Week 9, Thing 23: Copyright

I have mixed feelings about this entry. On the one hand, I'm really sad to see this experience end. I enjoyed learning new things and having a sounding board to discuss my findings. It was frustrating feeling like I was writing for no one but just the fact that I could express my thoughts on technology without having to look at my husband's blank face or try and waylay our always-on-the-go CFF coach gave me confidence and an outlet for my successes and frustrations. On the other hand, I'm finally done and it feels like I've been doing it forever! I started this while visiting my sister, relieved to be in her air conditioning, I'm ending it with a heating pad on my freezing feat. Now I can work on my iWeb page and cope with the holidays.

Copyright and Creative Commons was a very interesting "thing". I went into this assignment convinced that copyright always belongs to the author otherwise the publishers will take advantage of the situation and feather their nests at the expense of the poor, creative geniuses. Lawrence Lessig's article "Against Perpetual Copyright" presented a very different point of view and I felt differently afterward. As librarians, we are supposed to be the closest thing to experts on copyright in our schools but even though I'm very familiar to the "dos and don'ts", the theories behind it aren't thought of very often.

I appreciated learning about Creative Commons. So much of librarianship is about collaboration and CC is exactly that. It's good to know we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel.

Week 9, Thing 22, eBooks & Audio eBooks

When I was a young girl, I loved everything Little Women. There was a series on PBS and I hated when I had to miss it. In my dreams, I wished that I could watch the show whenever I wanted to, not just the Thursday night it was on. I also wished that a copy of the book would just fall out of the bottom of the TV set. That was 35 years ago. Now, you can watch shows whenever you want with VCRs and DVRs and with a lot of the cool eBook sites, you can can get a copy of Little Women. If only I could have come up with a plan to provide the world with the luxuries I desired. Then I could well afford the iPod or MP3 player I want to download some audio eBooks so I can listen to them in my car or a Kindle to read some classics away from the computer. Although, I can't imagine reading a classic on anything but paper.

For those of us who love books and have trouble finding some of the older, out of print classics, some of these sites fulfill many needs.

Week 9, Thing 21, Podcasts

This one was a bugger. I know about podcasts, I even did one once for a class I took. They're a great teaching tool. In one of my earlier posts I wrote about an incredible learning support teacher we have that had her students create podcasts on each of the three branches of government. That wasn't my problem. My problem was finding some really good ones. If the links for the directories weren't dead, the indexes didn't allow searching. Another problem was that some podcasts can be very long and difficult to listen to if you don't have an iPod or MP3 player. Maybe that's why I have a poor attitude. I want to listen to some podcasts, but I can't justify the expense of the aforementioned technology and I'm just being a brat. Seriously, the best way for me to listen to a lot of the things I'd like to is to download it and plug a player into a dock and listen in the car. Ironically, that would keep me alert and awake while driving but put me right to sleep in front of a computer. (I have the same problem with webinars. It's pretty pathetic.)

On to the positive! I did find a pretty decent podcast directory, PodcastDirectory.com. It categorized things pretty well and I was able to find some good, quick, podcasts. My favorites are ones from Connected Life. They're really interesting and cover a lot of cool tech news without being too complicated. There are two segments on computer gaming that I know my son will love so finally I will have found something in this class that he will think is cool. I added their RSS feed to my Google Reader so I can keep up with the fun stuff.

Hopefully, I will get around to the podcast on The World is Flat. That's what I'd really like to listen to. Unfortunately, there are just too many time constraints at this time.

Week 9, Thing 20: You Tube

I never really checked out a lot of stuff on You Tube. My biggest impression of it was as a wasteland for bizarre video clips and inane posts from teens who filmed themselves fighting or punking someone. I was pleasantly surprised. There's some pretty cool stuff on there, especially for someone with my semi-twisted sense of humor.

I really enjoyed the recommended videos. My favorite was "March of the Librarians", although it's truly bizarre how so many librarians look so similar.

I found this video of a career movie from 1946 or 1947 on choosing the profession of Librarian. It is crazy fun. The wildest part is seeing all the things that had to be done by hand and how long it took. Some things are still the same though. There's a student who asks for a book but can't remember the author or title but does remember the subject and that it's blue. Who among us hasn't had that happen?



For a while, we could only view videos from TeacherTube. An Apple trainer showed us this one entitled "When I become a Teacher". I love it.



I couldn't remember the name of it while composing this blog and was having a hard time with my search, especially on youtube. Just putting in the search term teacher resulted in some very raunchy videos. (Not that I watched them, the titles were enough for me.)

I enjoyed this exercise and will probably view and use more videos in the future.

Week 8, Thing 19: Library Thing

I really like Library Thing. I've always wanted to have a list or a reference of all my books. When I was in middle school/early high school, I had a card file of all my books. The were in alphabetical order according to title. Sometimes, I even had a little summary. (There really is no other profession for me.) I can only imagine how excited I would have been if Library Thing would have been around back then!

I signed up for Library Thing a while ago and added a couple of books. I put a few more on this summer when we looked at the Web 2.0 Award sites. My only complaint is that I can't pull up an author, choose a number of titles and batch process the selection all at once. As a reader who tends to collect books by certain authors, that capability would be enormously convenient.

Here's a question though, do you only put in the books that make you look good or do you put in all your books, even if they're not exactly award winners? Case in point - when I first started looking at other people's blogs, some have this really cool widget, shelfari, where books are placed on a virtual shelf for all to see. Great, except as I looked a couple of people's "bookshelves", they were reading "important" books and I was reading to escape. I don't think I'll be a literary snob when it comes to Library Thing because the purpose is to list my books, pure and simple.

There a few of my students who would enjoy Library Thing and I'm definitely going to put a link on our library web page.

I'm going to put both the Library Thing and the Shelfari widgets on my blog because what I own and what I read can be very different.

Week 8, Thing 18

I signed up for Zoho writer, created a blog post and had no trouble sending it! Pretty slick. I thought this would be a very good tool to use since it wasn't blocked at school and the edit area of blogspot.com was for a while. My plan was to work on my blog during my lunch break and even if I was blocked from sending what I wrote, at least it would be a lot easier than cutting and pasting and in the best format as well. As it turns out, blogspot edit has been unblocked, but it's still a nice site to go to. I'm usually at a computer that's either my own or has access to a server where I can save my documents. It's nice knowing that if I'm in a situation where I'm not, Zoho writer will allow me to type and save whatever I need.

Our CFF coach has a Google Docs account set up for our CFF team. One is for teachers to go in and schedule projects so our students don't get overwhelmed with iMovies, Keynotes, and podcasts all due around the same time. It also frees up equipment and lets our coach know where she might be needed. We just started it this year but since it's desperately needed, I'm sure it will work.

One of the blogs I read mentioned how well it should work for students who have trouble with compatibility issues between their home word processing programs and ours at school. I don't know how many times I've had kids try to get their flash drives to open up their assignment on our Macs, then my library PCs, and nothing works. If they could use Zoho or Google Docs, it might go a lot better.