Copyright is more than a concept

Reading from the Travelin' Librarian's Blog, came across a post reiterating our trite disclaimer about using copyrighted material but with an added twist. He quoted, as I also do below, from an Associated Press article posted on the KTVN Channel 2 Website:

Associated Press - February 15, 2011 7:05 PM ET

DENVER (AP) - A law firm that targets the unauthorized use of news content on the Internet has filed 32 lawsuits in federal court in Colorado seeking to stop the use of a Denver Post photograph showing an airport pat-down. . . .

Righthaven has been criticized by some for suing first, rather than asking bloggers or operators of websites to remove copyrighted content. . . . CEO Steve Gibson defended the strategy Tuesday, saying many people wrongfully assume that if something is posted on the Internet, it's in the public domain and can be used for free. . . .

In a notice to readers published Nov. 14, the Post said it would use all legal remedies to address copyright infringement. . . .

1 [sic] of those sued by Righthaven is Brian Hill, 20, of Mayodan, N.C. Hill said he found the Post picture on Google Images and posted it on his news and politics website, not knowing it was copyrighted.

Hill said an attorney from Righthaven called him Feb. 10 and said he could be liable for up to $150,000 in damages . . . . [apparently a settlement offer for $6000 is a possibility]

This, my friends, is why I try to teach our students about copyright law when we create multimedia content. Perhaps, as students they will not become the target of a lawsuit like the one described above but how many of our students might build their own businesses or work in small companies where they find themselves as Webmasters, public relations or news providers, marketing agents or social media liasons.

In education, with liberal interpretations of fair use, we feel protected but as we send our students out into a digital world, unless or until our national copyright laws are re-written, they will be held accountable by firms like Righthaven. Could you afford to pay $6000 (settlement offer) for every copyrighted image you ever used without permission? (I am sure I could not but do my best to use Creative Commons images and give credit whenever possible.)

Travelin' Librarian also identified an image search engine I had not seen before. Compfight searches Flickr and with one click on the primary search page, can limit search to Creative Commons images. In a couple quick tests, I did find images through Compfight that Google did not provide and so will definitely add it to my toolbox, but using Google's "advanced image search" and choosing "labeled for re-use" still seems to provide a broader selection of images.

NOTE: Remind students that searching creative commons does NOT assure that images are available without limitation. A copyrighted photo saved by another user to a Creative Commons license is still copyrighted. Multiple wrongs do not make a right.

Google in the kitchen

Sunday afternoon, sitting at home and looking for recipes and what did I find? Google has made it easier than ever before to find exactly the recipe you are looking for. Search recipes by ingredients, cooking time & calories.

Not only did this help me find exactly the recipe I was looking for more quickly than I ever could have on any of the recipe database sites, but now I have a new tool to share with our cooking classes. Bon appetite . . .

Check out the Google Blog introduction to this new tool "Slice and dice your recipe search results," posted on February 24."

"The Last Text"

Just for a moment, on my soapbox . . .

Not sure where this fits into the library curriculum but as a parent, uncle, teacher, friend, driver, human being, and as a citizen of the world with a voice and a platform, I cannot keep this to myself.

From the AT&T page where this video originally appeared:

Watch AT&T's new 10-minute documentary titled "The Last Text," featuring stories of real individuals whose lives have been adversely affected by texting behind the wheel.

AT&T created this documentary as part of its "It Can Wait" campaign because we want consumers be safe while using our technology. We are grateful and humbled by the bravery of the people who agreed to be on camera for the documentary. We would have no story to tell without them.

Learning you can see!

Check out this great new tool! Create a video trip across a map complete with music and captions in minutes on TripLine.

In conjunction with our focus on Black History Month, check out this demo of King's march from Selma to Montgomery. Click "Full Screen" for best effect and press the play icon to start video. Click on the caption summary boxes to pause video and read an elongated caption.

It literally only takes minutes to create a project like this! Available tools allow you to select points through search or by dropping directly on map. Text and pictures are easily added as captions. Uploaded pics can create trip automatically using time stamp and geotags! A diverse selection of music is available on the site and adding is as simple as a click!

Great tool with potential uses in any subject from mapping civilizations to wars to political campaign trips. Highlight a biography, an event, a mission or even a period in history; Where were the hotbeds and turning points of the Industrial Revolution? Maps can be made with connecting lines or without for projects like this.

Would love to see a map of Homer's travels, the Iditarod sled race, and my next vacation (or my last). Maps can be made public or private with a simple click.

Registering to create your own maps on TripLine is is simple and easy but many maps are available for viewing without registering or logging in. I give this site an A++ rating!!

Hey Doc, Can I help you ?

Working with one of our computer techs today, we were approached by a student who asked advice about her personal computer. I thought nothing of it until the tech related to me that he is often approached at parties and by virtual strangers with tech questions. He compared the approaches to those endured by doctors, lawyers, mechanics and other professionals with advanced knowledge in specific areas desired by less knowledgeable acquaintances.

Are librarians approached in this same manner? Not at the reference desk of the public library or by students or teachers against a tight deadline, but by friends, neighbors and acquaintances on the street or at the gym?

I realized as he made his comment, without malice or realization of what I was hearing, that this is the problem we are facing today as librarians fighting for our jobs and the right to continue serving the public. Trying to get legislatures and executives at local, state and national levels to see us as professionals is almost futile without the support of our friends and neighbors and strangers on the street.

Is it too late? I pray not but but wonder, how can we shift the paradigm? What can we do to elevate the perception regarding our ability to improve people's lives? Our ability to discover and organize information is irrelevant if others do not covet that ability and see us as the avenue to enlightenment.

We see ourselves as professionals and believe the lessons and the tools we can share with our students or patrons are both beneficial and can improve quality of life. Unless we can convey this opinion to others in a way that motivates them to aggressively seek and promote our services, the end may be nigh.

I have spent much of this year building my skills as a librarian through actions and through reading. I have not focused my attention on self-promotion or promotion of our field but it is becoming increasingly obvious that our only ray of hope is in tooting our own horns and trying to be heard.

Merely logging usage statistics is a path to eventual extinction. We must promote our services and ourselves to a far larger group than that which may be interested in usage statistics. It is not this narrow group who will decide the fate of the last librarian, but the users themselves who rise in our support.

Google improvements

I logged on to write that Google is now advertising "real-time collaboration" in Google Docs! WooHoo! I was disappointed to see the Google Wave experiment disbanded,, not because I liked the Wave, but because it did allow real-time collaboration that Docs did not. And now! Google to the rescue. They poured the Wave technology back into Docs to make it better than before!

So my next dilemma, why can't I get teachers or our computer services department as excited about these tools for students and especially for group projects? Well check out the white horse that rode into town on my Google Reader yesterday.

Google Apps Now In A New York State Of Mind

Washington Post - Oct 5, 2010
This deal will give 3.1 million students access to Google Apps for Education?including Gmail, Docs, Sites and Calendar.

Google Apps Now Available in New York Schools  

PC Magazine - Leslie Horn - Oct 5, 2010
... to providing schools the deployment and professional development resources they need to make Google Apps for Education - including Gmail, Docs, Sites, ...

New York schools go Google with Apps announcement

Fortune (blog) - Seth Weintraub - Oct 5, 2010
... they need to make Google Apps for Education—including Gmail, Docs, Sites and Calendar—a powerful tool for teachers and students across the state. ...

OK, so these are talking about state level decisions.  Not sure how they actually affect our district, but certainly should begin to give some credence to my mantra, "like it or don't, Google is real world and offers tools our students need to learn and use."

Is Google taking over the world?  Should we be scared?  Well these are questions for a different day, but for now, I see it as important that we teach users how to harness the power of the available tools as a step toward continued advancement and understanding of the digital world and how we can use it to learn and improve ourselves and our real world situation.

YouTube in a PowerPoint show!

Ok, All revved up to start posting regularly and my wheels are spinning off.  Great start to the school year but have jumped in full speed ahead.  Focus is on planning for the year and trying to get teacher's attention.  Lucky for me I have a few who are keeping me busy!

Have spent today trying to get ahead of the curve and figure out the best way to teach MLA formatting with newly installed Word 2007.  (What the heck is up with Google and the Calibri font?)  I will post on this topic very soon.  I've come up with some great questions regarding the level of teaching to do on this topic and some great solutions with various levels of student input.

Serendipitously, today I came across the answer to a question that I have been asked a bizzilion times (almost).  Can I put a YouTube video on my PowerPoint?  Well, yes Virginia, as of MS 2007 you can do exactly that!  And it is easy and fun!  Check out the video below for step by step details of what to do and how to do it.  (Might look a little scary for non-techies but very simple when following this recipe.)



This video assumes an active and unfiltered access to the Internet.  For districts that still block YouTube and other video sites other options do exist.  The same author who produced this video offers a second video describing a rather complicated method.  I prefer the much easier method of using Zamzar.com or other similar file conversion site to rip the video into a format that can be saved on the hard drive and played locally. 

When streaming video directly from YouTube, there are no copyright implications (see previous posts in this blog).  In any case where the video is removed from its source (converted and saved on your computer) it is important to remember to give credit to creators! 

Have a great day!

Explosion of Expression

Welcome to the Grand Illusion . . . Not exactly sure why but these Styx lyrics popped into my head when I finally realized I was going to give myself permission to write again.  My fingers are twitching I am so excited!

Yes, gave myself permission.  I am behind on some projects that I really need to get done and I have stopped myself every time I tried to express my thoughts here with the admonition that I should be using my time wisely to get my projects done.  Months have gone by and that strategy has not worked and so today I am giving in and will look for new motivation on those other fronts.

I have had a great summer with the family.  We enjoyed several weeks at the lake and a couple other roadtrips to add a little spice.  I worked a little and played Mr. Mom as my wife embarked on a new career.  Perhaps most enjoyable, we actually made time to do a few projects around our own house this summer.

I had one great interview for a secondary position.  It would have been a great job for me and, though it meant cutting lake time short I was very excited.  Turns out over 60 people applied including five with professional library experience.  Of the 60, eight were interviewed and three called back to teach a lesson.  It sounds as if I was a strong second choice but was edged out by one of the more experienced candidates.

My strengths, according to the interviewer who notified me of the results were my knowledge of technology but more importantly, my understanding that technology is not the answer without a strong curricular link.  He said my answers that focused on a scaffolded approach to teaching 21st Century Skills and preparation of students for life beyond high school with regards to research and presentation were very impressive.

Alas, summer is over and the job did not come my way but I am blessed that I have such a fantastic venue to continue to learn and grow as an educator and librarian.  Our team, two librarians, two clerks, and myself returned intact to greet a new year in a freshly painted and exciting library.  The computers are warmed up and the books dusted and we are ready to go! 

Perhaps it is a line later in the song, "deep inside we're all the same," that made this song relevant to me today.  Though I am technically still a Teaching Assistant, in my mind this year I am a librarian and plan to conduct myself as one at every opportunity.

Student learning is our priority

Alison Zmuda opened her day-long conference, Librarians as Learning Specialists, with the statement, "Without a curriculum and a robust assessment system school librarians cease to exist."  I was invigorated to hear the repetition throughout the day that, "Student learning is our priority."  She focused on ways to re-design our lessons and align our standards with content curriculum areas and standards.

Two weeks later I had the opportunity to attend a conference hosted by Dr. Ross Todd on the topic of Evidence Based Practice and School Libraries.  He spent the early morning describing our "invisible evidence syndrome," and the afternoon focusing us on "learning outcomes" verified by "evidence based practices."  His message and Alison's mirrored and complemented each other.  They both agree, and write and speak about ways to alter the image and, in fact, the reality of what school librarians do and how we do it.

Alison offered more suggestions for effective teaching opportunities, while Dr. Todd filled in the blanks with more concrete examples of learning-focused, lesson-based feedback and assessment collectibles.  Talking with other conference attendees I discovered that my comfort level with this dialogue of true curricular collaboration and measurement of outcome extends from my business background.  Two other librarians at my table, responding throughout the day with nods and smiles, also came from previous business experience.  The two career librarians at the table generally agreed with what they heard, but did so with trepidation.  

Four years ago in the first paper I ever wrote about school librarians, a literature review based upon current school and library journals including quotes from Dr. Todd, I lamented the need for librarians to map their curriculum to blend with content areas, to find ways to assure progressive information literacy development from year to year and to find ways to document progress and achievement.  I am not sure what topics my classmates chose but even as an outsider I saw the need for this change in focus.  My advocacy has continued in verbal and written reflections for LIS classes and in my job as a high school library teaching assistant.

Working in a school population nearing 1500 students, this knowledge has been a painful load to carry as I have had difficulty figuring out any consistent ways to measure student achievement or growth across the information literacy continuum.  Collaborative opportunities are frequent, but convincing all teachers in a given content area / grade level to approach a project in the same way to allow us to give similar lessons and collect uniform data has proven virtually impossible.  As if a symbol of the failure, much to frequently, we are asked to do a "quick, basic database intro," or worse, teachers with low expectations assign information-driven  projects without library support.

Coinciding with the conferences I attended, however, I had the opportunity, as part of a required practicum, to work for five weeks each in two different smaller schools, a middle school and an elementary school, both with populations of closer to 500.  Suddenly the lights are coming on.  When all teachers for a subject / grade level can be counted on one hand (sometimes one or two fingers) the needs and opportunities are easier to identify.  As both Zmuda and Todd and other authors I have read admit, the process is still not easy or quick but I am beginning to see light in the woods that may indicate a path.

The beginning of the path lies in continued movement away from "the database lesson" and toward true collaboration with teachers to design lessons, deliverable products, and grading criteria.  As teacher-librarians, even as "information specialists," we need to step away from the role of information, material, space and student managers and aggressively into the role of information literacy teaching specialists.  It goes without saying that we must be comfortable with the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner, but to achieve success we must think simultaneously about core content area standards and how to blend the curricula to achieve success.

I still find humor in the sign in the back office of one school library I visited that says, "If it's not barcoded, it doesn't exist," but as I see our budgets crunching and librarians losing clerks or losing their jobs to clerks, and as I see librarians taking over book-rooms and managing study halls, I am increasingly concerned that we must pursue education over management if we are to survive.  I certainly do not have all of the answers; in fact I believe I still have more questions than answers but I am agressively seeking ways to make an impact, even one student or one teacher at a time.

What is technology?

One of our teachers poised the question last week, "What will our classrooms look like five years from now?"  He declared that teacher laptops and ceiling mount projectors are not viewed as "new technology" but are embedded and required components for today's teachers.  His question was primarily rhetorical; despite some suggestions, he offered no answers but it certainly got me thinking.

We work in a well-funded district that has pursued technology including the tools described above, wireless laptop labs, Elmo visualizers, PolyCom distance learning equipment, and a variety of other hardware and software solutions.  Our teachers use the available technology throughout the curriculum in a variety of ways.  I've argued repeatedly and usually with the majority, that technology is only beneficial when it improves the learning experience or helps to prepare our students for college or professional experiences.

This argument tends to open far more windows of opportunity than it closes.  The use of all types of hardware and software technology in business and in higher education is expanding exponentially.  Teachers who create successful technology based lessons increasingly focus upon creating better and more encompassing future lessons.  The question is more than valid and worthy of discussion; so, what will classrooms look like five years from now?

These were my thoughts when I read Ben Grey's recent post, "Excessive Inaccessibility", in the Tech & Learning Advisor Blog.  Grey relates a conversation with a student, recently returned from Zambia where she saw, "children who lined up by the hundreds so that they might receive a single pencil.  A pencil.  Not an iPod, or laptop, or cell phone, or netbook.  A single shaving of wood lined with graphite.  And she spoke of kids without books.  Kids who are trying to read without the words with which to accomplish the task.  Kids who crave the learning yet lack access to the intellectual nourishment."

Quickly, I remembered that not all education is the same.  Though a digital divide does exist in our district, I had not really focused on its impact on student education in quite a while.  The wake up call that Grey delivered in this piece, though, is way more than a digital divide.  It is a digital and educational chasm.  And the reality is that we need not travel to Zambia to experience the stark differences between the have and the have-not districts.  I have visited schools in my local area that own less than one class set of computers and rely upon 30-year-old (average age) library resources.

As I contemplate my future employment I admit that I would consider myself honored to teach and serve a student community regardless of the level of technology (or library) funding.  I would, however, work within any community that I serve to foster and nourish any programs that will lead to the most complete and well-rounded education possible.

So, what will our classrooms look like five years from now?  Obviously, this will depend greatly upon what they look like today and what funding can be generated in the coming years for upgrades and improvements.  Our goal should be to work within our schools and as part of the greater education community to identify and refine our most pressing needs and to pursue them with passion.

The teacher that initiated my thoughts argued that projectors and teacher laptops are no longer technology.  Grey countered that, "a pencil is technology."  Upon reflection that has included memories of my grandmother's stories about teaching in a cold and drafty one room schoolhouse where all writing was done on a piece of slate because no one could afford paper, I agree that a pencil is technology.

I also agree with Grey and with the teachers in my school, and probably all over the world, that it is not enough.  It was not enough for my grandmother who taught for almost 40 years and it is not enough for our students today, no matter where they live.  I guess the greater frustration is that we may never feel we have enough regardless of our level of funding or support.

I must therefore conclude that while planning and goal setting for the integration of technology in the future is critical, it is more critical that we identify every way possible to draw the most benefit from the tools that we do have available to us.  This is a topic for a whole series of posts that I will not be writing now but which we should all explore.

How can we make the most of what we have?  How can we share and use the technology and resources that we have to their fullest extent to fortify our student's educational experience?  These are questions to which we can respond and directly affect on a daily basis.  We do not need additional financial investment or approval of any board to increase the efficiency of the tools that we have.