Filtering and Intellectual Freedom Issues in K12 Schools

The WEMTA Spring Conference is quickly approaching, April 6-8. One of the presentors is asking for data to include in his session. Below is his request. Even if you're surveyed out, please take the survey, so we can all begin the discussion with some facts.

Hello,

For the upcoming WEMTA Conference, I am planning to present on the topic of filtering in schools. With CIPA, most of us have stopped the discussion about whether or not we should filter Internet access, and now most of the issues revolve around how we implement filters and how we deal with disagreements about what is and what is not filtered.

I would very much appreciate your feedback about how filtering decisions are made in your schools. This survey is 21 questions long, and will take approximately 10-15 minutes to complete.

The results will be shared at the WEMTA Conference at the session titled: Filtering and Intellectual Freedom Issues in K12 Schools.

I will also post the responses back to the WEMTA and WETECH listservs.

While identification information is requested at the front of the survey, I will remove that information from the results.

Please take the time to either fill this survey out, or pass it on to someone in your district who is close to the decision making process for filtering. This information will serve to help schools have discussions around this important topic.

Thanks in advance,

Joel VerDuin
Director of Technology and Media Services
Wausau School District, WI

Technorati Tags: WEMTA08

hitchhikr Ever seen this image before? Perhaps on a conference blog or wiki? I have been listening to a few of the TechChickTips podcasts. I'm not sure how I discovered them. (I noticed that I had used Tech Chicks as a tag already. So checkout my first post about the Tech Chicks. ) Anyhow I subscribed to their podcasts via iTunes. In one their earliest podcasts,#10, they spoke about hitchhikr. It's a site designed by David Warlick that gathers all the blog posts, podcasts, and pics about conferences.

Mr Warlick says, Hitchhikr was invented, to provide you with a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.

Hitchhikr allows those of us who cannot attend a particular conference to continue our own professional development at our leisure. Here's a great blog post by kstevens77 discussing hitchhikr which includes a link to David Warlick's podcast about hitchhikr.

I was disappointed that I couldn't find the AASL's recent conference in Reno. We have to keep in mind that hitchhikr is only as good as those who use it and those who TAG. So be sure that you do use tags. And, keeping that in mind, I registered WEMTA's spring conference. Check it out.

Wink

I've been trying to learn how to use Wink, a freeware program.

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users.

I first saw Wink in operation at my former school's website. The teacher librarian who replaced me has created a great tutorial on how to use EBSCOhost to locate a magazine article. An excellent and useful tutorial.
I'd like to create a tutorial for using Moodle for WEMTA's Battle of the Books.

Zoho Sheet (Continued)

Collaboration will work. After we discovered that an incorrect email address was being used by one of the collaborators and a telephone call while using the application, I can now say that it's going to be so awesome.

Here's how:

The first person to send a Share Invite is the author. The invitee receives an email with a link to the sheet and the sheet appears in your Shared With Me folder. You can then open the sheet and make additions, edits, etc. We found that the author doesn't see the change/s until you Share-Notify Author. The author receives an email with a link and now has any changes you have made.

We also found out that chat is available if more than one user is online at the same time. Really cool.

Today's School Libraries

"Today's Library: A fun look at the schools library and how it has changed over the years."
The Henrico County (Va.) Public Schools recently produced this informative look at what school library media centers and media specialists can do to teach 21st-century literacy skills. Remixing a 1940s-era librarian vocational film with interviews with middle-school and high-school information specialists, teachers, and students, Today’s Library is an entertaining showcase of the importance of professional librarians in the educational process....
Henrico County (Va.) Public Schools Video Vault