Safety and Web 2.0

I think I agree with Doug Johnson's statement about what students put on the internet can be more dangerous than what they see. After reading the articles you can see how publishing photos, personal videos or words can do so much damage. This brings to mind my biggest question about this whole course: What can we ask students to share in order to use tools like BibMe? I had to give my e-mail address to register to save my bib. (I mentioned this in my post to Jane). Does this pose any kind of risk for the student? I'm fairly comfortable with having the students post to my blog because as administrator I am the only one seeing their e-mail addresses. I found some discomfort in giving out my e-mail address to the many things I subscribed to during this course just because it's been drilled into me about the dangers of having your personal information on-line. So I guess that's my question: Can anyone tell me how safe it is for students to use their e-mail addresses in this age of Web 2.0? Or are my fears unjustified?

Copyright and the Internet

For me the biggest issue surrounding the use of the web is the proper way to cite items, whether it is images, info, music or other. There still are gray areas for me and I think I'm going to just have to educate myself so that I know better how to teach my students. Thank you to Tanya for her post on this topic. While visiting the Copyright Matters site I found a link that outlines some answers as to citing web material. I know I will be referring to it alot. I'm on a listserv and this evening there was a post about 'free' clipart. (It has some great stuff for literary characters). On their license at the bottom of the page it explains very clearly how and why to cite their material. I wish all sites had something similar. In this age of technology my way of teaching referencing is definitely changing as more and more I'm able to show students how to reference using computer citation tools. I think students need to know as well that their own work is copyrighted but they can grant usage to others through things like the Creative Commons license. Students also need to know about Creative Commons Media Search and similar tools and how to use them. They need to be taught that things like wikipedia can be edited by anyone and they must bear that in mind when searching for information there. Students need to be taught more, now than ever that, to look at sites critically.

Succes With the Feed Link!

Donna helped me get the feed link to work! Please see my first post about RSS and Feed Link and read the comments if you had trouble using the Feed Link.

Rss Feeds and Frustrated by Feed Link

I too have had a Google rss feed since the IT summit but I rarely have time to even look at it! I've never been great at organizing my info into folders and I think this is my downfall. The start pages look wonderful and I'm truly inspired by Tanya's! I'm hoping when I have time I can go back to this, do a start page and make it so well organized that I will use it! I have to admit defeat on trying to get a colleague's delicious page on my blog. I can do it as a link but I cannot do it as a Feed Link. Everytime I try I get the message "invalid feed url". I've been to the help site and am still clueless.

Summary of Some Search Tools

I chose to do a search using "grief " and "children's literature" since I've been focusing on the novel After by Francis Chalifour. I found the 'Narrow Your Search' aspect at Ask.com to be much better than what Google came up with. I think younger students would be fascinated with Quintura for Kids. I really liked Kartoo and Search Crystal. Kartoo's connections I think would help kids visualize this process and lead them in directions they may not have thought of themselves. I liked how Search Crytal categorized its hits and at a glance you can tell which returns are the best . I will definitely have students try these two search tools out.

A Mind Map

This is my attempt at a mind map. It's from Gliffy. It took a very long time for me to figure out how to use it and I still don't have all the wrinkles ironed out. Maybe one of the other ones is easier. You will need to click on it to see it better. I'm not sure why my picture of Death did not upload.

My Second Book Trailer

I have redone the first trailer I did but this time used pictures from Wikipedia that I cited. As far as I know this should cover any copyright issues.

My Attempt at a Book Trailer

I decided to take my book trailer off the blog because of concerns about breaking copyright. If you missed it I had used PhotoStory 3. I also used JakesOnline Tutorials (on the Meet the Stars wiki) which I found very helpful. I used the "Add video" button on the "Create a Post" page and had no trouble uploading from the video file where it was saved. I will try this again at some point when I find pictures that don't have the copyright concern.