images, Ellis’ presents a boy who has witnessed something so horrific that he can no longer function and does not know how to function. Logan’s journey of discovering how to deal with a situation that has forever changed his life. Will he move forward? Will he find his voice again?
I started and finished this book yesterday. I could not put it down. I needed to find out what happened to Logan and Zylar and Ellis’ story keeps the reader engaged. A great read and one worth picking up.

See more about This Is What I Did: