Library Information Services
...Helping students become Independent, Information - literate, Lifelong Learners!
Department Staff

Spring Branch Independent School District
Dr. Barry M. Bishop
9016 Westview
Houston, TX, 713-365-5616

Library 2.0

(emphasis on the digital resources of the Library of the future)

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AASL Conf. 2007 (Word document) Blog (and next 4 posts)

Barry

Library 2.0 PowerPoint (R4 June 07) Library 2.0 Expanded (R4 Oct 07)

Barry

Library Learning & Student Achievement (and future of Libraries for Parent U)

Barry

Podcasts PowerPoint Podcast example--The Trap by Karen Rodgers
 Book review podcast

Liz

All Things Books - Literature 2.0

Vaughn

All Things Books - Literature 2.0  Librarians' Perspective  (Aug 07)

Vaughn

All Things Books - Professional Development Fall 07

Vaughn

Blogging PPT  District 8 for Librarians  Dist 8 Handout      Library2Play version      BLOGS & web 2. 0 April 5, 2008

Vaughn  Blog Behind the Scenes HELP 
Web2.0 Background

Wiki PowerPoint, Wiki PowerPoint 11/8/07 Wikis in Plain English

Barry

Things Librarians should know:

JWalk

Meriwether

MARC Wizard

Online Subscription Databases

            Federated searching

Web Resources

            Institutional web sites like the Smithsonian (what they offer and when to use them)

            Deep web

            Online digitization of resources (i.e. UNT and SFA)

Web page evaluation

            Search engines

            Google Earth, etc…

            Online lesson plans

E-mail

Word (with tables)

PowerPoint (including links and multimedia)

Web page creation (Front Page or DotNetNuke)

Desktop publishing

Excel

Web 2.0 (blogs)

            Social impact of Libraries and the technology that facilitate

            Flikr

            YouTube

            MySpace, Facebook

            Blogging

            Wikis

TEKS and collaborating co-teaching

DDI

Pulling TEKS, Resources, and Technology together into a good lesson

Library studies

Budget negotiations

More things Librarians should know:

Pick your grade level.  Then also pick the ones above and below.  Explore around.  I think that you will find it is a wonderful adventure in math.

http://www.rainforestmaths.com/

Okay, I know that it is not Thanksgiving time, put check this out.  Click on Your investigation begins here.  This lets kids see and hear some of our early history things. 

http://www.plimoth.org/OLC/index_js2.html#

Take a minute and look at this. All different kinds of things from dinosaurs, language games, etc.  Click on the all games tab and then the subject matter.

http://funschool.kaboose.com/arcade/index.html

Look at these:

http://www.missmaggie.org/

First grade teachers.  There is some cool stuff on here about China.

http://www.scholastic.com/sitemap.htm 

Check this out about gov.  Lots of fun and easy to understand.

http://pbskids.org/democracy/ 

Take a look at the following math site.  It is incredible.  It has a Mission Impossible feel to the site but the math is taught using videos, etc.  There are additional activities under the activities tab in each lesson.  In particular look at the decimal lesson, the area & perimeter, as well as several others.  I know that it SAYS Grade 6 math but that is in Canada.  I think you will really find this one VERY useful.  You can choose to watch the intro or skip it.  Pick the lessons button on the bar.  Then choose decimals, etc.

http://www.learnalberta.ca/Launch.aspx?content=
%2Fcontent%2Fmesg%2Fhtml%2Fmath6web%2Fmath6shell.html

You have to buy it to use all of it.  But there are several freebies available.  They are wonderful.  Great add in to a lesson or a wonderful, eye-catching, informational intro to a lesson.

http://www.brainpop.com/math/seeall/

The website is www.classblogmeister.com

They gave several websites for reference;

www.edtech.esc11.net/portfolios/

www.techappsnetwork.org

http://tammyworcester.com

http://tw.neisd.net/webpages/cjoor

The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO, and edited by Richard MacManus. The Top 100 is listed at the end of the analysis.

Charles Knight is the Principal of Charles Knight SEO, a Search Engine Optimization company in Charlottesville, VA.

The Search Homepage

In order to address their claims systematically, it helps to group them into categories and then compare them to their Google counterparts. For example, let's look at the first thing that almost everyone sees when they go to search the Internet - the ubiquitous Google homepage. That famously sparse, clean sheet of paper with the colorful Google logo is the most popular Web page in the entire World Wide Web. For millions and millions of Internet users, that Spartan white page IS the Internet.

Google has successfully made their site the front door through which everyone passes in order to access the Internet. But staring at an almost blank sheet of paper has become, well, boring. Take Ms. Dewey for example. While some may object to her sultry demeanor, it's pretty hard to deny that interfacing with her is far more visually appealing than with an inert white screen.

A second example comes from Simply Google. Instead of squeezing through the keyhole in order to reach Google's 37 search options, Simply Google places all of those choices and many, many more all on the very first page; neatly arranged in columns.

Artificial Intelligence

A second arena is sometimes referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is the desire we all have of wanting to ask a search engine questions in everyday sentences, and receive a human-like answer (remember "Good Morning, HAL"?). Many of us remember Ask Jeeves, the famous butler, which was an early attempt in this direction - that unfortunately failed.

Google's approach, Google Answers, was to enlist a cadre of "experts." The concept was that you would pose a question to one of these experts, negotiate a price for an answer, and then pay up when it was found and delivered. It was such a failure; Google had to cancel the whole program. Enter ChaCha. With ChaCha, you can pose any question that you wish, click on the "Search With Guide" button, and a ChaCha Guide appears in a Chat box and dialogues with you until you find what you are looking for. There's no time limit, and no fee.

Clustering Engines

Perhaps Google's most glaring and egregious shortcoming is their insistence on displaying the outcome of a search in an impossibly long, one-dimensional list of results. We all intuitively know that the World Wide Web is just that, a three dimensional (or "3-D") web of interconnected Web pages. Several search engines, known as clustering engines, routinely present their search results on a two-dimensional map that one can navigate through in search of the best answer. Search engines like KartOO and Quintura are excellent examples.

Recommendation Search Engines

Another promising category is the recommendation search engines. While Google essentially helps you to find what you already know (you just can't find it), recommendation engines show you a whole world of things that you didn't even know existed. Check out What to Rent (BLOCKED in SBISD), Music Map, or the stunning Live Plasma display. When you input a favorite movie, book, or artist, they recommend to you a world of titles or similar artists that you may never have heard of, but would most likely enjoy.

Metasearch Engines

Next we come to the metasearch engines. When you perform a search on Google, the results that you get are all from, well, Google! But metasearch engines have been around for years. They allow you to search not only Google, but a variety of other search engines too - in one fell swoop. There are many search engines that can do this, Dogpile, for instance, searches all of the "big four" mentioned above (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask) simultaneously. You could also try Zuula or PlanetSearch - which plows through 16 search engines at a time for you. A very interesting site to watch is GoshMe. Instead of searching an incredible number of Web pages, like conventional search engines, GoshMe searches for search engines (or databases) that each tap into an incredible number of Web pages. As I perceive it, GoshMe is a meta-metasearch engine (still in Beta)!

Other Alt Search Engines

And so it goes, feature after feature after feature. TheFind is a better shopping experience than Google's Froogle, IMHO. Like is a true visual search engine, unlike Google's Images, which just matches your keywords into images that have been tagged with those same keywords. Coming soon is Mobot (see the Demo at www.mobot.com) (BLOCKED in SBISD),. Google Mobile does let you perform a search on your mobile phone, but check out the Slifter Mobile Demo when you get a chance!

Finally, almost prophetically, Google is silent. Silent! At least Speeglebot talks to you, and Nayio listens! But of course, why should Google worry about these upstarts (all 100 of them)? Aren't they just like flies buzzing around an elephant? Can't Google just ignore them, as their share of the search market continues to creep upwards towards 100%, or perhaps just buy them? Perhaps.

The Last Question

Issac Asimov, the preeminent science fiction writer of our time, once said that his favorite story, by far, was The Last Question. The question, for those who have not read it, is "Can Entropy Be Reversed?" That is, can the ultimate running down of all things, the burning out of all stars (or their collapse) be stopped - or is it hopelessly inevitable?

The question for this age, I submit, is… "Can Google Be Defeated"? Or is Google's mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" a fait accompli?

Perhaps the place to start is by reading (or re-reading) Asimov's "The Last Question." I won't give it away, but it does suggest The Answer….

The Top 100

For an Excel spreadsheet of the entire Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, go to: http://charlesknightseo.com/list.aspx or email the author at Charles@CharlesKnightSEO.com.

This list is in alphabetical order. Feel free to share this list, but please retain Charles' name and email.

Update: Thanks Sanjeev Narang for providing a hyperlinked version of the list.

Update, 5 February 2007: Charles Knight has left a detailed comment (#94) in response to all the great feedback in the comments to this post. He also notes:

"...while it looks like a very simple, almost crude list of 100 names, it has taken countless hours to try and do it properly and fairly. The list will be updated all year long, and the Top 100 can only get better and better until the Best of 2007 are announced on 12/31/07."

Please take a good look at this year's winners of the EduBlogs Awards.

http://incsub.org/awards/2006/the-edublog-awards-2006-winners/,

especially:

Flat Classroom Project http://flatclassroomproject.wikispaces.com/

Duck Diaries http://duckdiaries.edublogs.org/ Polar Science

http://www.polar06.yesican-projects.ca/

AP World History Review Wiki

http://www.ahistoryteacher.com/~ahistory/apwhreview/index.php
?title=AP_World_History_Review_Wiki

Holocaust Wiki

http://www.ahistoryteacher.com/~ahistory/apwhreview/index.php
?title=Holocaust_Wiki_Project

Here are own fledgling examples of 2.0 collaborations with our teachers:

Mrs. McCaslin's Lit Circles

http://mrsmccaslin06.wikispaces.com/Literature_Circles

Mr. Rodoff's Hamlet blogs http://hamlet06.wikispaces.com Hurston Blog 2

http://zora.learnerblogs.org/ Research Log Template

http://researchlogtemplate.edublogs.org/

Last year's pathfinder blogs http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/pathblogs.html

Springfield Art Gallery http://www.flickr.com/photos/45367058@N00/

Mr. MacFarland's Global Studies Blog http://globalspartan.edublogs.org/

Mr. Woehlcke's Hamlet Blogs http://ghost0411.learnerblogs.org/

Mr. Martin's Senior Seminar Blogs http://seniorsemfall06.wikispaces.com/

Also look at my friend Darren Kuropatwa's Pre Calc Blogs http://pc4sw06.blogspot.com/ 

and his use of Flickr in math

http://adifference.blogspot.com/2006/11/what-does-success-look-like.html

And there's my friend Gigi Lincoln's Night Blog http://nightwiesel.blogspot.com/

And Will Richardson's Secret Life of Bees Blog http://weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/bees/

For more examples, visit my 2.0 workshop page for our new teachers

http://joycevalenzaworkshop.wikispaces.com/

I personally find these tools learning tools. I love the webcasts and podcasts I attend when I cannot attend conference.  I love attending meetings at EdTechTalk.  My students are preparing instructional

podcasts and streaming video for our website.   I am planning to turn

my own pathfinders into wikis to encourage collaborations.

The tools are easy and most of them are FREE.  They can be engaging and creative. They give young writers authentic audience.  Some of them—Edublogs and LearnerBlogs—were created just for us.

As for safety, the way we set up our blogs, teachers can control the

comments and the level of visibility.   We can use these tools to

teach about safe and responsible use.   We can work with classes to

jointly set rules for behavior and negotiating content.  Nothing is 100%.  We must accept that.

David, you say: "We also need to be careful that we don't promote something that turns out to be less than helpful technology. Some of you are old enough to remember laser disks. Those a bit older will remember beta/vhs battles.  I'm old enough to remember four-track/eight-track tape players."

These tools are free and global. They are embraced by business and universities.  They are a huge part of a flat world growing flatter and I believe they are far stickier than laser disks and eight-tracks.

  They have a power to connect us.

You say: Librarians, as a group, tend to be early users of new technologies, and sometimes we push for something that turns out to not be able to deliver what was promised. When that happens our credibility is reduced.

What happens when we choose not to lead?  Who introduces these tools thoughtfully to teachers and learners across the curriculum?

http://www.realsoftwaredevelopment.com/2006/10/best_of_the_bes.html

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