Carole Matthews's Profile

Fair Use: rethinking the use of copyrighted material 

to use the actual book covers in their book trailers and reviews

Tool for Reasoning Fair Use. (See my post on the release of the new code.)

NoodleTools, a subscription but highly affordable service with a free MLA Starter feature, not only generates citations in APA, Chicago, and seventh-edition MLA style, it now allows learners to tag and cluster and share note cards with each other and with their teachers,

, among the alternative free citation

Free citation generato

Automatic bibliography and citation make

interactive tool do

For books only

Librarians should offer their constituents an array of appropriate search tools. At the high-school level, that array reaches into social search—blogs and wikis and Twitter —as well as copyright-friendly media and scholarly content

iGoogle is a particularly sticky search and organizational tool at our high school. As a librarian, I work with content-area teachers to help students create customized iGoogle tabs for the various classes they take each semester. These tabs may gather RSS feeds, critical bookmarks, games, maps, and organizational tools. Students love changing their themes and establishing tabs for their personal interests—sports, music, games, etc.—as well as their classes. (See the wiki for our ALA session on Personal Information Portals.)

 

iGoogle pages are composed of widgets (“gadgets” in Google lingo). Widgets themselves function as powerful new information strategies. I embed and share our database widgets everywhere: on the many lesson wikis I build with classroom teachers, and on many of our library pathfinder pages. Students (and teachers too) can grab database widgets—JSTOR, for instance—and install them in the places they themselves live, play, and work: their own wikis, Nings, and Facebook. (I’m planning to roll this out with our AP classes this fall.)

 

In addition to creating personal-information portals using widget-based tools like iGoogle, libraries can broadcast information portals as pathfinders using tools like PageFlakes and NetVibes.  These 2.0 pathfinders exploit the power of widgets to gather research and content-area materials in customized ways. Flakes transformed the way our students and teachers look at current events. In the old days, our students generally visited CNN and perhaps one other news source to discover an interesting story. Now, by visiting one page, they access several news feeds in several media formats. Take a look at our Global, Current Events, Science News, India, Environmental, and French Resources Flakes.



Buffy Hamilton, the librarian at Creekview (GA) High School uses PageFlakes, NetVibes, and LibGuides for her pathfinders. Check out the wide variety of media and feeds she presents on this pathfinder on Afghanistan, created recently for a social studies class. Her timely pathfinder on the Iran elections allowed her students to view events through many lenses as events occurred this past year. (See my posts on PageFlakes as current-events pathfinders and database widgets: My dream comes true.