2010 Elected Officers

 Congratulations to the slate of officers elected by the GLMA membership for the 2010 calendar year!

• President – Valerie Ayer

• President-Elect – Betsy Razza

• Secretary – Ann Schaub

• Treasurer – Nan Brown

These volunteers look forward to serving the membership of GLMA in their new roles. Please don’t hesitate to contact them with any suggestions you have, or if you would like to join a committee or otherwise volunteer for GLMA Feel free to contact the GLMA Executive Office if you have any membership, advocacy, or general GLMA questions at (404) 299-7700 or elizabeth@jlh-consulting.com. Thank you for your votes and your continued participation in GLMA!

Chatting with Kids About Being Online

I think media specialists have a terrific opportunity to take the lead when it comes to talking about online safety for students. This publication comes from the U.S. government. You can download it as a pdf, order free copies, reprint it, etc-very handy! There are lots of other useful online safety links at the site to check out. They are even looking for districts to partner in implementing the suggestions in the guide.

The state of California has created an excellent hotlist of cybersafety links. CyberSmart! has a wonderful set of lesson plans that is organized by grade level.

One challenge we face is how to teach our students to make good decisions without sensationalizing the topic. As we ask to use more and more Web 2.0 tools in our schools we have to address these safety issues proactively. But we’re media specialists so we can do it!

Judi Repman

Georgia Southern University

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

On today’s LM_Net Select I found a wonderful new source for primary documents:  Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience.  New documents are added daily to this site.  You must follow the link and read today’s post. 

It includes the original letter written by Virginia O’Hanlon in 1897 to the editor of The Sun, a New York newspaper.  Following her letter is the official reply as posted in The Sun.  Take a few moments out of your very busy day to read the editorial.  It could never be explained better…yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  These printed words written over a hundred years ago will warm your heart today.  Merry Christmas, everyone.

Feel the Need for Browsing Speed? Check Out Google Chrome and Its New Extensions

Google Chrome Extensions via kwout

I started using Google Chrome as one of my browsers in August as a way of accessing and using my Google toolbelt my efficiently, but I have come to love it as much as Firefox this autumn.  Google Chrome is a speedy browser that is incredibly easy to use and navigate.

However, until now, Chrome did not offer the myriad of extensions available in Firefox.    You will need the “beta” version of Google Chrome to run the new extensions that are now offered.  While I am sure there will be tweaks to these extensions as they receive feedback from users, I am excited by the possibilities because Chrome is such a fast, stable, and clean browser.  I am especially excited to see the Diigo bookmark extension (not as good as the one designed by Diigo for Firefox but better than nothing) and theShareaholic extensions; I’m also intrigued by the Google Quick Scroll extension and how students might possibly use this tool for information skimming and scanning.  Other fun extensions include NPR News, Music, and Books as well as the Picnik photo editing extension. If you are playing with Google Wave like I am, you will also want to test drive the Google Wave extension to monitor your waves.

After showing the browser to my Media 21 students earlier this semester, many installed it home and report that they love its sleek look and lightning fast performance.   I will be sharing the apps information with them in class this week as I feel confident some will want to experiment and play with these new extensions, too.

If you have not tried Google Chrome, I encourage you to check it out.  If you are heavy user of Google Apps, I especially recommend it as the Google Apps, as you might expect, live more happily in this browser space.

New Acrobat.com and Other Collaboration Tools

Anyone here all in the cloud?  By that I mean “cloud computing” which is just a buzzword for using mostly online tools rather than programs loaded onto single computers.  It’s much better than leaving documents on the wrong laptop or having to send cumbersome attachments or toting around thumb drives.

I’m not saying there aren’t any disadvantages.  For the most part, the free or online tools don’t have as many features.  But for basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and more there are a wealth of tools and they’re getting better all the time.

I’ll assume that you’re familiar with Google Documents.  It’s definitely the most convenient and they’ve recently added more templates, translation, and now even equations which should be useful to advanced math students.

Very similar to Google Docs, but with a few more features is Zoho’s Writer.  This is much more like a complete word processor and probably the most you can get without downloading Open Office.

My personal favorite is Adobe’s Buzzword.  It’s simple, yet stylish and inviting.  It’s a bare bones word processor, but intuitive and being Flash-based, much nicer looking than most.  Now Adobe has completely revamped and has a whole suite of tools at Acrobat.com.  They have Buzzword, a new Presentation tool, a new spreadsheet tool called Table, an area to upload and store all your PDFs (so you can clear out that downloads folder  of yours and keep everything safe) and they have an online meeting space.  This is certainly worth a look.

Whatever tools you use, and whether or not you’re completely “in the cloud,” the are plenty of ways to backup, share and collaborate.  Enjoy and leave any other good collaboration tools in the comments.

-Jim Randolph