good news! brought to you by...

Extending my reach...

I received this fantastic news: "Congratulations again on your selection by The Fund for Public Schools to receive a Library REACH grant to upgrade your library media center. I would also like to inform you that your school is one of 15 schools selected to receive an additional $1,000 Best Buy Gift Card to further improve your library facility. These gift cards are made possible through the generosity of Best Buy and their partnership with The Fund for Public Schools."

Yayyyyy! Computers aren't an option, and a color printer would be too expensive to maintain (not to mention that it would raise all kinds of complications regarding which students could use it for what), so I'm thinking digital camera and video camera for student/project use, flash drives for student use, maybe a digital photo frame to display student-taken photos on a loop in order to draw students into the library... We'll see! It's a fun dilemma.

Here's the class applicable stuff, though, perfectly timed after our discussion last class:

Next paragraph:
"Best Buy takes its commitment to communities seriously. They know that a strong, healthy community is a great place to live and work, and the strength of the community is dependent on the strength of its schools. Best Buy rewards schools like yours that are finding creative ways to engage students through the hands-on use of technology. For more information on Best Buy's focus on teens, see http://www.bestbuyinc.com/community_relations/our_focus.htm."

So now I know! Best Buy is in a genuine partnership with The Fund for Public Schools, and Best Buy really gets me.

I will say this: With $1,000 in my pocket to spend on electronics that I will get to see my students get creative with, I have nothing but appreciation for whatever entity slipped it in there.

cool. why isn't it cooler?

Two energized 10th grade boys stopped on their way past my circulation desk to check out the pop-up book I have on display called Blood and Goo and Boogers Too! by Steve Alton, Nick Sharratt, and Jo Moore. It's not exactly a must-have for a high school library, true, but you'd be surprised how many kids say, "Whaaaaaaaat? Isn't this for little kids, Miss?" and then spend 10 to 15 minutes flipping through, totally engaged, learning about the human respiratory and circulatory systems... enjoying themselves.

A moment ago, these two boys stopped, amused by the textured cover (the green snot on the cover is gooey and, believe it or not, impossible to resist touching), and said, "Cooooooooooool! I love pop-ups!!"

Then the second boy said, "Does it have sound?"


Really? With all the colorful, complex, interactive features this book, he wanted sound to boot??



A few more words on this dissatisfaction with the pretty darn amazing, a bit more entertainingly expressed, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

all together now

If this exercise circulating amongst friends of mine isn't a prime example of ______ involving all of the elements under recent investigation, I don't know what...

It just is.

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CREATE YOUR BAND NAME & ALBUM COVER:

To Do This

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 - Post it to FB with this text in the "caption" or "comment" and TAG the friends you want to join in.

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i am where the internet is

I've been sitting at cafe for the past few hours because my internet connection at home went down. I could not do what needed to get done without the internet. It told me where to go and how to restructure my day. Even more annoying than spending hours in an unfortunately chilly place with noisier than ideal strangers is the recognition that I am Connection's slave.

And then...

I made the unfortunate mistake of leaving my copy of Convergence Culture at work, which has been locked up over this last week because of the school's winter break. That reading will have to wait until tomorrow morning, while all of the online-accessible materials were immediately at my fingertips. When I had internet connection. Which has me thinking of internet connection as an almost tangible thing. Interesting!

Another thought...

I spent hours a week or so ago tidying my gmail inbox--from 2,367 unread messages to none...

yet my actual room remains a mess

(though, to be fair, it is roughly shoebox-sized, and looks cluttered even when it's clean).

The Rainie reading on tagging has me thinking a lot about how organized my online presence is. I'm learning, tools are improving, and I'm liking the way my online room is shaping up.

in anticipation of flickr

I love photos (taking them, viewing them, sharing them), and "making" things with them (though I never seem to get around to actually printing photos... Am I doing so less because I'm spending more time staring at my computer screen than I am at, or within, my home walls?), so I'm very excited about our flickr lesson.

In anticipation, I happened upon this incredible site with lots of links to applications that do really fun photo-y things for free:

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

Here's one example (featuring my boyfriend Brent and friend Megan):














I just spent way too long fooling around with another fun tool, the Magazine Cover maker. See my new profile picture for the fruit of my labor.

Rebecca Blood mentions in her blog posting on flickr (http://www.rebeccablood.net/archive/2006/04/how_flickr_singlehandedly_inve_1.html):

"Flickr slideshow of photos of the French employment riots [Flash required] amply demonstrates that, on Flickr at least, collaborative photojournalism is thriving. That success is at least as much a product of Flickr itself as it is a product of the contributing photographers."

It is clear to me, too, that photojournalism is thriving (as always, I remind my students--and myself--not to believe everything I see in shared photos, no matter how many words they're worth. I'm really interested in consider what trends are born in response to new technologies, and which technologies are devised in response to an expressed need/interest. My guess is that it's almost impossible to tell, and probably irrelevant. Maybe.

Speaking of photo editing software, I just learned (from NYCSLIST) that Sumo Paint is an online image editor that opens in your browser and does most of the things you’d want from Photoshop for free: http://sumopaint.com/web/

Neat!

As I'm reading more about flickr and the "mashups" out there, I'm increasingly excited about the whole thing. My one hesitation, though, is the idea of putting all of my personal photos . Privacy settings, sure, but... they'll be out there for people who know more tricks than I do to access. This general unease is the single reason I've not yet uploaded all of my photos to flickr (my other big fear being that I somehow lose all of my precious private photos thanks to a busted hard drive and a failure to adequately back them up).

A few other reading notes:
- Gail Shea Grainger's "Dewey Browse"
- Howard Rheingold: "My thinking is that activism, to be successful, needs to be visible." (http://www.smartmobs.com/2005/08/16/flickr-based-smartmobbing-the-ministry-of-reshelving)
- This social bookmarking tools site proposes appealing lessons
- Should I create a librarian trading card? Here.
- making sense of tagging / labeling / bookmarking: Lee Rainie argues that tagging is more tailored to individual needs than Dewey's more all-inclusive system.
- I'm not tempted to "label" my blog posts... yet. I will consider if/how it might be of use to me.

order of preference

I just noted that when I reviewed this week's assignment I viewed the videos first, read the book with varied pictures second, and read the printed, densely paragraphed article last. Upon reflection, I believe I chose to view the videos, the mixed-media, first because it they would take the least discipline, somehow, to engage in.

I wonder, though, if viewing the videos first then made it more difficult to focus without distraction on the printed materials. I noticed long ago that I personally operate less efficiently in the evening after watching TV (so I generally try to avoid it). I appreciate the distinct 'zones' each portion of the assignments put me in.

tech notes

As I write this blog, I'd like to make note of what specific tasks were confusing or difficult for me to accomplish using blogspot. I plan to experiment with adding to this post a note about these difficulties as I come across them.

- I find that I am not able to space postings using the tab key. It's more frustrating than I'd think it would be!