EBM (Esprosso Book Machine): ATM for books
This was just twittered (tweeted) by BudtheTeacher: First Espresso Book Machine Installed and Demonstrated at New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library
The machine, being demoed at New York Public, currently prints copies of public domain titles on demand.
About libraries, Books and reading | Comment (1)The direct-to-consumer model of the EBM eliminates shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allows simultaneous global availability of millions of new and backlist titles in all categories and languages. These savings permit potentially lower prices to consumers and libraries, and greater royalties and profits to authors and publishers. Also, titles will never have to go out of print again.
Cool TL videos!
Elementary librarian Doug Valentine, a.k.a. Dr. Loopy, a member of our TeacherLibrarianNing, recently posted three very clever, tongue-in-cheek videos about our profession. I later discovered that these are but three of his many funny efforts posted on TeacherTube.
He’s given me (us all?) some great ideas for new productions this fall and some cool material for inservices.
- Agent Codee Books fights an evil Lexile character who prevents children from reading books they themselves choose
- Blind Date explores classroom teacher/librarian collaboration in reality television, pop-up video format.
- Bionic Librarian shares the updated librarian image, as well as the potential super powers of collaboration.
Great fun. Thanks, Doug!
Note: After writing this post I explored a little more of how school librarians and teacher librarians are represented in the world of teacher and student-produced video. Check out the longer post at my SLJ Blog.
About libraries, Books and reading, Just for fun, Reading and books, School culture, Video | Comment (0)2007 Quill Award Nominees
At BookExpo America, they announced this year’s Quill nominees. It’s the third year for these consumer-driven awards. The last two lists helped me plan my summer reading and helped me to discover new authors and titles to include on our high school shelves.
Scroll down to the bottom of the list for youth titles.
End-year happiness
You can tell it’s the end of the year. Their exam over, our AP US History students are a little more relaxed as they attack their final debate. You can tell the pressure is off. When I shared our new books on the environment, the girls grabbed them and broke into a spontaneous book dance. We had to capture the joy!
Open the door. Let ‘em in–the article
In a post little while back we talked about the potential for and the value of student collaboration/student involvement on library websites. That post and some of your email turned into my VOYA Tag Team Tech column.
Open the Door. Let ‘em In. eVOYA, April 2007. 1-3.
The bigger picture regarding that 2.0-themed column?
Many of us are working differently. This blog continually allows me to post ideas, to solicit input and feedback, and to synthesize the response into a better product (if that product is ever really done).
Today, I also discovered two new books about the shifting collaborative culture, that I think we need to read:
2.0, About libraries, Books and reading, School culture, Teaching Strategies | Comments (3)The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Braffman and Rod Beckstrom
“Organizations fall into two categories: traditional spiders, which have a rigid hierarchy and top- down leadership, and revolutionary starfish, which rely on the power of peer relationships.”And Donald Tapscott’s (Growing up Digital):
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Perhaps this collaborative trend is connected to the way school librarians are used to leading–from the center.
Youth Information Seeking Behavior II
When I got home yesterday, I discovered Mary K. Chelton’s and Colleen Cool’s new anthology, Youth Information Seeking Behavior II: Context, Theories, Models, and Issues (Scarecrow, 2007) waiting for me. I grabbed it and ran to my hair appointment. This time, I didn’t grab my usual guilty pleasures stack of glossy new magazines. I was the only one in Bella Gente flipping through a carefully documented book on information studies.
My participation in this collection marks a career tipping point. It’s the first time my work appears near the work of my research heroes. My chapter is: “It’d Be Really Dumb No to Use It”: Virtual Libraries and High School Students’ Information Seeking and Use: A Focus Group Investigation.
Mary K.’s and Colleen’s first collection informed both my research and my practice. It collected a kind of greatest hits volume–conveniently gathering together folks whose writings I love to discover in various journals. I find myself continually returning to that volume, chewing on and citing its contents.
I’ll be reading Volume II on the plane to Seattle.
Book trailer contest
Nick Glass (TeachingBooks) and I have been having a long-running conversation about the effectiveness of book trailers as student projects. Nick just wrote to share this cool contest with me–The Teen Book Video Awards.
Sponsored by Random House Children’s Books, the site posts the three winners of this year’s contest which asked young adult (in this case, college student) producers to promote popular titles of the year.
Take a look at the trailers for Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty, and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now. These live action productions make wonderful booktalks for us all and serve as models for future student films.
The Book Standard offers more information regarding the videos and the November 29th screenings.
New projects
It’s been a lovely week for collaboration!
Yesterday morning Ken and I brainstormed new strategies to get his seniors to better understand characters and motivation in Hamlet. This led to a nifty new strategy.
We grouped the students into Hamlet communities–Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, and their choice of one other character. Students are each maintaining blogs as their characters, reporting their personal responses to each scene as they read it. They are also responsible for commenting on the blogs of the other three characters in their communities. http://hamlet06.wikispaces.com/. (Because no one selected Polonius, Ken is modeling good posting through his character.)
And in another activity relating to perspective and deeper understanding. . .
After watching the film Control Room, reading sections of Persepolis, and examining the current nuclear situation in Iran, Jeff, the Global Studies teacher and I, developed a new project. Students will create a mock special issue of a news magazine originating from a non-Western country of their choice. http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/newsmagazine.htm
We’ve set students up with links to international news media and are encouraging them to frame their editorial decisions based on their selected country’s cultural norms, political concerns, government restrictions.
And, just for fun, they’ll be doing their covers using Flagrant Disregard’s magazine cover tool.
2.0, About blogging, About learning, Books and reading, Teaching Strategies | Comments (2)Our new book trailers!
Last week I judged the video competition among Ken Rodoff’s seniors. The goal: Create a 30-second trailer for Ayn Rand’s Anthem, to be used to motivate the juniors who will be reading the book next year. We are slowly working our way through the entire reading list.
This particular group of students had never before used iMovie. Few of them had ever before used video cameras. The project’s time restrictions were intense. We wanted to avoid straight on images of student faces. Students were judged on their creative screen shots, their appropriate use of music, their expression of the book’s theme, their “pitch” of the video to the judges.
Without exception Ken’s students rose to the occasion. Their motivation was obvious in their presentation. They gracefully managed the software’s steep learning curve. Although only one is the official winner, I’ve decided to post all five.
Which would you have chosen?
About learning, Books and reading, Video | Comment (1)
Premature (?) sharing: New ideas for wikis and blogs and flickr
I thought I’d share a couple of fledgling projects and move away from the theoretical for a bit.
1. Our art students are in the process of building a formal gallery in the library. (Our facility is already graced by lots of student art!) We got a local grant to buy display panels. The goal is to highlight the work of individual student artists and allow them to function as “art professionals.” We’ll write artist statements, prepare exhibit brochures, and host formal openings. We wanted to support this physical space with a serious virtual presence, and so we created a blog to mark our progress and a Flickr gallery to allow artists to present and describe and create notes about their work. Right now we have the work of just one artist represented, but the other artists are truly excited by this model and there is much more to come!
2. After months of trouble trying to get interactive material suggestion forms working on my site, I decided to go with a far less formal approach. Our new materials suggestion wiki already has one suggestion.
3. After our seniors read The Handmaid’s Tale, one of their projects was to create a movie poster highlighting a scene or a theme from the book using original photography. We are using the movie poster tools from Flagrant Disregard’s Flickr Toys, below is one sample. More to come after Friday’s deadline. We created some wonderful inspirational posters highlighting words of advice from our new teachers back in September.
