Common Sense Media closing statement

goal to empower young people to be safe respectful and responsible.
comprehensive: safety/security: digital citizenship; research, and info lilit collaboration: harvard graduate school of ed
target: k-12 sstudents alignment NETS, AASL, ELA, ...

kids said to be successful: don't be cheesy!

Framework: yourself, friends and family, community. Most stop at protecting yourself. Key is to get out to the outer ring and do all three rings.

AISL 2011 Live Blogging Experiment first session

We are at Branson School in San Francsisco listening to a gal speak about Common sense Media and digital literacies. They take a comprehensive approach to media education. They do a l ot of reviews and then share them. Librairans have disagreed with them, but they do have a group that agree with the review component that they have on their site.

They also deal with sexting, cyberbullying, media images, etc. Schools are looking to them for help. They are also looking at advocacy and privacy issues. They want digital literacy and citizenship is on the radar for legislatures.

How many of you are doing work on digital citizenship? What is Digital citizenship?

Respect of online behavior. Treat them the same as your would treat them face to face.

By virtual of being born in this world you are all dwellers in the digital world. A DC in csm is someone who can make safe ethical and ....choices (spoke to fast) There is a balance. We try to help stuuents harness the full potential of technology. This is an in a more informal context.

From an informal context, we are talking about gaming, downloading, researching, socializing, creating, texting.

I'll talk first about the Net Effect. It's about whow the media landscape has shifted. The baseline is that there is an enormous scale about how kids are approaching tech. FAcebook: 600 million members. equals what country the #3 country in the world. Far bigger than the USA. Our students are engaging in this world. They don't know who they are communicating with.

They have no concept of the scale of the audience of what they are doing online. Because the audience is invisible. There is a disconnect between audience and person posting. if you are putting someithing out there you lose control of it. Cyberbullying is part of that loss of control. Things are replicable. Relationships are changing. Things are searchable. They need to know that things can be found and that they can be persistent once posted. College counselors can search for things you posted in high school.

Not only is it searchable, it may have been archived, cached, downloaded, etc. You may have taken it down, but others may have it. The digital footprints may be positive or negative. We need to be helping them leave positive footprints.

YOu are helping them create and be creators.

You want them to be able to show a digital profile that presents a portfolio that is positive.

we need to teach them about using them responsibly. It's about building a leadership team and identifying goals. This is really for a whole school. You want to include faculty, parents, and students. Add the guidance counselor. Who is responsible for this? Determine who this is. Meet regularly. This can't be done in one meeting. Define your Digital Citizen. create your mission statement and identify your goals. then develop polcies and procedures. consider comlince issues. May not apply to indepenet school as much. make sure the policy is comprehensive. make sure it is differentiated by grade. who has responsibilities for what areas. refine your acceptable use policies. make sure it is understandable!!! AUPs are usually written in GREEK.

Educate across the entire community. FAculty, parents and students.

Take an empowering approach.

They have resources at their website. Parent media education program. They have surveys. www.commonsense.org

Joyce Valenza's Libguides

[Note: You can Poster Yourself at the ALA Website (something I discovered by looking at Joyce's Libguides). ] I have to admit that there are some people in the world who make me tired and a little depressed. Joyce Valenza is the main one.

She is pretty amazing, just scroll down her library's website and you can see all of her awards. Her website is chock full of interesting things, and it seems like every new Web 2.0 tool that comes along is just another old notch on her gun belt.

How does she do it? I don't think she sleeps. At all! Ever.

It's the only explanation. Of course, she could have a towering intellect and an amazingly organized mind. I did hear her speak at an Association of Indepedent School Librarians conference several years ago, and she is pretty brainy and organized as well as super nice. It was overwhelming, the sheer number of things she does and knows about. Dutifully, we all took copious notes. Then as we all were leaving her very energetic and amazing talk (it truly was spectacular, don't get me wrong! Funny, insightful and informative.), it hit us. We aren't Joyce Valenza. It's as if we all became a pack of Eeyores. Our heads dropped, our voices became whispers and our pace slowed to a crawl. One of looked at the others and said in a moan, "We can't do a quarter of what she does!" The rest of us just patted her on the back and moved along in silence.

So I was actually feeling a little good about myself when I started playing around with Libguides. Springfield didn't have any libguides. She hadn't found that playground. But it was only a matter of time. She's like Mad Eye Moody. She sees everything! You can't keep any neat technological advance from her.

This morning, one of our IT coordinators stopped in to tell me all about Joyce Valenza's AMAZING LIBGUIDES on WEB 2.0 TOOLS.

Thanks. I think I will kill myself now. But I went and I looked at them, because she is the guru of all things and I do respect her. I, even in my most small and humble way, try to replicate a teen-nitzy portion of the things she does.

Imagine my surprize when I saw two other names on the libguide! Two other people created the libguide! Two other people! Not Joyce!

You know what this means? It means that she might sleep after all!

It means that there might be hope for all of us!

I Am J by Cris Beam

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the first book I have read Other than Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil that had a transgender character. J is the main character and is a transmale, although physically female. I found this book to be compelling and real. The struggle that J goes through, but his internal conflict, the familial conflict and the problems that arise with J's relationships with peers are told in such an unflinching and forthright manner that they seem honest, real and natural. I did not get that air or fakeness or preachiness not one might from a novel that is ostenstibly telling us about what it is like to be a transgendered teen.



I cannot imagine the heartache. There is one particular scene that take place midway through the book when J is having what he thinks is a heart to heart with his father. They are both talking about college and dreams and being what you want to be, then he father destroys it all inadvertantly by saying "You'll always be my baby girl." He has no idea how hurtful these words are. Each family member is in their own cocoon afraid to share anything. J is afraid to make a connection with anyone. It is no way to live.



It really makes one think about how difficult LGBT teens have it in school and how they need books for role models and they need librarians to have those books available for them. They need adults to read those books and at least get a small feeling for the confusion and pain they are going through.



Those kids are so brave just to go to school everyday. I can't imagine it. I just can't bear it if they didn't also have adults around to be safe havens for them to go to for help.



Read the book.



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A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Well, I had high hopes for this one. It was touted as the next Harry Potter for adults, sort of an urban fantasy for intelligent women. Hmm. I should have know that it was too good to be true. There is no action. Very little romance and the mystery is buried so deep you almost don't even care.



Frankly, when the author of a vampire novel makes her vampires able to walk in the sun, YOU HAVE SCREWED UP THE BOOK. So you better have some amazing romance or something else to make up for the fact that there is now NO DANGER to the vampires. OK? NO DANGER.



Honestly. I was so bored I finally just stopped reading. The vampire wouldn't even make out with the main character, Dr. Diana Bishop. Something about you humans being so eager to get on with things. You should take your time. Blah blah blah.



You are boring me!!!!



Nope. I'm bored.



I stopped reading.





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Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Interesting. I really liked it and it was a quick read. I think it has some fascinating points on how to be an exceptional new leader and how companies can move past their paradigms that aren't working. I doubt this is going to work however because the corporate man is never going to believe that the little guy is going to be responsible enough to work without supervision or wants anything but money.



now i'm depressed.



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Another Site to Add to List for Students to Research

I came across an interesting site the other day while grading the Honors Chemistry annotated works cited projects. It was for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights or CCHR. Since the student was doing their project on sleeping pills and this site has a particular view of psychiatry and the use of prescription drugs. Here is what the citation and annotation said:

"Lane, Christopher, Ph.D. "Pharmaceutical Scandal in Britain Sheds Disturbing New
Light on Benzodiazepines." Mental Health Blog . Citizens Commission on
Human Rights International , 12 Nov. 2010. Web. 23 Feb. 2011.
I did not find this website through one of the databases provided in the LibGuides. However, this source is credible because it is an organization with a .org website.

My head ALMOST exploded. How many times had I said that a .org meant nothing? About 1000 times. So I went to the site and sure enough there seemed to be a particular bias against prescription drugs. The paper calls for objective scientific facts, not persuasive argumentation. They are supposed to use library resources and since they are an honors class, I had also granted them the ability to use www.scirus.com the science search engine with the admonition that they still needed to use their head when selecting sites.

So, I did what I always do. First, a link check. Go to google, put in link:www.cchr.org and see who is recommending the Commission as a credible source. Then I do a www.betterwhois.com search to see who owns the site and see if they have a PO Box or a street address. Then I look them up on wikipedia.

Interesting. What do you think? I think I will add them to my list of example sites.