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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)