Using start pages

From the Odysen Blog:

Odysen Blog: Using a Start Page to Track an Endangered Species, the Leatherback Turtle

Here's an Odysen start page for the endangered Leatherback Turtle, a species that has been swimming through the oceans for the last 100 million years but is now down to ~5,000. The big recent news is the tracking of one of the turtles that showed how it swam from Indonesia to Oregon and back to Hawaii.

The Odysen start page, Leatherback Turtle, includes a news search widget, a website bookmarker widget, Flickr photos, an Amazon book search, and YouTube videos.

Like iGoogle - an easily created, interesting "webpage" to draw attention to a subject of inquiry.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Photo sharing sites - Flickr

A place on the internet where students can store, share and access any photos of their exhibition process can be very useful in telling their stories. There are many photos sharing sites - Read How the big photo-sharing sites stack up at All Things Digital for an overview of several sites. (There is no reason to limit yourself to one site, as different features are available at each site.)

This video looks at the features in Flickr and how they can be using in an educational setting.




There are many other video tutorials on YoutTube about how to use other aspects of Flickr. This one is on how to geotag your pictures.

Search "flickr" on TeacherTube for tutorials on some more specialized things to do through Flickr.

Tumblr

Tumblr joyfully describes itself like this:

"To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks. You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create. "

Screen shot of my tumblr dashboard

"Is Tumblr better/worse than Blogger, TypePad, FaceBook, etc.? It's totally different. That's why we built it, and why we love it so much. Blogs are great, but they can be a lot of work. And they're really built to handle longer-form text posts. Tumblelogs, on the other hand, let you easily and quickly post and share anything you find or create. "

Tumblr will display anything with an rss feed: blogs, bookmarks/favorites (like del.icio.us), podcasts, wiki posts, live bookmarks, photos from photo sharing sites (like Flickr), videos (from YoutTube or Google Videos, etc) etc, as well as items you post directly.

And then, of course, you can subscribe to a Tumblr feed in any rss feed reader. This would be an interesting way to collect all the work of a class, or group, or a teacher's collection of resources for a particular subject area, because it is so graphic.

Using online bookmarks/favorites

Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon) are described at Wikipedia like this:

"Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly."

Screen shot of a del.icio.us account page

The trick to using a site that uses tags rather than filing bookmarks into folders, is consistency in tagging or labeling. If a group were using one account, it would be good to work together on keyword definitions. (In itself, this is a good tool to practice determining and defining keywords.)

A "tag cloud" can be configured, and added to the side bar of a blog, or to a web page. The tag cloud at left is from the "PYPCDN" del.icio.us account. Anyone can tag a bookmark "for:pypcdn", and the administrator of the account then has the choice to accept and save the bookmark, or delete it.

Read this post (and watch the video from TeacherTube) on the 28 August blog that I wrote for another tech-day gathering.

This page at Mahalo, "How to use del.icio.us like a Pro", will show you everything you need to know about starting a del.icio.us account.

What a useful tool for an Exhibition group!

Copyright - who has it, how to use it

This video from Creative Commons explains the concept of copyright.


Att: There is a short add at the end of this video


Copyright law varies from country to country, but in general, these guidelines apply:
Copyright owners have the following rights to their work

• Reproduction
• Adaptation
• Distribution
• Performance
• Display

"Fair Use Exemptions" generally are

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Copyright

You can read about copyright at Wikipedia: "Copyright is a set of exclusive rights that regulate the use of a particular expression of an idea or information. At its most general, it is literally "the rights to copy" an original creation. In most cases, these rights are of limited duration. The symbol for copyright is "©", and in some jurisdictions may alternatively be written as either (c) or (C)....Copyright laws are standardized through international conventions such as the Berne Convention in some countries and are required by international organizations such as European Union or World Trade Organization from their member states." Read more here.

Creative Commons (CC)
"Creative Commons helps you publish your work online while letting others know exactly what
they can and can't do with your work."

You can read about Creative Commons on Wikipedia: "The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share. The organization has released several copyright licenses known as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of the work." Read more here.

Read more about the concept here. You can license your work with a Creative Commons license here.
A comic (online) explains how Creative Commons works "How it Works"

Suggested student guide lines

Suggested student guide lines for work using only original and copyrighted (c) "all rights reserved works" (based on this page):

• On the opening screen and any print materials, if you have included copyrighted materials, you must put a notice that "certain materials are included under the fair use exemption".
  
• Acknowledge ALL your sources with a bibliographic citation
• Use only lawfully acquired copyrighted works or self-created works. Be very sure that any pictures, files or text you take off the Internet says that you may use it, or write the webmaster/author for permission.
  
• Follow the 10% rule of thumb. Ask the librarian or teacher if you have questions about how much of a song, video, picture or poem you can use. You may not modify scanned images.
• Use your project only for class work and show it only to the students in your class.
• Only 2 copies can be produced for use. One copy can be saved in a portfolio.

Suggested student guide lines for work using only original and Creative Commons (cc) works

• Acknowledge ALL your sources with a bibliographic citation
• If you use works licensed with an Attribution license, be sure to site the creator.
• If you use works licensed with a Share-Alike license, be sure to license your own work with the same license.
  

Added 9.12.07: "Crossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age" presented by Karen Richardson during the K12 Online Technology Conference gives a good overview of issues in copyright, and many link and resources for correct and legal use of materials.