Week #9, Thing #23: Copyright and Creative Commons

That. video. was. GENIUS.!!!!!!!! After I finished watching it, I immediately shared it with my pals on Facebook (and nobody will understand the genius) so then I sent it in a message to a fellow librarian pal on Facebook. Now SHE will understand the hysterics and truth of the Fair(y) Use Tale!

I think that I understand the point befind Creative Commons. Like they say in the example, if you are looking for a photo of a giraffe, you can type in "giraffe," click on the flickr tab, and I will see pictures of giraffes that the photographers have marked as free for me to use and adapt....basically, this is the same concept as the Fair(y) Use Tale. The creators took snippets of Disney works and amended them to tell a completely different tale, although that tale seemed to be pretty anti-Disney in terms of copyright laws, hence the need for the Creative Commons.

And...now I'm done.

These past few months have been a truly eye-opening, enlightening experience. I have enjoyed almost every minute of my time exploring 23 fresh teaching tools, and I have most certainly enjoyed blogging about them all! To my readers (ok, basically that's just my mom and a few kind librarians), thank you for following my travels through the web!

Week #9, Thing #22: eBooks

Ok, I have to admit it...I have been slacking. The last week of school was nuts and once I was out of school, all things library slipped completely (well, kind of) out of my head for a few weeks. But here I sit at school, having a work day, attempting to finish my 23 Things while the beautiful sun shines down on the 90 degree weather outside. Alas, I wish I was sitting outside with Harry Potter and a cold lemonade.

Instead, I am attempting to search the World eBook Fair for free downloads from Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, it's telling me to come back between July 4 and August 4 for the Fair...so until then, I have no choice but to wait patiently for the next two weeks until I can search. But since I need to finish these Things by July 1, I've decided to explore other avenues for finding ebooks. My favorite is the online tour of the British Library's online gallery. I used to live in London and LOVE the British Library, but this is the coolest thing I have seen in months!!!!!! Jane Austen is one of my personal favorites, and being able to "turn the pages" of her history of England, seeing her handwriting and little drawings, is AMAZING. I love technology!

Another favorite was Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice...all the beautiful detailed drawings and neat penmanship, including little page numbers in the upper corners. This is simply amazing. What a great resource for teaching primary documents, eBooks, or simply internet exploration. This one's a keeper!

Week #9, Thing #21: Podcasts

My road to podcasts was not as smooth as I would have imagined. First of all, the "Yahoo: What is a Podcast" tutorial is broken, so I figured I could just go it with a blurred vision of podcasting. After I tried and failed to access the tutorial, I tried using some of the podcast directories suggested by the Library Learning 2.0 site with little success. The first and third options on the list are no longer usable sites, and I was stuck with the second choice, podcastalley.com. It seems like an easy-to-use site, but when I tried to access the Learn to Speak Italian podcast, it prompted me to download a player. Without any knowledge of the good v. bad players, I chose one at random, but the downloading directions were confusing. At this point, I was thoroughly frustrated.

Enter iTunes. I've had some bad experiences with downloading on my home computer, so even though I know that iTunes is a very well established and reputable, I've never used it and thought that I could use one of the other podcast players. Wrong! As soon as I downloaded iTunes, I realized that it would be so easy to use. I did a search for podcasts in the search results and came up with lots of great results, including a podcast on learning to speak Italian, perfect for my upcoming honeymoon!

In terms of library-related podcasts, I'm having a little trouble. I'm sure that there is a wealth of information and podcasts floating around out there somewhere, I just need to find it! I'm going to keep looking. I have found a few book review podcasts, but they are mostly for religious books, which will not help me much in buying materials for my middle school library. I will stay on the hunt and add the RSS feed when I find a good podcast. In terms of the entire experience...not one of the better orchestrated "things." But a fun idea, and lots of possibilities for libraries!