DOPA Implications for School Libraries July 28, 2006
Posted by sbrisco in : Community , 2commentsYALSA executive director Beth Yoke announced Wednesday the importance of contacting our US House Representatives asking them to oppose H.R. 5319 DOPA (Deleting Online Predators Act). Within the past two days, she has also announced the ‘fast-track’ pace of the US Senate to move the bill forward.
What does DOPA mean to the school library? First of all, it would require that, as a condition of receiving E-Rate support, all schools and libraries block access to social networking websites and chat rooms. The ALA website sheds some implications to the school library such as:
1) Local school districts and libraries should determine what content should flow into schools and libraries. Federal mandate over content control is very problematic.
2) Districts and libraries already have the power to block access to social networking sites and chat rooms and a number of them have already done so.
3) DOPA imposes yet another burden on schools and libraries participating in the E-rate and may deter many from continuing to participate.
4) This bill paints an unflattering and distorted view of the Internet as a whole, serving to scare away parents, students, teachers and librarians from making use of all its resources.
In an election year we understand the seriousness of instant legislation created to gain immediate political support; however, the implications of DOPA would critically censor access to many social networks (communication) used within education by not just students, but also teachers, parents, and librarians.
Beth Yoke’s testimony before Congress shows examples of how students safely use online communities and social networking to take virtual field trips, participate in distance education courses, and provide disabled students with the opportunity to “physically” participate with their peers in a virtual environment that does not discriminate or exclude. Her statements, however, may have been in vain.
As we watch for next week’s move on DOPA by the Senate, it is IMPORTANT that school librarians help to educate others (including our legislators, administrators, parents, and teachers) of the implications of federal restrictions on the social networking. While we all want to provide Internet safety for our children, we should remember that restricting Internet access does not protect our children from ALL evils that lurk within our much smaller technological world.
Rather than restricting social networking, communications, and real-time connections with one another through the Internet, it our responsibility to teach students (and those who do not understand the educational opportunities in social networking) how to protect themselves, how to make good choices, and how to evaluate information, individuals, and ideas online. These are local responsibilities, not federal responsibilities.
To stay up-to-date on what’s happening, check the ALA Legislative Action Center and be sure to stay connected next week to read how to take immediate action. The ALA office will have a Legislative Advocacy Guide that will make contacting your Senator’s office easy, as well as a Social Networking Site Toolkit so you can help educate your coworkers and library users about the pros and cons of social networking sites, what DOPA may mean for them and how to stay safe on the Internet.
NECC – the exhibit floor July 12, 2006
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , add a commentA big part of NECC (and ALA) is the exhibit floor. Wandering through the area lets you see so many vendors all in one place. Collecting free goodies is always fun. I like to use these freebies as give aways during professional development back at my school.
This year there was the usual variety of vendors some who have been around for a good while such as Adobe, Apple, Scholastic but some new ones as well. Many of the vendors give mini workshops at their booth and these are often as good as or better than the other workshops.
In terms of Libraries, only some of the exhibits pertained solely to libraries. There were a few library automation vendors, and a very few database providers (the main one I saw was Gale). In terms of equipment I saw nothing specific to libraries. I would like to see some new products for barcode scanners. But I saw nothing here and do not remember seeing anything at AASL in October.
There were lots of vendors offering school management programs, and those instant feedback programs which use a small clicker device. Internet safety, online courses and tutorials were also there. But I didn’t see anything really new in these areas.
Many of the booths that I spent time in offered free content, for example NASA and Library of Congress.
I would be interested to hear what others thought of the vendor exhibit.
Tag: NECC2006
Adobe Breakfast July 11, 2006
Posted by lrjohnson in : NECC2006 , add a commentNo conference is complete without going to presentations by vendors. It is a great opportunity to help out on the food budget and at the same time network with your table. I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had attended the Adobe presentation at FETC but they did it right this time!
Three different educators shared what they were using Adobe for. I need to follow up with Adobe Breeze. You first put together a PowerPoint presentation and then put it in Adobe Breeze. This allows you to take PowerPoint up to another level and include handouts for tutorials or assignments.
A media specialist from Florida gave a great presentation on how she uses Adobe Photoshop with the students for visual literacy projects. Students worked together to create the images that would tell the story. With the students creating their own book covers using the program the potential for sharing book hooks is tremendous. Half of the screen is an intro to the book and the other half the cover they created. Gave me lots of ideas and she will be presenting at FAME in November!
The last one was a film and design class from Bellarmine HS. Unfortunately I did not catch where they were from and thinking it was a unique name I planned to go on their web page but there are a lot of Bellarmine High Schools! The teacher showed the awesome projects the students did for their film and design class with the purpose to taek them from Academic to Industry. They actually did designs for companies. With the expanded venue for viewing the students took great pride in their work and it showed in all their products. They did logos, CD covers, posters, trailers…
Keynote: DeWitt Jones July 11, 2006
Posted by lrjohnson in : NECC2006 , add a commentImmediately get the video online of his presentation. The web site is http://www.DewittJones.com The beauty of his photography behind him as he presented was awesome! What he had to say was very inspiring. Before he spoke they used Turning Point, an immediate response system that polled the audience on what we thought was needed for the transformation of education to meet the needs of the digital generation and almost half said Visionary Leadership.
Jones was a great follow up for that! He spoke of having a vision, passion, creativity and a dream. He himself read National Geographic by flashlight as a kid. He had a dream and he persisted in spite of the family push for business through acceptance at Harvard. He spoke of National Geographic’s passion for sharing what is right with the world. (Don’t we need to change our focus in the news?) He spoke of hearing Robert Frost’s poems and the impact the words had on him.
One thing that really hit home was discipline and commitment are non-issues when you have passion. He spoke of the view we have, is it seeing the possibilities? The stone chipper vs the cathedral builder?
He talked about in photography there is more than one right answer. Nature is beauty and possibility. We need to be willing to take a risk. Open ourselves to the possibilities and remember that is is not what will I take but what will I be given.
Celebrate our journey in life with gratitude and grace. He ended it with know our purpose, have passion, vision and values!
What a perfect opening session!
Beyond Acceptable Use: Developing and Implementing a Plagiarism Policy July 10, 2006
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , add a commentPresented by Debbie Abilock (editor of AASL’s Knowledge Quest).
Much of the information can be found on her site at www.noodletools.com/debbie/ethical Checking in here will give you a better outline than I can give here form my notes. Beyond Acceptable Use: Ethical and Academic Use (.pdf)
Debbie focused on reasons why students plagiarize and why having an acceptable use policy is not enough. The most interesting thought, “it is not enough to “tweak the assignment”. Many of us tell teachers that they need to make the assignments more interesting or more difficult for students to copy/paste. However, if the pressure for a student to succeed academically, then even really interesting compelling projects may still be plagiarized.
Several resources mentioned during the session; film “Shattered Glass” book “Doing School” Yale University Press, author Geoffrey Nunberg “power of blog culture to credit.
Resources which help students with creating bibliographic citations and note taking were also discussed. Along this line, Noodletools will soon have a note-taking component.
Tag: NECC2006
Blogging toward Literacy; Promoting Reading and Writing in English Classes July 10, 2006
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , 1 comment so farPresented by Pamela Raytick and Karen Connaghan
Blogging was all over NECC this year. I saw one blog session, Blogging for Beginners being held in in a very large room with people standing just outside listening in because the room was full. Blogging was definitely a hot topic.
I wanted to get to a blog session this year, as I had listened in on David Warwick’s session last year but wanted on about how students would use blogs, and so selected this one since the focus was to be on using blogging to promote reading.
These two ladies prepared and implemented an action research project on the topic of blogs used for promoting reading and writing. In addition to covering blogging, it was a good example of an action research project. The project was begun with limited students in small group, later expanding to more students. They hoped to;
Cultivate Literacy
Focusing on more than skills
Encouraging connections
Making the READER matter
Community
Social and collaborative
Ownership
Students teach themselves (latent Curriculum)
Technology
Virtual community
Conversations with no boundaries
New Mechanism
The possibility that parents and other teachers were uncomfortable with this technology was discussed as a possibility.
In the summary, for others who might want to do a similar project, four areas were addressed; Security issues, Sanity issues (editing, time, comments, unexpected) issues of access outside of class and Time (frequency, workload etc)
Tag: NECC2006
More NECC2006 July 10, 2006
Posted by Laura Pearle in : NECC2006 , add a commentFor additional information about NECC2006:
The Official NECC2006 program (with session handouts)
Introducing the Read Write Web July 9, 2006
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , 1 comment so farIntroducing the Read Write Web presented by Tim Wilson
This was a very good workshop, especially for anyone not sure what Web2.0 or Read/ Write Web means. The presenter, Tim Wilson has a blog at http://technosavvy.org/. Check out the post for Introducing the Read Write Web: Tim has an audio version of the presentation available along with a list of the links. I would recommend taking a listen.
But if you don’t have time, here is my summary;
Compare a personal web page to a Weblog. The personal web page is read only, where as the weblog is a total read/write page, viewers can not only read but write and give back comments. The read/write web opens users to all kinds of new abilities all of which deal with the development of information, community and conversations.
However, as in all things there are also challenges. Tim not only listed the challenges but gave suggestions for dealing with these challenges.
Safety – keep the applications where you can “pull the plug” if necessary, monitor, implement a curriculum and remember that students will “encounter weirdos not just online.
Professional development – made training not “just in case” – “feed the rabbits” and leadership is essential.
Assessment – use information literacy standards, create rubrics across unites, de emphasize individual assessments, emphasize self assessment.
Equitable access – establish a baseline for equipment, extend hours of labs and libraries, have equity conversations.
Tag: NECC2006
This and That July 9, 2006
Posted by Debbie Stafford in : NECC2006 , add a commentThese were all seen/heard at NECC but don’t lend themselves to a full blog post.
Keynote DeWitt Jones from National Geographic. The talk was inspiring and the photographs were beautiful. But I will try to incorporate his four main ideas; Vision, Creativity, Passion and Purpose.
PBS site on media literacy
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/media_lit/related_sites.shtm
SIGMS (special interest group, media specialists) met and discusses ways to make librarians more visible at NECC, perhaps with some sort of award program.
LM_NET “Birds of a Feather” several long time members spoke about how much LM_NET has meant to librarians. There was some discussion about how to create a focused database of information useful for librarians facing cutbacks or other issues. A possible Wiki was discussed.
Virtual Field Trips presented by Beth Caraccio
The first part of this session was a presentation about the why of virtual field trips and different types of field trips.
Advantages,
Learning styles
Flexibility
New kinds of learning
Types
Trips of discovery
Trips of exploration
Trips of Confirmation and Challenge
Other information available at http://www.catoosa.k12.ga.us/~bcaraccio/virtualfieldtrips.htm
Tag: NECC2006
Planned Improvisations July 6, 2006
Posted by lrjohnson in : NECC2006 , add a commentPlanned Improvisations: Technology-Supported Learning Activity Design in Social Studies
Different type of session, one of the speakers is participating via videoconferencing! Check out their web site to get the actual presentation!
Gave a quick review of traditional approaches to Prof. Development
Pockets of amazing things going on in the classroom but for the most part not technocentric. Technology focus but not integration.
Focus is on student’s curriculum standards – content-centric
Shluman’s pedagogical content knowledge
Intersection of teachers content knowledge, pedagogical and technological knowledge
Decisions based on students learning needs and preferences
Taking that intersection and going from there! All of it fits together
Planning and teaching are context dependent, but is really lots of improvisation though not in as much detail
Think of teaching planning as Jazz
Tried and true are riffs
Learning activity plans as lead sheets
Project/unit plans as fake books
Use all the different teaching approaches and integrate them as a planned improvisations
Students needs in central focus, close by standards and contextual factors and digital tech included, all are interdependent
To do this…
Planning Aids: Activity types
Like the idea of designing an exhibit. Would work as a great activity for students to teach the other students
There are several examples of projects on the web, be sure to get their powerpoint!
Need to think about the students needs as we assign projects, not all are effective in small groups or larger groups…
Acknowledge the interdependence, think about the activity types as you plan, let them assist in the planning
Tech interwoven rather than the focus. They plan to work on more lessons. They had 2 in their PowerPoint that look great.
