Library Media Diva

The Hunger Games film is scheduled for theatrical release on March 23, 2012. Currently in the pre-production phase, the three starring roles in the film have been cast. Jennifer Lawrence will star in the film as Katniss Everdeen. Her leading men will be played by Josh Hutcherson (Peeta) and Liam Hemsworth (Gale).

Personally I thought that Hutcherson should be playing Gale at first. However, I think if you look past the hair color, Hemsworth has a much stronger face, similar to what I imagined Gale looking like. I can hardly wait for the release of this film.

Find out more:
VH1: The Fab Life
The Hollywood Reporter
Screen Rant
MTV News

On a whim, I thought to enter the Education PSA that one of my library helpers, along with some members of the Cougar TV Crew, created into the SchoolTube Big Game Commercial Contest. The winners were announced yesterday, and we won first place in the one minute category. I am pleasantly surprised! Our entry was so different from all of the many other humorous entries, that it must have stuck out. I am so proud of my students and what they are capable of accomplishing when they set to the task at hand. What great things they can achieve when they put their minds to it!

A 2008-2009 Young Hoosier Book Award Nominee is about to make its way onto the big screen March 18th. Alabama Moon by Watt Key is a survival story that I think might be a good fit for my Books Gone Hollywood class. Depending on the quality of the film, I may add it to my reading list for next year.

Resources:
Movie Website
YHBA Novel Resource by Amy Nelson
Watt Key Author Website

The students in my mass media class made their Education PSA into a whole feature, so that we can enter it into the Student Television Network Spring Nationals competition. My second block library helper conducted most of the interviews, and did the majority of the editing. She is amazing and I hope that she earns an award for this. She worked so hard!

This trimester I have had several students in my mass media class that are extremely creative, and they want to be on camera constantly. Never before have I had so many students that wanted to star on Cougar TV, and not enough students to do the behind the scenes work. The editing phase isn’t glamorous; you don’t get the glory of being on TV.

This past week, in a last ditch effort to teach my students the complete filmmaking process, I started back at square one. The planning phase that requires writing, which most of my students hate with a passion. I always emphasize the planning step as being crucial, but is the one most often skipped. My middle school students have a hard time filling out a basic storyboard. In an attempt to review, I decided we should fill out a storyboard as a whole class. I was trying to demonstrate to my students how to take an idea, or a news story of interest, and plan out a segment for the show. The only thing that came to mind at the time was everything going on with education reform in Indiana.

I started talking about some of the changes being made in schools around the state due to property tax caps and other funding cuts. I told my students how so many of my colleagues, my fellow librarians lost their jobs last year. I told them about how membership in my professional organization has dropped to 200 from its high of 500 hundred in just a few years. I told my students of the schools that are having to limit or completely cut out library programs and fine arts classes. Then I asked them to think about why students should care about these things. They immediately started thinking about how their school day would be different. Then they came up with the simple concept of having students imagine what would be missing from their school day. A simple concept turned into a very powerful message.

While the students were brainstorming ideas, I was writing them down. They hate writing, but they have good ideas. They struggle with getting organized. After we had our rough outline, I had two of my library helpers revise the writing and one of them narrated the whole public service announcement. I’ll admit to writing the two lines, “Education Reform without Funding is Meaningless” and “Invest in the Future of our Children”, but I really wanted that in the PSA for the legislators. My library helpers that were writing the narration wanted to feature more of the library. One suggested another scene with empty bookshelves, but I told them that I thought we should just keep it simple.

Of course as a teacher I led these students to create this PSA, but the ideas were theirs. I think the best part of being a teacher is the moment when you see your students succeed. I am so proud of what they have accomplished. I have been overwhelmed by the feedback that I have received. My inbox has been full of wonderful comments. The video received over 1200 views in the first 24 hours it was on SchoolTube.com. It was also placed on the Indiana Federation of Teachers website, ValueHoosierSchools.org.

I hope that some of the legislators have seen it and been affected by it, but even if they haven’t I know that creating this PSA was an authentic learning experience for my students. In that respect, I know I have made a difference in the lives of my students.

Google is using its “street view” technology to now invade art galleries. Just browsing around, I was thinking about the benefits for students. In a struggling economy, students can now go on virtual visits to these famous galleries.

Obviously a virtual visit pales in comparison to the real thing. When I did my study abroad in England, I had the opportunity to actually visit the National Gallery of London. Looking at The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein, on my computer at home is nothing like standing in front of it in the real gallery. When I saw the painting in person, I remember being awestruck by the shear size of the painting, as it was taller than me. Seeing the painting in textbooks hadn’t properly conditioned me for seeing the real thing. A picture on a website or in a book simply cannot do the painting justice. Viewing it at home, the image ends up being about 6 inches on my computer screen, and while I can zoom in on the image it becomes rather difficult to see the anamorphic skull Holbein so painstakingly created. I have to hold my laptop over my left shoulder to see the skull take shape, and even then it is diffcult to see because my monitor is not meant to be viewed at that angle.

Although the Google Art Project could never be as good as the real thing, this new service offers students a significant opportunity to study art from the comforts of their own home without having to pay admission to a gallery. So what do the galleries seek to gain from this agreement with Google? Self-Promotion? Advocacy? Spreading culture?

Besides browsing through the galleries, when you are on a selected work an information panel provides detailed information on the artwork being viewed. This includes links to video clips about the piece, a brief history of the artist, and any other interesting facts a viewer might want to know. Probably one of the most useful features is that teachers can make their own galleries, which would obviously be beneficial to an art teacher. However think about the history teacher covering a specific topic; they could create a gallery of paintings that illustrate the civil war. This has my head spinning.

The downside is that Google, known for its search engine, has created a way to virtually browse gallery collections and hasn’t really made the collections search-able from the main entry page. To handle copyright issues, Google has blurred some of the images at the request of the participating galleries. There is a YouTube channel dedicated to those that are interested in learning more about the Google Art Project.

I was truly touched this evening as I came across the awe inspiring images of the Egyptian youth, gathered holding hands to surround and protect the New Library of Alexandria from looters. I was reminded of all that we have here as citizens of the United States of America, which we often take for granted. The director of the library issued a letter of thanks to the young people that have been helping protect the library and its collections. Read the full letter here.

Every day at work, I observe students struggling to weed through the copious amounts of information available to them online. Students are easily overwhelmed with this abundance of information and have an extremely difficult time processing all that is available at their fingertips. As a librarian, I work hard at teaching them how to analyze and utilize the information they seek, but reading the New York Times today, I was reminded of the importance of my job.

Military investigators are looking into an incident that occurred in Afghanistan almost a year ago that is now believed to have been caused by information overload. The operator of a predator drone, neglected to mention a piece of crucial information that resulted in the death of 23 Afghan civilians. In an intense situation like this, when people’s lives are at stake, the stress of the event must make it even harder to tell the good information from bad.

As the technology allows soldiers to pull in more information, it strains their brains. And military researchers say the stress of combat makes matters worse. Some research even suggests that younger people wind up having more trouble focusing because they have grown up constantly switching their attention.¹

We are dealing with a generation of multitaskers and the military is taking notice. Apparently this generation that has grown up constantly connected with their cell phones, and is having a hard time focusing on what is around them. For example, “when soldiers operate a tank while monitoring remote video feeds, they often fail to see targets right around them.” So in Hawaii the military is researching whether or not the brain’s ability to focus can be rewired in a program of “mindfulness-based mind fitness training.”

The article goes on to describe the daily routine for Josh, a 25-year-old first lieutenant in the Air Force, that involves heavy multitasking:

For 12 hours a day, he monitors an avalanche of images on 10 overhead television screens. They deliver what Josh and his colleagues have nicknamed “Death TV” — live video streams from drones above Afghanistan showing Taliban movements, suspected insurgent safehouses and American combat units headed into battle.

As he watches, Josh uses a classified instant-messaging system showing as many as 30 different chats with commanders at the front, troops in combat and headquarters at the rear. And he is hearing the voice of a pilot at the controls of a U-2 spy plane high in the stratosphere.

“I’ll have a phone in one ear, talking to a pilot on the headset in the other ear, typing in chat at the same time and watching screens,” Josh says. “It’s intense.”²

How do we prepare our students for this explosion of information? It seems that school librarians, who are information specialists, should play a vital role in the education of students. Yet school librarians are facing job loss across the nation as budget cuts have schools in crisis mode. I feel for the students that will lose the most as they enter the job market without the information skills that are necessary for them to thrive.

1. New York Times 01/17/11 [↩]
2. New York Times 01/17/11 [↩]

So even though I asked for a Nook Color this year for Christmas, Santa did not put one under the tree. I did manage to get enough gift cards and cash towards paying half the purchase of one. I’ve had my Nook Color now for about 3 days, and it is definitely not love at first sight, although I’m sure my husband thinks differently. He probably feels like I’m cheating on him, I’m spending so much time devoted to my Nook.

Barnes and Noble sold me with their  excellent marketing strategy this fall. I was very interested in a color e-reader, primarily because I love magazines, cookbooks,  and I also love reading picture books to my four year old son. These all require vivid color. When I went to see the Nook Color display sample magazine at the store, I thought the color looked amazing and my son really enjoyed interacting with the books and magazines too.

I was also drawn to the Nook because I am a library user. I like to borrow books, and the Nook supports the ePub format, as well as PDF. I also like the social features that allow you to share quotes on Facebook or Twitter. Plus you can lend books to friends, just like a good old printed hardcover, right?

I have some mixed feelings as there have been some major bugs with my nook especially with the kids books that came pre-installed as samples. I was so excited to see Richard Scarry’s Colors, and Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child, freebies already available for me to read with my son. These were the first books we looked at on the Nook and it kept freezing up in both the Read-To-Me and Read-By-Myself modes. I took my Nook back to the store, but of course I could not replicate the problem there, so back home I went. Today when trying to view the Nook Kids books, not only would the Nook freeze up, but it was also giving a “Fava Software” error.

I also thought that my Nook was malfunctioning because I tried for two hours to get the share feature to post a quote to my Facebook account. Apparently you can only share quotes from books that you have purchased from Barnes and Noble. I was only trying to share quotes from eBooks that I have borrowed from the public library. I find this very annoying that I spent two hours trying to figure out why the share feature wasn’t working properly, when the matter was as simple as someone telling me that you can’t share from borrowed content. I didn’t see anything mentioned in the user guide about this and the Nook didn’t throw an error message on the screen or anything. So I thought it wasn’t functioning properly.

Before purchasing the Nook, I had already read about the Lend-Me feature, and there are some strings attached. I can understand why you can not read the book, if you have loaned it out to someone. If you had a physical hardcopy book that you’ve let someone borrow, it wouldn’t be on your bookshelf until they returned it. I never stipulate that you have to return it within two weeks or anything though, and I might lend a book to five or ten different friends. Apparently you can only lend a book out one time! If I’ve paid for it I should be able to loan it out as long as I want, to as many people as I want (one at a time of course). I guess an eBook will never fall apart like a hard copy, but a printed hardcopy book might circulate at least 20 times.

I also found out today that a software upgrade is already available for the Nook and can be downloaded from the Barnes and Noble website here. I updated the software hoping that it would correct the problem with the Nook Kids books, but unfortunately it did not. The software upgrade is suppose to help enhance WiFi connectivity.

I contacted customer support to see if I had a defective device and was told that the Richard Scarry book and Rudyard Kipling book had glitches and that there would be new downloads available within 24-48 hours. I am hesitant to purchase other Nook Kids books because of the software bugs in the two free samples, however I was reassured by customer support that they would refund any money towards the purchase of books if there was a reported problem. The customer support specialist was very helpful.

I can understand the rush to be one of the first affordable color eReaders on the market, however there have been just a few too many bugs with my new Nook Color for me to say that I am completely happy with my purchase. I am still contemplating returning the item and downgrading to the original Nook. I am an avid reader and if I sit and read for four hours on my Nook Color, I do feel the eye strain, even with the brightness setting turned nearly all the way down and the background/font combination set to sepia. Customer service at the store said I have until January 31st to return the product.