In Like a Lion! Bits Flashback for March 6

March 6, 2011 by

Lions & Lion CubsAccording to the old adage, March should come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. With rain and flood watches here in Blacksburg and reports of new snow from colleagues across the country, I guess the saying is true to its word. Here’s hoping that you got a mild, little lion cub rather than a big growl lion of weather.

This past week, Bedford Bits has had posts on everything from poetry to propaganda. Here’s the round-up, in case you missed something!

[Photo: “Lions & Lion Cubs by fortherock, on Flickr]

Filed under Bedford Bits Tagged with

Black History Month Links for 2011

February 2, 2011 by

Virginia Civil Rights MemorialI gathered a list of links for Black History Month for the NCTE Inbox Blog in 2010. Lots of new resources have come online in the last year, so I’ve updated the collection with the most recent and best K12 and College resources for for African American Read-Ins and Black History Month celebrations.

As I wrote last year, click away, read, and marvel at these rich resources. There’s enough that you can visit a new site every day this month!

General Background Information

  1. African American History Month, from The Library of Congress
  2. Black History, from The History Channel
  3. Black History, from the National Archive
  4. Black History Month, from Biography.com
  5. Black History Month, from EDSITEment
  6. Black History Month, from Thinkfinity
  7. Culture and Change: Black History in America, from Scholastic
  8. The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library

Literature

  1. A Brief Chronology of African American Literature, from San Antonio College Lit Web
  2. African American Poets, from Famous Poets and Poems
  3. African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, from The Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  4. African-American Women, from Duke University Library
  5. Black History, from Academy of American Poets
  6. Twenty-Eight Days Later, A Black History Month Celebration of Children’s Literature, from The Brown Bookshelf
  7. Black History Month, from Reading Rockets

Historical and Nonfiction Texts

  1. African-American Odyssey, from The Library of Congress
  2. African-American Quotations, from InfoPlease
  3. African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, from the Library of Congress
  4. African American Cultural Heritage Tour, from the Smithsonian Institute
  5. Africana & Black History, from the New York Public Library
  6. American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, from American Studies Hypertexts at the University of Virginia
  7. The Church in the Southern Black Community, from Documenting the American South
  8. Electronic Text Center: African American, from the University of Virginia (Includes texts about African Americans as well as by African Americans)
  9. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  10. In Those Days: African-American Life Near the Savannah River, from the National Park Service
  11. North American Slave Narratives, from Documenting the American South
  12. Notable Speeches and Letters by African Americans, from InfoPlease

Personal Histories

  1. Experience War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, from the Library of Congress
  2. Oral Histories, from the National Visionary Leadership Project
  3. StoryCorps Griot, from National Museum of African American History and Culture

Photographs and Other Visual Images

  1. The Civil Rights Era in the U.S. News & World Report Photographs Collection, from The Library of Congress
  2. The Face of Slavery & Other African American Photographs, from The American Museum of Photography
  3. Images of African Americans from the 19th Century, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
  4. Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, from the University of Virginia Library
  5. Pictures of African Americans During World War II, from the National Archive
  6. Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers, from The Library of Congress
  7. Portrait of Black Chicago, from the National Archive
  8. Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection, from VCU Libraries

[Photo: Virginia Civil Rights Memorial by john.murden, on Flickr]

 

Filed under NCTE Inbox Tagged with , , , ,

Top Ten Blog Entries for 2010

December 31, 2010 by

HP Winter Summit 2010It’s that time of year when we take a few minutes to look back and reflect. I asked Google Analytics to do some of the work for me, and it came up with these blog entries, written in 2010, which received the most traffic during the year.

  1. 6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984
    Big brother really is watching you and the students you teach. These news stories (check the comments for additional links) talk about how schools and communities are using big brother tactics to track what you do.
     
  2. Top 10 Things to Do with a Banned Text
    This List of Ten shares ways that students can think critically about censorship, focusing primarily on argument and persuasion.
     
  3. Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun
    Word cloud-driven analysis (like Wordle) is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo, which shapes your cloud of words into an image.
     
  4. List of Ten: Fun with Crayons
    This collection of assignment prompts focuses on crayons, everything from color names to childhood memories.
     
  5. 38 Ways to Write about Writing
    A collection of links to 38 ways that students can reflect on the writing they are doing, the strategies they use, and the different experiences they have had as writers.
     
  6. What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom?
    Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. These three lessons about building community in the business world, make a lot of sense in the classroom too.
     
  7. 6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying
    When I tried to update a comp/rhet blogroll list, I found that blogrolls seem to be a dying breed.
     
  8. Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of Thanksgiving
    It turns out Mark Twain was a bit harsh about Thanksgiving, according to an excerpt from his newly-published autobiography. Turn the short passage into a classroom discussion of culture and commercialism.
     
  9. Turning Blog Posts Into a Book Draft
    Thanks to NaNoWriMo and Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, I turned a variety of notes and blog posts into a very rough and informal book draft of 52,967 words!
     
  10. Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
    This round-up features unusual literary lists (like 10 best tattoos or 10 best pairs of glasses in literature) from an ongoing series published in the UK newspaper The Guardian. See the comments for links to more.

So that’s 2010. I was surprised by the popularity of the Orwell post. I just happened upon several stories and threw them into the post. Lots of teachers seem to come to it however, and it was even linked in October from the New York Times Learning Blog. Who knew I’d ever get a shoutout from the New York Times? Not bad, as I look back at my personal blog writing. Not bad at all.

[Image: HP Winter Summit 2010 by negotiable_me, on Flickr]

Filed under Personal Journal

Turning Blog Posts Into a Book Draft

December 3, 2010 by

2010 NaNoWriMo Winner BadgeAfter thirty days of thinking, sorting, and scribbling, I turned a variety of notes and blog posts into a very rough and informal book draft of 52,967 words.

Now as I confessed a month ago, I went about the process as a rebel—writing a nonfiction, academic piece and borrowing from existing work as appropriate. Fortunately, rebellion is sanctioned in this contest, and I am now officially a National Novel Writing Month winner for 2010.

The Secret to My Success
I would never have taken on this project without a little nudge from Literature & Latte’s Scrivener NaNoWriMo 2010 Trial, a special trial version of a wonderful word processing program for Mac (and coming soon for Windows). Ryan Cordell reviewed Scrivener for ProfHacker, and that’s when the program initially caught my attention. When I saw that the Literature & Latte folks were offering a discount for NaNoWriMo participants, I knew I had to download the program and give the month-long writing event a try.

After a few days, I realized that Scrivener had completely changed the way I work on a longer document. Honestly, the program made it possible for me to see how my practice of writing short pieces could work in the context of producing a larger document.

I write dozens of short documents every month, almost always blog entries composed in Dreamweaver for upload to a blog platform like WordPress. When I’m not writing blog entries, I am writing very structured pieces like lesson plans and strategy guides for ReadWriteThink.

My greatest fear has been that I would never figure out how to write another book. I’ve become so used to these shorter, structured pieces, that I just couldn’t think through the problem far enough to understand how to structure and write a fluid, longer piece.

After playing with Scrivener a bit, I realized that I could create and import dozens of shorter pieces as Texts, arranging them in folders, and dragging them around on the cork boards until I had what I wanted. I soon had six chapters sketched out, and I ultimately ended up with 73 short texts sorted into those folders.

Admittedly, the draft is not close to finished. There’s little flow or consistency at this point, but when I realize that I went from 0 words to a fleshed-out folder outline and over 50,000 words in a month, I know it wasn’t just the pressure of the NaNoWriMo deadline that did it. The secret to my success was that Scrivener allowed me to collect my existing blog posts, compose some additional short texts, and end up with a book draft.

My Take-Away Lesson
After participating in NaNoWriMo, I realize that I was letting my belief that I had to have a finished idea for a book in my head block me from getting started. Working with Scrivener helped me recognize that my practice of writing short pieces could still work when I composed a larger book-length manuscript.

As I worked on my draft, I quickly learned that I could turn my blog posts into a very rough book draft simply by sorting things into reasonable categories and adding some missing pieces. My take-away lesson is to remember that I don’t need that finished piece figured out to create a longer text. I just need to be open and creative about how I fit my ideas together.

The Outcome
So here it is 30 days later, I have a roughly-arranged manuscript, which I’m currently calling Designing Digital Writing Assignments.

I’m not sure when I’ll get the manuscript finished or if I can find a publisher. I’m trying not to worry about that right now. It’s enough of an accomplishment to realize that I now know how to turn my blog posts into a book draft. I even know what I want to write a third book about and how to do that. Besides, I need to get back to anxiously checking my email for that 50% off discount for Scrivener that I should get from Literature & Latte as a NaNoWriMo winner.

 

Filed under classroom activities, Personal Journal Tagged with , , , ,

Writing Effective Titles for Your Blog Entries

December 1, 2010 by

Women of WiFi, after CaillebotteHow do you write a title that makes people want to read your text? That was one of the major lessons of Chris Pirillo University (CPU): Writing for Google, an online seminar I attended last month. The on-demand version of the webinar is now available for rental on YouTube.

The session, led by Jake Ludington, covered writing titles, choosing keywords, using links, naming files, and including rich media—all the things that Google and other search engines pay attention to when they rank web pages. It’s what social media experts and marketing folks call Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

My blogs have a very specific audience of teachers and educators, so I’ve never thought much about SEO. I don’t write entries that the general person using Google or Bing is going to look for. Jake’s explanations of SEO made me realize, however, that I’ve been making a mistake by not paying more attention to my titles and the details in my posts.

I quickly realized was that I hadn’t been thinking about audience and purpose in the right ways when I was writing titles for my blog entries. I had fallen into the habit of using either titles that would fit a scholarly article or titles that relied on a pun or clever thinking to reveal their topic. Let me show you some examples, and point out what’s wrong with them:

  • Trying Out Some Tasty Blackbird Pie relies on an analogy related to the WordPress plug-in name. If you didn’t know Blackbird Pie was a plug-in, you’d have no idea what that post was about. I should have included keywords like WordPress and Twitter in that title.
     
  • Warning: Your Usage May Vary takes its title from an image in the blog post. The post is about usage and style, in particular as it relates to dialects and regional variation. Even though the title includes the word usage, I bet no one realizes what the entry is about. I should have been more descriptive instead of hoping the play on words would draw in readers.
     
  • No Yelling in the Food Court summarizes the underlying lesson of the classroom activity described in the post. Readers have no way of knowing, though, that the activity is a way to talk about audience and voice. Heck, they have no way of knowing the entry is about a classroom activity at all, and no teacher in the world who is looking for a fresh way to talk about audience is going to search for the phrase “no yelling in the food court.” I should have used a title that included the keywords and described the post better.
     
  • 100 Sticky Notes, or The Simple Way to Move from Observations to Composing is more like a title for a conference presentation than a blog entry. It’s far too long and the first part (“100 Sticky Notes”) doesn’t give a reader any idea what the entry is about. Even if you read all the way to the end of the title, it’s not going to be obvious that the entry is about a reader-response strategy. Using the words “Move from Observations to Composing” was a good start, but I needed to drop the cute stuff up front and be more specific about the point of the piece.

I liked all those titles when I wrote them, but I wonder now if I would have brought in more readers if I had used better titles. The webinar made me realize that good titles applied to far more than SEO. Certainly I want people to find my posts when they search for writing activities using Google, but writing effective titles for my blog entries also matters to RSS feeds, the Tweets I send out, and other ways that I spread the word about my work.

A well-written title makes a difference everywhere. How much of a difference? How about roughly 33% more visits? In the week before I attended the session on Writing for Google, my highest days in Google Analytics showed 86 and 96 visits.

After I attended the session and applied what I heard, my two highest days were 122 and 132 visits—and that’s all in the days before Thanksgiving. Having more teachers visit my site in the days before Thanksgiving is fairly unheard of. Most people are turning their computers off and forgetting about teaching at that point.

With that response to the change I made, I’m sold. Attending Chris Pirillo University (CPU): Writing for Google helped me write more effective titles (and posts), and I learned important information that I can pass along to students I work with. Who knew that a couple of hours could make such a difference?

If you want to learn more about writing effective titles for your blog posts, take a look at How to Make Money With Google on Chris Pirillo’s blog.

 

[Image: Women of WiFi, after Caillebotte by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com, on Flickr]

Filed under Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with , , , ,

Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of Thanksgiving

November 22, 2010 by

TurkeysStill looking for that last-minute classroom activity to keep the class occupied before the Thanksgiving break? Mark Twain’s newly released autobiography includes a comment on the meaning of Thanksgiving that is bound to lead to a lively classroom discussion.

Begin the classroom discussion by asking students to brainstorm or freewrite about the meaning of Thanksgiving. To help focus their comments, you might first ask them to reflect on what Thanksgiving means to them by sharing some of their personal experiences.

Next, ask them the talk about the cultural and social messages related to the holiday. It’s likely you can arrange their shared responses into a handful of categories like family, tradition, patriotism, thankfulness, and shopping.

Once students have recorded their ideas on the meaning of Thanksgiving, turn to Twain. The New York Times published some Excerpts From the ‘Autobiography of Mark Twain’, (found via Chris Boese on Facebook) that included this vitriolic rant “On the Meaning of Thanksgiving”:

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for – annually, not oftener – if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it.

Twain’s syntax is a little complex, so you might start by breaking down that passage and unpacking the words. Ask students to look in particular at the word choice Twain is using to establish his opinion on the meaning of Thanksgiving:

  • It’s a function, rather than a holiday or celebration
  • The pilgrims are “those people.”
  • The function marks “exterminating their neighbors.”

There’s no whitewashing in Twain’s account of Thanksgiving! Those are some tough words, and Twain’s meaning is very clear.

Have students think about the religious and cultural references in the quotation, and challenge them to think about how Twain’s personal experiences may have influenced his opinion. Have students compare Twain’s comments to the ideas they brainstormed at the beginning of the activity, and encourage class discussion of the accuracy of Twain’s statement. Are there ways that Twain’s take on the meaning of Thanksgiving could be seen as accurate?

As an extension, ask students to adopt Twain’s structure and tone and apply it to Black Friday or Cyber Monday. What would Twain say was the meaning of those commercial events?

 

[Photo: Turkeys by Hey Paul, on Flickr]

Filed under American Lit, classroom activities Tagged with , ,

Bit.ly Bundles Simplify Sharing Links with Students

November 19, 2010 by

~dried and bundled~Bit.ly Bundles are about to simplify the way you share links with students and colleagues. Take any collection of links you want to pass along, and with Bit.ly Bundles you can share just one short web address. You’ll no longer need to pass out links individually.

I originally found link bundling in a post about LinkBun.ch from Jane’s Pick of the Day. Imagine my surprise when less than an hour later the same capability miraculously appeared on my Bit.ly Pro page. I’m a Bit.ly addict, so that’s the tool I’m reviewing here today.

Lifehacker has explained the tool and talked about how it can be handy to the general user. To demonstrate who I might use it, I created a bundle of links to the sites where I publish most of my personal work—links to Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs I work on.

Bit.ly Bundles took the collection of six different links and simplified them into a single URL that I can easily share at a conference, in email, or even Tweet out to my followers:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/newsfromtengrrl/status/5737279511330816″]

Even better than just collecting the links on a single page, Bit.ly Bundles let you control how the links appear on the collection’s page. You can edit the titles and add descriptions or explanations to the links in your bundle. If a link in a bundle changes, or you want to add or delete it, you can edit the collection later. People who visit the bundle can add comments as well.

In educational settings, Bit.ly Bundles take care of two challenges:

  1. They let people see the target links before they click. The service allows for link shortening with transparency. There are no surprises behind the shortened URLs.
  2. They take care of the need to point to multiple texts without blasting a series of URLs or having to create an intermediary page.

It’s a smooth tool that makes sharing links much easier. Just pass out one address, and you’re done!

Not yet convinced? I brainstormed some uses to demonstrate the possibilities for using Bit.ly Bundles in the classroom. Create a Bit.ly Bundle to

  • gather a collection of articles on a current event for students to read.
  • point to a reading and to related discussion and criticism.
  • link to resources for a writing assignment (e.g., tip sheets, guidelines).
  • make sets for students you can use in feedback or tutoring (for instance, a collection on adding descriptive details).
  • share background information on an author or piece of literature.
  • collect information on campus or community resources for a project (e.g., the Writing Center, the reference desk, office hours).
  • distribute URLs to class projects.

And that’s just a beginning. Essentially any time you need to share more than one address, you can use Bit.ly Bundles to simplify the task.

Since you can edit the Bundles, they’re useful for collections you use in more than one class or more than one term. Collect your links in a bundle, and publish that URL in each course. The URL you share remains the same every semester. You simply return to the Bundle each term to make any updates.

To build community resources, like a student-assembled collection of links, I’d still recommend a social bookmarking tool like Delicious or Diigo, but for the collections that you create and find yourself reusing, Bit.ly Bundles are going to make sharing links a whole lot easier for teachers.

 

[Photo: ~dried and bundled~ by uteart, on Flickr]

Filed under classroom activities, Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with , ,

Educational Resources You’re Guaranteed to Like

November 18, 2010 by

365.14 (Blogging)If you are an English teacher, I’m here to make you a promise. Every day, I gather the latest news stories on literacy, literature, and composition and post them online. When I finish that, I publish details on the wonderful educational resources that teachers can use in the classroom as well as links to thought-provoking professional development materials.

The Promise
Follow me on these sites, and I guarantee you’ll find something you can use or that makes you think about an educational issue differently!

It may be a lesson plan or writing assignment that you can use in a class you teach. It may be a link to an article that relates to your favorite literary author. It could be a new educational research report. It might even be a link to a text that you can ask students to read in class tomorrow.

If you’re an English teacher, I promise you will find something you can use in the next month. If I fail you, write me and tell me why!

Follow Me on These Sites

 Blog Entries

 Facebook Pages Updates

 Twitter Updates

Tell Me When You’ve Found It?
Let me know when the guarantee has paid off and you’ve found something you can use. Just leave a comment on Facebook or the blogs or reply to the Tweet where I fulfill my promise. I look forward to hearing your comments on these sites and here.

 

[Photo: 365.14 (Blogging) by kpwerker, on Flickr]

Filed under Bedford Bits, ReadWriteThink

Updating the Copyright Puzzle

November 15, 2010 by

Copyright Symbol by Horia VarlanIn some ways, copyright is a very static thing. Once you set your words down, you own them for decades. When it comes to how teachers apply and teach copyright however, there are always new resources and new guidelines to take into consideration.

This entry was originally published on the NCTE Inbox blog on June 15, 2010. This revised version includes some additional resources and is updated to reflect the Library of Congress ruling on DVD remixing from July of this year. Resources are included for all grade levels (kindergarten to college).

Figuring out copyright can be like piecing together a puzzle. You have a good idea how it’s supposed to work in the end, but all the little pieces can be confusing to piece together.

These links can help you learn more about copyright yourself and teach students about fair use and copyright. In no time, you’ll move from scattered pieces to a full picture of copyright and fair use.

Classroom Resources

Check out the Media Education Lab website for key resources and curriculum materials. The site includes links to My Pop Studio, which focuses on media literacy for girls 9–14, and Assignment Media Literacy resources for K–12 students. You’ll find songs and video clips that you can use with students or in your professional development workshops.

Copyright on the Web, from CyberBee, is a simple FAQ interactive that younger students can explore to learn more about copyright.

Older students can use the Digital Slider from the Copyright Advisory Network to test whether the works they want to use are covered by copyright. The Fair Use Evaluator, also from the Copyright Advisory Network, steps content creators through the process of creating a fair use defense.

Teaching Copyright, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is a collection of five lesson plans on copyright, fair use, file sharing, and remixing.

The Fair Use section of the Center for Social Media website includes teaching materials and educational resources on fair use of documentary film and online video.

Movie Clips and Copyright from Inside Higher Ed explains the Library of Congress ruling on DVD remixing and fair use, which allow wider use of samples from DVDs for classroom use and student projects.

The Campus Guide to Copyright Compliance from the Copyright Clearance Center provides a thorough overview of copyright, fair use, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication, from the Center for Social Media, “identifies four situations that represent the current consensus within the community of communication scholars about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials.”

Copyright, from University Publishing of Washington State University, recommended by NCTE & CCCC member William Condon, includes information on everything about copyright from music to the Internet. The Public Domain Chart and Fair Use section are great classroom resources.

Profhacker’s Solutions for Dealing with Copyrighted Materials in an Open Access Course offers strategies for creating open classes that provide the necessary audio, video, and print documents while still respecting the intellectual property rights of those who created the texts.

The article “Copying Right and Copying Wrong with Web 2.0 Tools in the Teacher Education and Communications Classrooms” from CITE Journal outlines guidelines for determining the fair use of various Internet resources by teachers and students. The article was reviewed by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In addition to resources on copyright, you may want to know something about Creative Commons. For a great overview, check out “The Beauty of ‘Some Rights Reserved’: Introducing Creative Commons to Librarians, Faculty, and Students” from the November issue of the Association of College and Research Libraries publication C&RL News. The About section of the Creative Commons website offers movies, comics, and FAQs.

Issues for Discussion

If you’re ready to ask students to think critically about the complex issues that copyright law raises, you’ll find ideas on these sites. Some are meant to provide background for you, the teacher, while others are appropriate for sharing in the classroom.

Academic Institutions Face "Unfunded Mandate" To Enforce Copyright on Networks from Library Journal discusses regulations that require all schools that receive public funding to “combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of an institution’s network.” Is the legislation asking libraries to police areas outside their control (and what are the funding ramifications for those schools)?

The role of “fair use” in a time of CHANGE, a 2009 lecture by Lawrence Lessig, raises intriguing questions about the way copyright works for print-based texts versus video-based texts and introduces the idea of Creative Commons as an alternative. The video is 66 minutes long, so you may want to ask students to view it outside of class and save class time for discussion.

Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club, from the blog Balkinization, points out the glaring problems with the instruction at William McKinley High School on the television show Glee. There’s lots of fun and songs, but also a lot of apparently teacher-sanctioned copyright violation. The article will lead to lively discussion among students who watch the Fox TV show.

The Inbox Blog post Mixing or Plagiarizing? raises questions about how print-based text was recently borrowed in a German novel that the author defends as a cultural remix. Students can read the related news articles and discuss whether the copying was fair use or a violation of the original writer’s copyright.

The Intellectual Property Colloquium offers a recorded conversation among three scholars on Copyright Termination, the “unwaivable right to terminate certain contracts and licensing agreements.” Students can listen and then join the debate. Should someone be able to reverse a copyright agreement?

NPR’s “Cooks Source, Copyright And Public Domain” and The Guardian’s Cooks Source: US copyright complaint sparks Twitter and Facebook storm describe the copyright scandal surrounding a stolen recipe for medieval apple tarts. Classroom ideas for discussion are included in my An Easy-as-Apple-Pie Plagiarism Lesson on the Bedford Bits blog (forthcoming 11-23-10).

Challenging a YouTube Video Take Down is a short, and likely memorable, introduction to the fair use in using video clips to create a new work. Classroom discussion might focus on how the principles of fair use apply in other contexts. Students might also search other sites to learn how to protest a take down on another website.

Can You Copyright Your Tweets? refutes the position that Twitter posts are too short to be protected by copyright. The post comes from the blog 95Years, recommended by @jensmyth. Check the blog for the latest controversies involving technology and social media. Because some information on the site is not appropriate for your typical classroom, the resource is best for teachers rather than students.

The xkcd comic “Steal This Comic” is a short, pointed discussion starter for the issues surrounding music copyright. Whether you agree with xkcd’s take on the issue or not, it’s an interesting way to introduce the topic.

[Photo: Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo of copyright symbol by Horia Varlan]

Filed under classroom activities Tagged with , ,

Trying Out Some Tasty Blackbird Pie

November 7, 2010 by

I immediately liked the name of the new WordPress plug-in, Blackbird Pie. The nursery rhyme popped right into my head: Four and Twenty Black Birds, Baked in a Pie.

The plug-in makes this, essentially a jazzy block quotation:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/tengrrl/status/1348769496965120″]

You include the URL and get a very nice looking presentation of the Tweet that you are writing about. Twitter is behind the functionality, and you can create the links the old fashioned way at Twitter Media’s Blackbird Pie. The WordPress plug-in simplifies things by making it a matter of clicking the blackbird button when you’re in the Visual editing tab for your post.

One of the coolest features of the plug-in is the Search. Know you want to refer to someone’s Tweet, but don’t have the URL handy? Use the search in the plug-in to load up that person’s recent comments and just click the one you want.

Nice and slick. Only problem is it’s not working for me if I use a new Twitter link. You have to delete the #! from the Tweet’s URL to make it work properly.   It’s a minor bug though, and since I know how to fix it, I think I’ll keep the plug-in.

Filed under Teaching with Digital Tools Tagged with ,

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