Discovery2.0

Back in May 2009, I wrote about using Flip video cameras in the classroom.  At the time, I was using a Flip Ultra, but my challenge recently has been to use Flip Mino cameras with Year 8 students to create book trailers, as we have 20 of these cameras at school.

The Mino is smaller than the Ultra, and very easy to slip into your pocket when travelling. It also can be recharged by plugging the USB port or cable into your computer, compared to replacing batteries in the Ultra. The screen is smaller, and the controls are touch rather than buttons, but this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

If you’d like more of a comparison of the two, take a look at these videos:   Flip Mino HD vs Flip Ultra HD and  Flip Ultra HD vs Flip Mino HD.

You can make quick book reviews using the FlipShare software which comes as part of  the Flip camera, but if you want to make a more sophisticated book trailer, you will probably want to take your Flip video and drop it into a program like Movie Maker or iMovie.  Videos taken by Flip cameras are in MP4 format which is supported by iMovie and QuickTime, and playable on iPods, iPhones and  iTunes, but unfortunately not by Windows Movie Maker XP which only recognises AVI and WMV files. For this reason, if you wish to import your video into Movie Maker you will first need to convert it using a free program like Any Video Converter or Zamzar.  If you have Windows 7.0, however, you probably already have  Windows Live Movie Maker (or you can download it here), and this very streamlined, updated version will accept MP4 files.  Just follow the instructions in this tutorial.

Below is a SlideShare presentation by Naomi Bates of  Northwest  High School in Texas, showing how to use Movie Maker and Animoto for creating book trailers.  (See some of her examples here)

Creating Book Trailers

Tutorials for Book Trailer Software

• iMovie tutorials
• Atomic Learning Windows Movie Maker 2 – Video Tutorials
• Microsoft Windows Movie Maker How-Tos
• Chroma Key in Movie Maker
• Microsoft Movie Maker software download
• Microsoft Photostory software download
• Pinnacle Studio Version 11
• GarageBand for recording and mixing
• GarageBand Tutorials
• Audacity free download Mac or Windows for recording and mixing
• Audacity Tutorials

Using Movie Maker

• Movie Maker in Education wiki
• Introduction & Walk Through – Windows Live Movie Maker
• Adding Music to Windows Live Movie Maker

Using a Flip Video Camera

• Flip Video Spotlight – Shooting Tips
• 14 of the best resource sites for using Flip cameras
• Flipping out over the Flip camera – 18 links by Stephen Rahn
• Richland Parish – Flip Basics: Videos and  Links -  lots of links for using Flip cameras in the classroom
• Flip video in Education -  a wiki maintained by Chris Betcher: includes where to get video and audio
• Resources for Using the Flip Camera

Storyboarding

• Digital Storyboard Template by  Jason Ohler

Where to get free sounds and images

• Joyce Valenza’s Copyright Friendly wiki
• Digital Storytelling resources – ISTE Conference 2010

Image of Flip Mino from  http://www.gizmodiva.com/entry_images/0608/13/flip-mino.jpg

See this and more information about Wikipedia at our BGS Online Reference Centre LibGuide.

There is a difference of opinion amongst educators these days as to whether or not Wikipedia is a valid source of information for student research. Some argue that lots of people contributing to the sum of what is known and understood about a topic makes it more valid.  It is also a useful source of information for breaking news stories (as the image here indicates).  However, the constantly changing nature of Wikipedia – one of its strengths – is also a weakness when it comes to research, as students may not realise at which point in time the information presented is accurate and reliable.

As teacher librarians, we advise students to refer to Wikipedia, if they wish to, for a general overview of a topic, but to actually source their information from other more reliable sources – such as our academic databases and online encyclopedia.

Many students still seem to think that Wikipedia is a reliable and credible source of information – despite the fact that they have probably added information to it themselves!  Below are some thought-provoking reasons from Mark Moran of findingDulcinea as to why they should not use Wikipedia for their assignments.

10 good reasons why you should never trust Wikipedia as an accurate source of information:

10. You must never fully rely on any one source for important information

9. You especially can’t rely on something when you don’t even know who wrote it

8.  The contributor with an agenda often prevails

7. Individuals with agendas sometimes have significant editing authority

6. Sometimes “vandals” create malicious entries that go uncorrected for month

5. There is little diversity among editors

4. The number of active Wikipedia editors has flat-lined

3. It has become harder for casual participants to contribute

2. Accurate contributors can be silenced

And the number one reason:

1. It says so on Wikipedia

“Wikipedia says, “We do not expect you to trust us.” It adds that it is “not a primary source” and that “because some articles may contain errors,” you should “not use Wikipedia to make critical decisions.”

Furthermore, Wikipedia notes in its “About” section, “Users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic quality from the start: they may contain false or debatable information.”

Read more details about each of these reasons, including good examples, at:

• E. Moran, Mark. “The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely on Wikipedia.” findingDulcinea. March 19, 2010

• See also Elizabeth Dodd’s blog posts from Georgetown University: Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia: The Search for Truth and   Wiki Truthiness Part 2,   March 30 & April 6, 2010

Images:

• Wikipedia image:      Wiki Truthiness Part 2
• PM cartoon:     Wilcox at The Age newspaper

Wordle was the first of the word cloud generators, and it captured the interest and imagination of teachers and students around the world.  Then came Tagul, with the ability to form a limited number of images, rather than abstract shapes.

Now, an exciting new website is set to revolutionise word cloud pictures: Tagxedo, developed by Hardy Leung, is a sophisticated generator with an amazing ability to create recognizable images from words. You can choose from one of the options available, or even upload your own image shape. Take a look at some of these images from the Tagxedo Gallery

Image from http://www.tagxedo.com

In order to create Tagxedo word pictures, you first need to install a Microsoft program called Silverlight, but the website prompts you to do this before you begin. Once you are ready, upload your content – which can be text from a book, a website, a blog, a speech, a letter – whatever you choose. Tagxedo will adjust the size of the words, depending on how may times they are used. It also leaves out small ’stop words’, so you only get the main content of the text.  There is an extensive range of options to choose from: over 30 themes (colour combinations), over 30 fonts and 30 free shapes. Currently Tagxedo is in beta form and is free, but later you will be able to opt for more functionality and a wider choice of shapes by choosing to pay.

Similarly to Tagul, when you hover your mouse over  a word in your Tagxedo image, it will spin and enlarge so you can read it, but it doesn’t seem to link you to a website as Tagul does (which possibly could be a good thing!)

The images created by Tagxedo, and their derivatives, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License 3.0, and must be attributed to http://www.tagxedo.com

Our library has quite a large Professional Development / Teacher Reference section which has been bult up over many years by the school administration. Unfortunately, not many people use it, so we decided a marketing campaign was needed!

Steps decided on for our marketing strategy:

• make new directional signage to make sections easier for teachers to find
• create a display of PD/TR books
• email a list to teachers of recent new titles – including images of the cover and some brief information about each book
• offer a chance to win 2 free movie tickets to teachers who borrowed before the end of term
• advertise at staff morning teas
• daily email reminders during the last week of term

We decided on the theme “Treasure in the PD Library” and included a tresure chest in the display, along with a stand-up, cardboard cut-out of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. At staff morning tea we put advertising on the walls up the steps, placed Captain Jack at the door, then stood in the doorway handing out gold chocolate coins, as well as advertising for the PD library and the chance to win the movie tickets.  We also advertised that teachers could include reading professional or curriculum material as part of the hours for their ccmpulsory PD hours (required for registration by the Qld College of Teachers).

While our advertisng campaign did not result in huge numbers of teachers descending on the PD library (maybe they had enough discount movie tickets already, or maybe they were overwhelmed at the time with marking and reports), we did get quite a few teachers borrowing. Overall, it certainly made for a memorable experience and was lots of fun!

You’ve probably seen it already, but the perfect thing to make you smile is this amazing YouTube clip of students and staff from the University of Washington’s Information School doing their version of Lady GaGa.

‘Librarians do GaGa’ was an entry at the iSight Film Festival. The video was produced by Sarah Wachter, a student in the iSchool’s Masterin Library and Information Science program and the dancers were students and faculty members from the University of Washington’s Information School.

(http://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/silly-saturday-25-librarians-do-gaga/)

What a great marketing technique! Through one clever movie, they’ve managed to sky-rocket the profile of libraries and librarians, and thanks to Twitter and blogging, it’s now around the world!!

StoryTubes is a Public Library/ Schools Partnership Program which has been running for the past 3 years in the United States and Canada, and it’s aim is to excite children of all ages about books and reading by engaging them with technology.  To participate, students have to video themselves promoting a book in less than 2 minutes, upload it to either YouTube or TeacherTube, and then enter it into the StoryTubes competition.

According to the 2008 Kids and Family Report,  Reading in the 21st Century: Turning the Page with Technology, kids who extend their reading experience via the Internet are more likely to value and enjoy reading. Project initiators, Denise Raleigh, Betsy O’Connell and Faith Brautigam, say the project “is about marrying enthusiasm for reading with the exploration of new technologies….  StoryTubes allows kids to be both creators and interactive users of technology, and provides impassioned peer book recommendations that have no geographical boundaries.” (YSL Online Reading Conference)

“Both StoryPalooza in 2007 and the StoryTubes 2008 Contest were dependent on schools and public libraries working cooperatively.  Schools often secured parental permission, worked with students to develop their online booktalks, and provided technical expertise to tape and upload the entries.  Public library partners structured the contests, provided the staff time to review entries and manage the event, and secured prizes.”  (storytubes.info)

Click here to watch a video explaining what StoryTubes is about, or click here to read about it.

My favourite entry from the 2009 winners is this enthusiastic Year 1 student promoting the book New York New York The Big Apple from A to Z by: Laura Krauss Melmed:

This video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6zDYrM_cqM

Smilebox is basically a free scrapbooking website where you can upload up to 30 photos at a time and create an enormous array of different slideshows. You can also create scrapbooks, greeting cards, photo albums and collages.  You can make as many slideshows as you’d like and then embed the widget – which opens up into a full-size slideshow – into your Facebook page, webpage or blog. In addition to images, you can also add video, words and music.

This is the best background for a slideshow related to books and reading, but there are plenty of others to chosse from.  See also the slideshow I created for our Middle School Book Week.

Create a free slideshow design

If you’ve ever linked to a YouTube movie during a presentation, then tried to go back into your PPT, you’ll realise that it can look messy if you can’t reconnect to the viewer mode of your PPT.

This how-to video by Laura Bergells explains a great way to seamlessly play a YouTube movie in PPT, just by linking to it, but without actually downloading and embedding it. It looks as if you’ve downloaded it, and plays within your presentation, but it is actually just a link. What you do need, however, is a live internet connection for this to work.

A quick overview of the steps involved:

1.  Insert /open the Developer tab on your PPT ribbon, then open the toolbox

2.  Insert a Shockwave Flash Object from the toolbox list by drawing a box on your slide

3.  Copy the URL of the movie you want to insert, R click on your box, open up Properties, then paste the URL in the empty cell beside ‘Movie’

4. Delete “watch?”, and replace “=” with “/”

5.  Go to the full screen mode to play your movie, and note that you can also pause or adjust the volume within your PPT presentation

6.  Once you have played the movie, a screen capture ot it will appear in the box

6.  To seamlessly progress to the next slide, simply click your mouse – beautiful!!

Images from Juanico Environmental Consultants Ltd and US Dept of Energy

Did you know that while we are suffering from a glut of information -’infobesity’ – with a typical search in Google yeilding thousands or millions of results, Google only actually searches one fifth of the available information on the internet?

This is called the surface web, and the most commonly used search engines trawl this area for information. The remaining four-fifths or 80% of the web is referred to as the deep web, the hidden web or the invisible web. It is made up of information locked away in password-protected databases, white papers, and grey literature.

According to the Australian Law Postgraduate Network,  “The term grey literature refers to research that is either unpublished or has been published in non-commercial form. Examples of grey literature include:

• government reports
• policy statements and issues papers
• conference proceedings
• research reports
• market reports
• working papers.

Professional associations, academics, pressure groups and research institutes are only some of the sources of grey literature. Much grey literature is of high quality, although grey literature has generally not passed through the process of peer review….   Grey literature is often the best source of up-to-date research in specific areas. Another benefit of grey literature is that it is often written in an accessible style, providing a clear, concise introduction to difficult or complex topics.”

White papers, on the other hand, are “detailed, sometimes highly researched, documents intended to offer a much fuller picture of the capabilities of a product or company. Unlike an advertisement or press release, white papers are normally not promotional (though certainly some are) but rather, through strong writing and hopefully good research, these documents attempt to establish a level of credibility for a company and its products or services. Since many white papers are grounded in research these often contain good information, especially in terms of results of customer surveys, sales trends, and industry forecasts.” (KnowThis.com)

The last major part of the deep web, and the one most likely to impact on school students, is information contained in databases, both free and subscription.  One of the best reasons to promote these databases to your students (generally the content in these is made up of journal articles, research papers, theses, multimedia and news archives) is because a person has checked these sites for reliability and included them in the database – as opposed to a robotic search engine which cannot discern if a site is relevant or not. To see if there is a free database available on a particular subject, type it and the word ‘database’ into Google. If there is one, Google will usually find it.

As well as looking for databases, there are many specialised search engines or websites to help you access the deep web. For academic research, Infomine from the University of California and ipl2 are two of the better web sites you can use, but also try these suggestions below:

Magazine & Journal Databases
This page is a guide to journal databases which are free on the web. Many subscription-only databases are also available through libraries, so contact your local library for details.

Complete Planet
Discover over 70,000+ searchable databases and specialty search engines.
A comprehensive listing of dynamic searchable databases. Find databases with highly relevant documents that cannot be crawled or indexed by surface web search engines.
aip.completeplanet.com

Turbo 10
Search the Deep Net : Turbo 10 sends your query to over 800 specialist search engines.
turbo10.com

OAIster
Search for digital resources held across hundreds of university repositories.
oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister

https://www.tafensw.edu.au/library/studylinks/search/hidden.htm

Tools to Help You Use the Hidden Web

• About.com
  • http://websearch.about.com
• CiteSeer: Scientific Literature Digital Library
  • http://citeseer.csail.mit.edu/
• CompletePlanet
  • http://www.completeplanet.com
• FirstGov
  • http://firstgov.gov
• IncyWincy: The Invisible Web Search Engine
  • http://www.incywincy.com
• Librarians’s Index to the Internet
  • http://lii.org
• Scirus
  • http://www.scirus.com

Information from The Hidden Web Workshop

Invisible Web Research Tools

• Librarians Index to the Internet (look for Databases)
• Digital Librarian
• Library of Congress Online Catalog
• CompletePlanet
• Union Institute A-Z Database List
• New York Public Library Databases Online
• SearchSystems Public Records Directories
• GeniusFind
• InfoMine
• Turbo 10
• IncyWincy Search
• Invisible-Web.net
• Gary Price’s Direct Search
• MedNets Medical Database Gateway
• MedBioWord: Science & Medical Journals & Databases
• Argus Clearinghouse
• ProFusion
• PooGee

http://www.weblens.org/invisible.html

For more interesting reading see Michael Bergman’s article,  The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value and Invisible Web: What is it, how to find it, and its inherent ambiguity from UC Berkeley.

Since the advent of Web 2.0, speculation has abounded as to what form Web 3.0 will take.

Tim O’Reilly and Jennifer Pahika (see my previous post) term the explosive evolution of web 2.0 technologies and platforms “Web Squared” – indicating the exponential nature of its growth. However, this term has not been adopted into the common vernacular the way “Web 2.0″ was (a tern coined by Dale Dougherty in conjunction with Tim O’Reilly)

The future right now

Watch this Commoncraft video explaining “augmented reality” – a function of the internet available right now, and which has enormous potential for the future. There is also another video at the end of this post showing “augmented reality” and books, and what they will be like in the future – essentially 3D movies!

In this article about how libraries will use Web 3.0 in the future, David Stuart, of Wolverhampton University, looks at 3 different possibilities for what Web 3.0 will look like:

The 3D Web

When 3D online virtual environments were first available, librarians and teacher-librarians alike tried to imagine the possibilities for engaging students and patrons, and the world of Second Life seemed to have the most possibility. While there are still many passionate advocates, it has never taken the Library world by storm, probably due to its complexity, both with computational requirements and user skills. David comments:

“The 3D web will only become a realistic medium for the provision of library and information services when it becomes seamless with the rest of the web, becoming browser friendly…  Although much of the hype surrounding 3D web services has died-down, there is plenty of potential for its application in the provision of library and information services in the future. However, it is important that technologies are used because they are the most appropriate way to convey the requisite information – not just because they are the latest glitzy web technology”

The Semantic Web

The semantic web is a way of describing things on the interenet so that computers can understand. It is not just links between pages – it is about relationships between pages and computers understanding those relationships – eg collecting information about what medecines are relevant to a particular disease and where specialists for that disease are located in a country.

“Embracing the semantic web requires librarians and information professionals to not only move beyond the physical and virtual document, which has been the focus of much of their attention up until now. It also requires them to start thinking of interacting with the data on the web as a large information resource, rather than in individual data repositories.”

The Real World Web

This refers to incorporating parts of the web into our daily lives all around us, through the use of increasingly sophisicated mobile phones which will augment reality, and internet-enabled real-world objects which will send us real-time updates. Examples of how libraries are using this already are through the use of QR codes which Bath University Library is already experimenting with (see my previous post on QR codes), facial recognition software, and the use of RSS feeds to instantly give customers information about which services are available or which facilities are not being used.

Future libraries

According to David Stuart, “The 3D web, the semantic web, and the real world web, will all have a role to play in the future provision of library and information services. However, it is the real world web that is most likely to change the way users see the web – thus, this is the one most worthy of the 3.0 moniker. Not only will it provide an immediately-recognisable difference in the way users view the web, but the technologies are already available. Although the technologies are available for the semantic web, it relies on widespread adoption to become useful. It doesn’t seem likely that it will create a dramatic shift in the way we view the web any time soon. The technologies necessary for a more immersive 3D web experience are not yet established, and it is not yet clear how much it will affect the way that we view the web as a whole.

The three potential visions of the web discussed here are not mutually exclusive, but instead are likely to be combined in many as yet unthought-of combinations in the future, along with other new technologies. While Web 2.0 has been surrounded by a lot of hype and argument, we can’t get away from the fact that the way we use the web, as well as the content on it, has changed, and will continue to change in the future. Those who gain the most from the web will be those at the forefront of the change, not those playing catchup.“

Augmented Reality and Interactive Books by Hitlab