Why Do They Do it?

In my last post, I gushed about instagrok. And ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!  It's blocked by Lightspeed!  Lightspeed is the BCPS filter.  The reason it was blocked was listed as blogs.  So I emailed the Webfilter team and noted that this was a search engine not a blog.  I soon received a reply which said they had asked for a re-evaluation by Lightspeed and it came back as nudity. 

I was incredulous!  Wait a minute!  This is advertised as an educational tool.  How can there be nudity?  They must have made a mistake!  So I questioned again and this time they came back and said search for nudity.  Sure enough there it was!

Holy Hannah!  Are they that out of touch?   Why would you promote something as educational and then allow controversial stuff to creep into your algorithims!  I'm certainly not an advocate of censorship, but I work in a high school and watching teenage boys standing around a computer monitor snickering is the dead give-away.   If its way too easy to get to inappropriate stuff as it was on this one, it should not be designed for educational use.  Our kids are smarter than us in the area of technology and they can find it when it's buried deep.

I know this is still an evolving medium, but what a waste of a great product!

I read several blogs on a daily basis and I definitely have some very favorite ones.  Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers is one of my all-time favorites as is Joyce Valenza's Never Ending Search.  Both of these are prolific bloggers with great stuff to share.  I don't normally repost their stuff.  Instead I try to find some things that they haven't mentioned (actually kind of hard to do!)

But Joyce recently posted about an educational search engine that is fabulous.  I only hope it continues to expand.  I plan on using it with a class today!  It's called InstaGrok.  When you search, your results are returned in a wonderfully organized way which is so appropriate in education.  Not only that, but the results are rich in media, encourage students to ask questions and include visual image maps, videos, websites, questions and even quizzes.

The demo video gives a great overview, but it's much better when you try it yourself!  The video is a little out of date.  They have an updated version on their website.

The use of the concept map on the first page of the results is a recent improvement and allows students to see the inter-relationshop between their search and related topics.

This looks to be a great tool for students.  Stay tuned to find out how my students liked it!

Scooping It Up

I first heard about Scoop.it at the ISTE Conference in June.  I put it in my notes and thought I'll look at this when I have some time.  But time often gets away!  In October I went to AASL in Minneapolis.  It was a good conference as well.  And there was Joyce Valenza talking about curation.  And one of the tools she featured was Scoop.it.

OK, two times in 6 months.  It's time to take a serious look.  It happened that there was an Astronomy class coming in soon and the students had one class period to locate information on a topic of interest.  The teacher provided me with a list of topics and I decided that Scoop.it would be a perfect way to gather sources for them.

Since their time was limited, I didn't want them getting frustrated and wasting time with their searches.  I thought this would be a perfect tool for them and I could show them in a meaningful way how tags could be a powerful searching tool. 

So I went out and scooped websites with outstanding information on all of the topics.  Scoop.it is so easy to use!  You just add a bookmarklet to your browser's favorites bar and when you find a website you want to scoop, you click on the bookmarklet.  Scoop.it opens a window and searches the site for a title, images and a description.  You can alter what it picks up from the website and choose the image you want by scrolling through the ones Scoop.it collects or you can upload one of your own.  You can add your own annotation or use what it is picked up from the site.

Scoop.it will also search the internet based on your tags and make suggestions of sites it's found.  You can choose to scoop them or discard the suggestions.

By adding tags you make your curation a powerful tool.  Once you have gathered your information, you click the Post button, and the webpage and annotation is added to your project.  You can view and share your project in a variety of ways.  The finished project has windows with your scoops and looks like an online news site.  As I showed the students, by clicking on the Tags button, they could easily search the project and bring the desired pages to the top.

This is so much more appealing than giving students a list of websites!  They can see very qucikly what is available, what is on each site that's been scooped and search the entire project easily and quickly.  Students met with much success and they were getting ready for their presentations well before the end of the class period.  Not only were they successful researchers, but they also learned a 21st Century skill - tags.

Scoop.it is free and so far has remained stable in my usage.  There does not seem to be a limit to how much can be added to a project.  It recently has come out of a beta version.

Get a big scoop of the action!

Last week I had the pleasure to attend the SLJ Leadership Summit in Arlington, VA.  What a great forum.  Small enough to allow for intimacy but big enough to attract the movers and shakers of the library world.  It was packed full of great new things and I have to say, I'm still digesting most of what I learned.

Friday morning was devoted to ebooks and I found it extremely exciting and even a little scary.  We are venturing into new territory here and opinions are diverse.  One thing we need to remember is that we can't stop the technology from coming, but we can help shape it by letting our voices be heard.  We are the ones out there in the trenches.  I believe that publishers and book jobbers are beginning to understand the changing market - some more quickly than others.  But we know our audience, our patrons, and our colleagues and we have a handle on what works in these times of tight budgets, high class sizes, and high stakes testing.  We cannot let ourselves be swept away by these waves.

Sharon Grimes, Supervisor for Library Information Services, Baltimore County Public Schools has posted a Call to Action.  It is a must-read for us all.  And it is also an act now challenge.

Link to Sharon's post and let's get the conversation and the action started!

A Little Visitor Named Irene

Well, aside from the downed branches in my back yard, I made it through Hurricane Irene.  I was also one of the few fortunate ones that never lost my power or cable.  Our schools were supposed to open for students tomorrow, but there are still numerous schools with no power.

As I sat watching the television coverage of Irene, I thought a lot about the technology we had that could help us stay informed.

Certainly there are sites like the Weather Channel and your local tv news station.  But I also thought about the Hurricane Tracker app on my iPad.  So here are some other sites and apps to keep you informed during a weather crisis.

Stormpulse a website that also has a companion iPad app allows you to view radar and satellite maps for your area.  There are several options for labeling.

The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service and has a wealth of information covering the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific.

Google Crisis Response  offers Google mapping with storm overlays.

NASA's Earth Observatory has satellite images of many interesting subjects regularly including storms such as Irene.

Ready.gov will help you in planning BEFORE a storm hits.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research offers RAP - Real-time Weather data.

Although we are prepared and able to receive minute-to-minute news and information, we still are not any match for Mother Nature!

Jing Went the Strings of My....

Oops, wrong words and a poor attempt at humor.  But Jing is no humorous tool!  In fact it's a very powerful FREE tool.  TechSmith is probably most well known for SnagIt and Camtasia, both wonderful tools to do screen captures and screencasts and so much more.  But they offer Jing which allows you to do screen captures and screencasts.  And it's free!  Download the free software to your computer and you get the Jing Sun Launcher.

It rests at the top of your screen.  When you hover over the 'sun' it grows the three little appendages.  The one on the left gives you a cross hair so you can select which part of your screen you want to capture.

Once you've selected the area, the control panel above floats at the bottom of your screen. The far left button is a snapshot and the second from the left is the video.  This allows you to record your screen and movements. 

The recording time is five minutes and you can save the video to your hard drive, or share it using TechSmith's Screencast site.  You simply share the link to the website.  There is also an option to embed the video.

If you want to go Pro, the cost is $14.95 per year and this gives you the ability to save the video as an mp4, remove the Jing ads, and do a direct upload to YouTube.

As far as uses, I can think of lots right off the top of my head!  I used it to do a tutorial for an inservice course I was teaching.  I am currently making a series of tutorials for my staff as over the summer we were rolled over to Windows 7.  I can also see posting these for students to use when you aren't around.  Posting on a wiki, on an Edline page, or on the school webpage allows students, parents and staff 24/7 access to help.

Check it out!



Back in Baltimore!

So I landed back in Baltimore this morning and was home by lunch.  I managed to get to the grocery store as the cupboard was very bare!  Then I sat down and as I started to think about what I had learned, I just fell asleep!  Well they say travel is exhausting.....

At any rate, one of the things I found with Diigo is the social aspects.  Not only can you follow or be followed as Twitter, you can network and join groups.  As I discovered this morning, your groups will usually send you an email with posts and bookmarks by others in the groups.  Wow!  What a wealth of resources.

Now as I sat at Logan this morning looking through all of these, I thought it would be very easy to drown in all these cool tools.  I do tend to sometimes have a little ADD with these resources and get really sidetracked.  I'm going to try setting aside a time each day to go through them which includes emails and RSS feeds.  The trick is to try and implement some of these things.

It was great to meet Richard Byrne and Tom Daccord.  I have followed Richard's blog for a long time.  He always provides information on applications for education of the tools he blogs about.  Tom directs the EdTech Teacher program.