Do you have a new school in your district that needs a Teacher Passcode to access the GPB Education Streaming resource? 

With the 2008-2009 school year starting, many school districts are contacting GPB Education to set up their new schools.

In order to add an individual school to the streaming database, please complete the following:

Email the bulleted information below to Brad Walse (brad_walse@discovery.com) and the Education Sales Team education_sales@discovery.com at Discovery Education.

• Contact Name
• Contact Email
• District Name
• School Name
• Street Address
• City
• ZIP Code
• Phone Number
• Principal Name

After receiving the required information, Discovery Education will enter the new school account into the streaming database, the account will be created and the Teacher Passcode information will be sent to Contact Name you provide.

If you have any questions, please contact Discovery Education at 1-800-323-9084.

Have a fantastic school year!

Katherine Aiken
GPB Education Digital Distribution & TIE Network Manager
www.tienetwork.org

Every semester, I attend UGA’s graduation, to enjoy the selfish pleasure of watching my students cross the stage and shake President Adams’ hand.

There’s always an eminent personality on hand to give the graduation address. Last Saturday, the speaker was Maxine Clark, a distinguished alum. She is the highly successful entrepreneur who invented the Build-a-Bear Workshop® empire.

For me, her most important statement had to do with listening to kids. She described how her adult friends and colleagues discouraged her bear ideas. A ten-year-old girl, however, wanted to know where she could go to make a bear right now. Other children had similar reactions.

We sometimes forget to listen to what the kids have to say. We worry all the time about getting teachers to collaborate with media specialists, and to get parents involved. If kids were asked their opinions, how would they want the library to be arranged and programmed? It’s not always what we think.

Food for thought! I wish you all luck as the school year gets underway.

Mary Ann Fitzgerald, University of Georgia

Join us this year at the North Central District RESA facility for four packed-filled days that will provide you with “A Recipe for Success”.

Meeting dates are four Thursdays during the year from 8:30 – 3:30.  Dates for the 2008-2009 school year are September 4^th, October 30^th, February 5^th and May 7^th.  Each meeting includes a copyright, technology, media and collaboration component.  Judy Serritella from the State Department of Education will be our featured speaker and provide us with a DOE update on September 4^th.  Hope to see you then.

Esther Brenneman

GLMA North Central District Chairperson

At the GLMA Summer Institute, a task force worked on the direction GLMA online communications should take for the future.  The task force suggested a more timely communication newsletter than the current quarterly newsletter.  In response to this suggestion, GLMA will now publish a monthly NewsLeader Digest on the GLMA blog.  This digest will provide timely notice of upcoming events and news.  The past NewsLeader newsletters will remain archived on the GLMA website.

Upcoming events:

August 29-30 Decatur Book Festival

September 21 – October 4 Banned Books Week

Catch Up on the Month’s Information:

July 2008 posts

Remember to…

Register for GaCOMO

Check with RESA district for media trainings this year

Tip of the Month

Help the new teachers in your school with a media newsletter outlining the services you provide and those little tips about the school that only a veteran knows.  Keep it simple and to the point so they can use it as a quick reference as they acclimate to your school.

Question of the Month

How do you introduce the media center program to your students? Leave comments on your best practice and unique ideas for media center orientation.

Not that I am old but Andrew and I are discussing his library...

So let me give you a brief history of my life as a librarian. The moment that fate stepped in was when I had applied to grad school for an MSLS and the club I was working for wanted me to go to Bartending School. The grad schools came in first, California State stepped up, but the University of Tennessee (Yup, I Volunteer for a lot of things, excuse the pun) offered money; not much and I had to work for it, but the rest is history. It is worth pointing out that I have a high circulation desk that I prefer to stand at, and do “last call for check out” and I do bouncer duty at the gates. Did you know that nipple rings can set those things off?

I am old enough to have worked with a woman who told me she saw a demonstration of the overhead projector and was told that it would make libraries obsolete.  My three favorite shirts from grad school at the University of Tennessee were; one with a clinched fist above the word Strike, another that read “We are lawful wives of the 3×5s”  and finally a tasteful red one with “Mao was a librarian.”   I call myself a librarian because I was trained as an academic librarian not an academic media specialist and because people know where you work when you tell them you are a librarian.  Of course, they still don’t know what we do.  I was in a jury panel that was going to try a case concerning a young man who shot a nail into the head of another guy. I didn’t make the final cut, but the judge did say that “the librarian” is excused.  The other variously titled people from libraries he just said “thank you.you are excused”.  Of course, it might have had something to do with the defendant waving at me and calling out, “Hey, Miz Lay.” 

Later, I got an Instructional Technology degree from the University of Georgia and learned that computers were going to make libraries obsolete….  Having started with filing cards and now running two classroom computer labs, one on site professional lab, and eighteen work stations on the floor; not to mention the OPAC and circulation system, I think it is safe to say that the overheads are gone but if libraries are obsolete I sure am working hard in one. Once again somebody has to know and show people what to do with the information…

More later…

This is our third “debatable” topic of interest…

“Should the SLMS only teach about copyright issues through staff development or take a more aggressive role in informing faculty and students of the law?”

Copyright infringement happens all the time in our schools. Oftentimes, it occurs because the teacher is not even aware that they are breaking copyright law. I can recall many instances when I stumbled upon someone infringing on copyright guidelines: making illegal copies of sheet music, recording full length songs onto video, using the opaque to copy Big Bird for the bulletin board, photocopying full texts so every student in the class would have a copy, and the list goes on. Exactly how proactive and assertive should the SLMS be in dealing with copyright issues such as this? While it is obvious that the teacher who is committing an infringement should be told they are doing so, should the SLMS routinely check to see if such situations are occurring?

One school of thought is that the SLMS should go beyond simply informing students, teachers and administrators about copyright law by taking measures that expand their basic knowledge in this area. For instance, Doug Johnson suggests the SLMS can become a “copyright counselor” by guiding students and teachers to make informed decisions regarding copyright and fair use. The more assertive you are in informing students and faculty of copyright laws, the more likely they are to understand that this is theft and support punishment of offenders. The better informed faculty and students are, the more likely there will be no embarrassing infringements for the school and school system. When the role of copyright officer is taken more seriously and aggressively by the SLMS, the more protected the users of information will be.

The opposite viewpoint is that the SLMS should only present a good, basic overview of most copyright infringements through an in-service at the beginning of the school year. Teachers can inform students in their classes about proper use of resources and explain what is, and what is not, allowed regarding copyright. Rather than spending precious time and energy distributing detailed information beyond a basic staff development session, the SLMS should budget for legal purchase of needed materials, help teachers obtain legal copyright permissions, and model ethical and moral behavior regarding copyright law. Informing teachers and students at the point of infringement is sufficient; there is no need to offend teachers by presenting more details than necessary when dealing with sensitive copyright issues.

The next question becomes: when a teacher is observed breaking copyright guidelines, should you turn them in to the administration or look the other way? I think the goal here is to lead the faculty and students to a point where they automatically seek out the proper way of dealing with copyright “situations” when there is a question. If the SLMS can get users to first recognize when there might be an issue of copyright clearance, present this question to him/her as copyright officer in the school, and then respond based on the allowable actions, just maybe the more appropriate title could be COPYRIGHT GURU!

(I strongly recommend the Carol Mann Simpson book Copyright for schools.)

Johnson, D. (2007, June 13). Lessons school librarians teach others. Retrieved July 23, 2008, from http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/lessons-school-librarians-teach-others.html.

Russell, C. (2004). Complete copyright: An Everyday guide for librarians. Chicago: ALA.

Simpson, C.M. (2005). Copyright for schools: A Practical guide. 4th ed. Worthington, Ohio: Linworth.

Dr. Phyllis R. Snipes
University of West Georgia

The  Beijing Olympics begin in 26 days!  The official site has education resources concerning records, Hall of Fame, the Olympic Movement and more. Check del.icio.us for more links.

We begin school the Monday before the start of the Olympics and I am planning a book display to entice our students to read about the commitment, challenge, and history behind the Olympic Games.  I will also pull books concerning China (especially apropos for the 7th graders who study China this year) for check out during orientations.  In the fiction area, I will pull books by Chinese-American authors like Laurence Yep, Lisa Yee, Adeline Yen Mah, and Lensey Namioka.

How will you incorporate the Olympics in your school’s media center?

Kris Woods, Media Specialist, M.A. Teasley Middle School, Canton, GA

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

Are you looking for a cool multimedia Web 2.0 tool to show your teachers this fall?  Check out Mixwit, a fun “media playground” that allows you to artwork, photos, and music in a format that can be easily shared!  Read about how this teacher, Konrad Glogowski , used this tool as part of a novel study (hit the play button above to play his mix); you can also visit and see student examples by going to the link beneath this screenshot.

blog of proximal development

You can register your own account for free!  Click on the link below to visit Mixwit and start mixing up your own creative projects today!

Mixwit - Create and Share Digital Mixtapes

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com

As a recent present to myself, I bought a Kindle.

Kindle is Amazon’s digital book reader thingy, in case you haven’t heard.

Long a fan of handheld devices, I had resisted buying any kind of e-book reader. The printed book is an elegant technology. I hesitate to adopt a new gadget when the old version could hardly be improved on.

There will always be books in my home and office. However, this device seems better than previous generations of readers. Here are some basic reasons for shifting some of my library from print to electrons:

• Growing concern for diminishing numbers of trees (especially here in the south, where our pines so often become toilet paper)
• A need to declutter and simplify
• Frustration over never being able to check out a best-seller at the library, due to popular demand (a good thing)
• Distaste over having to carry so much stuff with me everywhere, including a laptop

These were personal reasons. The cool reasons that really sold this device to me were:

• No computer syncing required
• No cost for wireless access (it works over one of the cell phone networks, and you need not own that particular cell plan)
• Ability to access the web – to a very limited and slow degree, but still…
• For a dime, you can email a document to Amazon, where it will be converted to Kindle format and magically appear in your table of contents
• Plays audiobooks (for which you do need the provided USB cable to hook up with a service like Audible)
• Plays mp3s
• Can use some web tools designed for mobile devices, like the Google mobile apps, including calendar, email, and maps, so it’s possible to do email if you can type with your thumbs.
• While reading, it’s easy to annotate specific lines of text, just as you would pencil something in a book.
• Can download substantial samples of most titles before deciding to purchase.

So far, I am quite pleased with my present. Teaching class, I used it as a backup for my online class materials. I’m now reading my 2^nd novel. “Turning pages” is simple; the device is lightweight (about the size of a paperback). The “print” is highly legible, even for those of us who are (ahem) needing more light these days. (You can also increase/decrease the font size.) Books cost about $10, and are instantly available.

For me, the Kindle fills a niche. For good or bad, I can instantly (for a fee) access a title that would involve at least a car trip or several days of waiting for delivery. Also, $30 seems a lot to pay for a best-seller entertainment novel that I will only read once. I will still visit the public and academic library for older titles, highly visual titles, etc.

I could gush more but will stop here. I’m not sure if this first edition of the Kindle is something that would hold up in a school setting – but I think it’s worth a look.

Mary Ann Fitzgerald

University of Georgia