Just took the copyright quiz, and I can honestly say that I didn't feel confident on many of them with the exception of showing a movie at a fundraiser. I was particularly confused by #10 and #12. I'm not sure how showing a (non-curricular) movie in your classroom is different than showing a film in your home to a bunch of kids or watching a film on a tour bus. Is it because it's school? I was equally surprised that showing a TV program that a teacher taped violated copyright law. I actually thought that the more removed from the original date the video was shown, the less problematic it would be.
After taking the quiz, I'm curious about both old and new magazine and newspaper articles. What is the protocol for copying them and distributing them? Is it okay to link to an article from your website? Are you allowed to project an article live on your projector or save it as a PDF to project later? Hmmmm......
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Pixlr
I can't believe I hadn't played with Pixlr sooner. What a useful application! I love that you don't have to register (the userid and password insanity could be its own post.). It's free and you don't have to load an album to manipulate one picture. As I mentioned earlier this summer, I procrastinate uploading pictures because I feel wedded to the computer and the albums for hours. Being able to work with one picture at a time whenever I feel like it seems liberating.
Do I think this has practical applications for my course? Probably not. But I could see our advisory group using it to make a bulletin board. Perhaps The Daisy could use it, too.
Do I think this has practical applications for my course? Probably not. But I could see our advisory group using it to make a bulletin board. Perhaps The Daisy could use it, too.
Yippy, IPL,and GoogleScholar
I went back to the "working the web" sites after reading some other MS teachers' posts. Yippy didn't seem terribly different from other search engines with the exception of the cloud feature. I think it would be really helpful for MS students to see how terms are grouped and arranged. They often have trouble searching for topics they don't know much about and the cloud filter would give them some good search terms to explore under the bigger topic heading.
I really liked the clean look of the Internet Public Library and its marketing of "information you can trust". My aforementioned librarian buddy had mentioned the site to me last year; she was required to answer questions in the "ask a librarian" section for a course she took last year. The variety and quality of sources impressed me, but I was disappointed by the number of ads on many of the linked sites. The advertising made it difficult to find the relevant information. I did find a cool science fiction collection that I never would have thought to find without the IPL. I will definitely bookmark the site for future perusing.
GoogleScholar just seemed too sophisticated for my students' and my own teaching needs. It had great scholarly articles, but I could waste a lot of time snooping around about H.L. Mencken or Southern Gothic lit without a lot of payoff for my course. With that said, I may go back for SWI if a student chooses a topic with which I'm not terribly familiar or is having trouble finding resources. JSTOR might be more useful.
I really liked the clean look of the Internet Public Library and its marketing of "information you can trust". My aforementioned librarian buddy had mentioned the site to me last year; she was required to answer questions in the "ask a librarian" section for a course she took last year. The variety and quality of sources impressed me, but I was disappointed by the number of ads on many of the linked sites. The advertising made it difficult to find the relevant information. I did find a cool science fiction collection that I never would have thought to find without the IPL. I will definitely bookmark the site for future perusing.
GoogleScholar just seemed too sophisticated for my students' and my own teaching needs. It had great scholarly articles, but I could waste a lot of time snooping around about H.L. Mencken or Southern Gothic lit without a lot of payoff for my course. With that said, I may go back for SWI if a student chooses a topic with which I'm not terribly familiar or is having trouble finding resources. JSTOR might be more useful.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Glogster v. Big Huge Labs
So I liked the Tech Department's assessment that Glogster could certainly re-energize the tired, old poster project. Big, huge labs, on the other hand, seemed to have fewer classroom applications, but was fun to explore. The material required for big, huge labs projects seemed to require less thought--essentially the program does the work for you. You can just plug in the info, choose some colors, determine a font size, and **whoosh** you've designed a movie poster or become Andy Warhol. Fun, but usually, I'm looking to go to a little deeper in assignments.
I particularly like that Glogster seemed more open-ended. While you can manipulate some of the templates and choose certain fonts or color-schemes, the students can add numerous images, manipulate them, add text, add sound, and create backgrounds. I really like the website's samples of student work for The Iliad. I would recommend checking out the student work (which looks pretty authentic). It required justification of ideas, including musical and visual choices. Very cool!
I'm going to need to play with this quite a bit more though to see how it saves. Could the kids save to the studentproj folder? Would they need an account to use it? How could the whole class see their work? I think I can figure this out, but it's going to take a little playing on the computer. The site is definitely going into my Delicious account.
I particularly like that Glogster seemed more open-ended. While you can manipulate some of the templates and choose certain fonts or color-schemes, the students can add numerous images, manipulate them, add text, add sound, and create backgrounds. I really like the website's samples of student work for The Iliad. I would recommend checking out the student work (which looks pretty authentic). It required justification of ideas, including musical and visual choices. Very cool!
I'm going to need to play with this quite a bit more though to see how it saves. Could the kids save to the studentproj folder? Would they need an account to use it? How could the whole class see their work? I think I can figure this out, but it's going to take a little playing on the computer. The site is definitely going into my Delicious account.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
GoogleDocs-part I
I'm trying to navigate GoogleDocs this morning in an attempt to find a more efficient way for the 7th grade team to navigate the numerous documents that arise from the Sustainable World Investigation (SWI). We were using Microsoft Groove, but when the network went down last fall we lost the account. Currently, we're using Moodle, but that acts as more of a bulletin board for us than a place where we can edit and revise documents.
Hurdle #1: make sure the team all has gmail accounts. The shared document feature will only work with other gmail folks from what I can tell. I sent out an invite to the team members at their BMS accounts.
I heard a rumor that the new Google Wave might fit the bill for our team because it allows several people to work on a file at once. Does anyone know about this?
Okay, I'm not getting the file uploading done if I'm on here...so I'm off.
Hurdle #1: make sure the team all has gmail accounts. The shared document feature will only work with other gmail folks from what I can tell. I sent out an invite to the team members at their BMS accounts.
I heard a rumor that the new Google Wave might fit the bill for our team because it allows several people to work on a file at once. Does anyone know about this?
Okay, I'm not getting the file uploading done if I'm on here...so I'm off.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
ARTstor
So I've gone rogue from the TECHSsploration mission...first Delicious, now ARTstor. I'll get back on the bus with the next post.
The nice thing about having a friend who is an art librarian is that she is always hooking me up with new websites and pointing me in the direction of new software (see the "Delicious" post below for more details on how I'm tracking all the new information.). I was telling her about the goals of TECHsplorations and she asked, "Do you guys have a subscription to ARTstor?" When I said we had JSTOR, she responded, "Well, why don't I let you play around with my ARTstor account for a little bit to see what you think?"
I fully expected ARTstor to be a little too esoteric and academic for the Middle School classroom, but, boy, was I wrong! I found the software much easier to navigate than JSTOR and frankly, much more visually pleasing, as you might expect. Since we don't currently have a subscription to it (although Patti R-W is more than happy to pursue it if other faculty members are interested), let me sum up how it can be used beyond the visual arts classroom.
The catalog of pieces includes not only small pieces, but frescoes and architecturally significant pieces. For instance, we were able to pull up several ancient frescoes, zoom in on them, get a 360 degree view of where they're located, and potentially, mark them up on the computer screen. They can also be saved into an ARTstor account that you could pull up in class or during a presentation. Wow! Having never seen the Pantheon in Rome, I was amazed to see how close it is to the action in the modern city. For the English classroom, I would be interested in using this to pull up pieces for class discussion and writing assignments. I had tired of checking out 15 art books from our library and lugging them around campus for a self-portrait writing assignment; I think I'd be willing to re-institute the assignment if I can pull up similar images from my desk. I can also seem numerous applications for this in the history and foreign language classrooms.
Oh, I almost forgot that numerous galleries and museums have entire collections available for access through ARTstor. Very, very cool. The one drawback that I see right now is that several artists' estates haven't granted access to ARTstor to use their works. So if you're set on using Picasso, you're back to a GoogleImage search or getting the big art books. Jodi, my librarian friend, sees this changing (maybe not for Picasso); she said she's watched the list of pieces available grow monthly.
If you'd like to try out ARTstor, check in with Patti R-W. It's a fun program that combines the academic, the visual, and personal interest.
The nice thing about having a friend who is an art librarian is that she is always hooking me up with new websites and pointing me in the direction of new software (see the "Delicious" post below for more details on how I'm tracking all the new information.). I was telling her about the goals of TECHsplorations and she asked, "Do you guys have a subscription to ARTstor?" When I said we had JSTOR, she responded, "Well, why don't I let you play around with my ARTstor account for a little bit to see what you think?"
I fully expected ARTstor to be a little too esoteric and academic for the Middle School classroom, but, boy, was I wrong! I found the software much easier to navigate than JSTOR and frankly, much more visually pleasing, as you might expect. Since we don't currently have a subscription to it (although Patti R-W is more than happy to pursue it if other faculty members are interested), let me sum up how it can be used beyond the visual arts classroom.
The catalog of pieces includes not only small pieces, but frescoes and architecturally significant pieces. For instance, we were able to pull up several ancient frescoes, zoom in on them, get a 360 degree view of where they're located, and potentially, mark them up on the computer screen. They can also be saved into an ARTstor account that you could pull up in class or during a presentation. Wow! Having never seen the Pantheon in Rome, I was amazed to see how close it is to the action in the modern city. For the English classroom, I would be interested in using this to pull up pieces for class discussion and writing assignments. I had tired of checking out 15 art books from our library and lugging them around campus for a self-portrait writing assignment; I think I'd be willing to re-institute the assignment if I can pull up similar images from my desk. I can also seem numerous applications for this in the history and foreign language classrooms.
Oh, I almost forgot that numerous galleries and museums have entire collections available for access through ARTstor. Very, very cool. The one drawback that I see right now is that several artists' estates haven't granted access to ARTstor to use their works. So if you're set on using Picasso, you're back to a GoogleImage search or getting the big art books. Jodi, my librarian friend, sees this changing (maybe not for Picasso); she said she's watched the list of pieces available grow monthly.
If you'd like to try out ARTstor, check in with Patti R-W. It's a fun program that combines the academic, the visual, and personal interest.
Delicious
I don't think Delicious is on the TECHsploration list of sites, but I have found this software to be the most helpful in managing my online wanderings. Ali Cohen helped me set up an account in April or May when she discovered the number of bookmarks floating around in my Firefox settings. I really hadn't had time to sort through the old bookmarks, explore the program's options, or figure out how to make it work best for me until now.
The tag feature helped me organize my bookmarks into units for the year...grammar, Of Mice and Men, cross-curricular, Middle School, etc. You can apply as many tags as you want to a bookmark, so you won't lose the website down the road. BUT, I would recommend you read the very thorough help menu before you start tagging. I didn't realize that the tags MUST be one word or the words must be separated by a period. I wound up deleting "To," "Kill," "A," "Mockingbird" as individual tags after I realized this. The "Kill" tag was a little shocking to see show up in my menu!
Also, you can choose to make your bookmarks private or public. What would be the point of having a public bookmark, you ask? If you mark your bookmark public, Delicious will show you all the other users who have also tagged this website. In addition, it will recommend similar articles or sites that users with that profile have marked. Rather than finding this invasive, it's been a great way for me to do some passive, professional, social networking. I'm not always into bulletin boards, chat groups, or posts, but marking my own bookmarks as public was a helpful way to tap into some other sources I didn't know were out there.
I would recommend dragging the delicious tagging icons into your toolbars in your browser. It made it MUCH easier to just practice using the software. It put it on my radar more often.
I'd highly recommend this program to anyone whose friends and family send them semi-random links that they're sure they will return to later....just not right now! Those e-mails had been clogging my inbox, but not anymore!
The tag feature helped me organize my bookmarks into units for the year...grammar, Of Mice and Men, cross-curricular, Middle School, etc. You can apply as many tags as you want to a bookmark, so you won't lose the website down the road. BUT, I would recommend you read the very thorough help menu before you start tagging. I didn't realize that the tags MUST be one word or the words must be separated by a period. I wound up deleting "To," "Kill," "A," "Mockingbird" as individual tags after I realized this. The "Kill" tag was a little shocking to see show up in my menu!
Also, you can choose to make your bookmarks private or public. What would be the point of having a public bookmark, you ask? If you mark your bookmark public, Delicious will show you all the other users who have also tagged this website. In addition, it will recommend similar articles or sites that users with that profile have marked. Rather than finding this invasive, it's been a great way for me to do some passive, professional, social networking. I'm not always into bulletin boards, chat groups, or posts, but marking my own bookmarks as public was a helpful way to tap into some other sources I didn't know were out there.
I would recommend dragging the delicious tagging icons into your toolbars in your browser. It made it MUCH easier to just practice using the software. It put it on my radar more often.
I'd highly recommend this program to anyone whose friends and family send them semi-random links that they're sure they will return to later....just not right now! Those e-mails had been clogging my inbox, but not anymore!
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