Tammy Worcester's Tech Tip of the Week

One of the best speakers I heard at TCEA was Tammy Worcester. Her Tammy's Tech Tip of the Week is a great way to keep up with new tools to use on the web. She sends out a tip a week via email or through a RSS feed.  Her presentation is the one that introduced me to Evernote.  She also mentioned another site called Dropbox, which is a site where you can store files and then pick the file up on another computer--again an example of cloud computing.

Another cute idea from her weekly tips is the Ifake Text site.  A great idea for a research project, this site allows students to put information into a template that mimics a text chat on various carriers.  This would be a fun assignment as well as one that does not lend itself to plagarism.

I have a copy of Tammy's book Google Tools for Teaching and Learning (link courtesy of Amazon.)  It's not so much a book to read cover to cover but rather to keep handy for a reference.

If you get the chance to hear Tammy speak at a conference, by all means go!  And if you don't get the chance to hear her in person, at least make sure you sign up for her Tech Tips of the Week.  You'll learn so much from her!

Evernote

So am I the only person left in the world who hasn't been using Evernote?  What a fabulous website!  You can store documents, pictures and audio files from your device and pick it up on your computer or vice versa.  It's a perfect example of cloud computing. I have the app on my phone and took some notes from the TCEA conference and now I'm reviewing those notes on my computer.

This would solve so many problems for me when I need to transfer files and forget my USB drive.  I can also see suggesting it to kids so they won't lose their USB drive too!

Tammy Worcester's presentation gave me this website and many more.  Her Tammy's Tech Tips of the Week will keep you abreast of some of the latest and greatest tools out there on the web. 

Over the next few days, I'll share more of what I learned at TCEA. Right now, my head is spinning.....

Oh my goodness!!

My head is spinning from everything I've learned today at TCEA. Watch this space-I'll be sharing my new knowledge with you soon!

Recharging the batteries this week.

So this is my week for learning and recharging and because of that, I may not get a chance to post as much as I would like.  Our district has a conference every February for teacher inservice.  Teachers present ideas and strategies that are working; groups get a chance to get together to plan and share, and the district brings in guest speakers to share with us all.

This week is also the week of the Texas Computer Educator's conference.  I'm going to go to that as well.  I'm looking forward to seeing lots of vendors and seeing more presentations from around the state.  There's a library strand at the conference so lots of sessions are directed to teacher librarians. 

So while I may not be able to post much this week, I should be learning lots that I can draw from and share in the days to come. 

The Internet? Bah!

OMG this is the funniest article....and a little scary too.  A fellow librarian ran across this article from Newsweek magazine dated 1995 entitled, The Internet, Bah! The writer is talking about the rise of the Internet, but he doesn't think it will become as big as people seem to think. I love this line:  "I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic."

Well, let's see.....Egypt's revolution, Libya's revolution, pretty much every revolution in the Middle East the past few years has been sparked by Twitter and Facebook.  I would love to find a telecommunting job so I could travel with my husband.  Virtual communities exist everywhere--my favorite is Ravelry, a great site for knitters and crocheters world-wide.  Our classrooms at my school are about as multimedia as they can be--projectors, computers, netbooks, doc cameras, clickers, MOBI boards--just to name some things off the top of my head.

Another great line: "Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard."  Yes, every voice is heard.  If not, I couldn't write this blog.  Even if no one reads it right now, my words are going to be here for ........ever basically.  And if I ever get my novel finished, I might join the thousands who are bypassing editors to self publish.

Here is one place though the author got it right.  "What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading."  No kidding--and it's only getting worse.   We don't take time to train our children to become critical thinkers of what they read on the web. And as information grows exponentially on the web, the "wasteland of unfiltered data" is getting bigger and bigger--the bad outweighing the good.

But the funniest/ scariest part of this article--it is from 1995.  That's not even 20 years ago.  Can you even imagine where we will be 20 years from right now?  I'm not sure I can.

Is Dewey dying out?

Well, this post is for my librarian friends/ readers.  I found this article entitled "The Dewey Dilemna"  in Library Journal--it's from 2009 so it's been around a while.  I didn't realize this was as big of a controversy at all, and I'm still trying to process the information in my head.

Basically, the article talks about libraries moving away from the Dewey Decimal system and using a system called BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications).  This is the system used by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc to classify books for sale.  It isn't as detailed as Dewey but consumers are more used to it and find it more user friendly.  This system classes books into 52 broad categories with several sub categories.  The article says "it fuses the functions of subject headings with classification". But the main point is people find it easier to navigate than using Dewey. 

I'm a bit torn here.  I'm all about customer service and making libraries accessible to the public.  But I'm quite frankly getting very tired of libraries being pushed to follow book store models.  Genre shelving, dropping Dewey, adding coffee bars--all these library trends are coming straight from bookstores (well, actually probably straight from Barnes and Noble).  I know we need to stay current and offer what people want.  But changing the way libraries classify books is just one too many changes for me.

I consider myself fairly current and I keep up with trends in the library/ publishing world.  I have  library Twitter and Facebook accounts.  We have digital signage; we display book trailers.  But why do we need to change an established system that has worked for a hundred years?  Why can't we do a better job of educating people on how the Dewey system works?  I studied the system of course in my cataloging class (many years ago...) but before that I learned the basics--through working as a shelver in my local public library. And before that as a child patron of the library, I knew where my favorite books were located and how to look for them on the catalog.  And if I couldn't find them, I knew to ask the librarian. 

One consultant quoted in the article says, "the issue isn't which system is superior; it's about the user's experience. When interviewing nonusers, [the consulatant] reports, “I heard over and over 'those numbers scare me,' 'I don't understand them,' 'they make me feel stupid.' The goal of having a BISAC-based scheme is to put customers at ease and help them become more self-sufficient and comfortable using the library.”

This paragraph from a library science professor is more along the lines of my opinion. 

Wayne Wiegand, professor of library and information studies and American studies at Florida State University, Tallahassee, says, “In general, bookstores do a better job of identifying newer titles relevant to their customers' interests, but that doesn't mean they understand those interests. They are mostly responding to a market demand.” While he thinks libraries should respond to what readers want rather than expecting readers to fit into the library's way of doing things, he takes a pragmatic view. “Dewey has faults but so does any other classification scheme.... To talk of changing classification systems at this time is unrealistic.”

So I would be interested in hearing from librarians...and teachers, too.....what do you do in your library?  Do you use genre shelving?  Do you use this book store model?  Am I being too old fashioned and unrealistic? 

Seth Godin

I have started reading Seth Godin's blog and receiving his newsletter.  The man has some good advice and he has a way of going straight to the point.  I wish I could be so eloquent and straightforward in my writing. 

His latest newsletter concerns what I think is the best description of the problem with SOPA I have read.  He talks about the availablity of information on the web and how especially music is benefitting from the "all access" idea or, as he calls it, Ubiquity (great word--that I had to look up to define!).  Now the movie folks are trying to get into the business of limiting access to the web through trying to promote SOPA.

Better than trying to explain everything he's written, I think I will just let you read his eloquent words at his blog -- the Domino project.