Your Digital Footprint – control of your online image
For a while everyone seem to be worried about what the universities and future employers would find when they googled our children’s names online. Not to say that still isn’t a concern, but the forward thinkers out there are beginning to be worried that their child’s online profile won’t be interesting enough to make the college recruiter pause or the employer to put their application in the “to be interviewed” pile. They have moved on to the active branding of identity in the digital age.
We need to move our students past their facebook profile as party scheduler and future disaster to using the net to reflect their beliefs, presence and style.
First things first, cleaning up anything embarrassing that may be visible to the public. A couple of the better people search tools are http://www.123people.com/ and http://pipl.com/ . You’ll be surprised at how much you have revealed about yourself to the world through the internet. Of course it isn’t just what you’ve posted yourself, but what others have posted without your permission. It’s worth asking the person who posted the information or the website owner to take down the photos or information you find unflattering. Adobe also recommends you search on your home phone number, address and any email aliases you may use.
There are services these days that rate your popularity and impact online. Garlik out of the UK is offering a sideline service that rates you based on semantic web technology, checking into how many web sites have information about you and who is interested in that information. Garlik’s real business is in protecting people from identity theft, warning them when there is potentially sensitive information available about them on the internet. I tried it and found they wanted a lot more information than I really wanted to give them.
If our students google well it is because they are using the web to improve their lives and further their education. I don’t mean they are taking an online class at Pima College or BYU, but are using Web 2.0 tools to collaboratively work and construct knowledge with their peers or as Will Richardson says “older students should be engaging in the hard work of what Shirky (2008) calls “collective action,” sharing responsibility and outcomes in doing real work for real purposes for real audiences online”. According to a recent Pew study, our students are online an average of seven and a half hours a day, frequently on more than one device at a time. As many of you may have noticed, these students are what Tony Wagner, author of the Global Achievement Gap, calls “differently motivated learners”. As a system we have to learn how to take advantage of this change in the way our students think and behave and respond by reinventing assignments and curriculum to motivate the net generation. The district infrastructure isn’t available yet to accomplish everything we want in the online environment, but not all Web 2.0 tools are bandwidth pirates. We can take small steps using diigo, a social bookmarking tool, and pbworks, a wiki, to collaborate, evaluate, create, and share. Soon Sabino will not only have a great reputation for football and academics, but our students will “google” well.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/nov08/vol66/num03/Footprints_in_the_Digital_Age.aspx
Google Redux
@ the Sabercat Library
Every day I hear about the need to exercise our minds so we don’t lose the mental agility and ability to recall that keeps us vital. I was happy to read an article in the weekend Arizona Daily Star a month a go citing a study that touted searching the internet as a way to keep the brain active. Since I abhor Sudoku and the New York Times crossword puzzle I was greatly relieved; there is hope for me yet. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the article again in AzStarnet, but I did find it at Medical News Today. The improvement in brain function is caused by the brain’s need to hold information in working memory while reading, searching and combing through web pages. Students, highly influenced by advertising are buying into Bing who promises to help decide for them, no need for critical thinking.
So for those of us still enjoying the challenge of search, I have new possibilities from Google –
+Show Options is located on the light blue bar just below search. It allows you to change some of Google’s basic operating parameters. Usually Google lists its results by how many other sites link to the site with your search terms in it. But in Show Options you can change that to find information within Any Time frame that suits your need. The results may not be as relevant, but they’re timely.
Standard View allows you to look at search in a totally different way. When you are unfamiliar with your topic and the terms you might need to use Related Terms to help you find the right keywords to search. This is especially important with kids who don’t necessarily have the background of experience that adults have and bring to the search experience.
Wonder Wheel is a visual search. We can’t use it at school because our computers are too slow, but it really gives you a new way to look at a search. I still prefer the search engine Quintura.com for visual search, because it has more bells and whistles, but Wonder Wheel does have Google’s search results to back it up.
Google Timeline is helpful especially for historical topics. It sorts your results across a timeline which you can click on to get closer to the event you are looking for. Using this tool you can get relevance and a timeframe.
Just in case you’ve forgotten some of Google’s other incredible features-
-.com using the minus sign to remove commercial sites or anything else that is messing up your search
“to be or not to be” quotes to keep words together in a search, great for titles
File type – in advanced search you can search for PowerPoints. Also in advanced search you can
Search within a site or domain – and choose just to search within the most credible sites .edu or .gov
Hello world!
@ the Sabercat Library
Schools and the state of Arizona haven’t been on the best of budgetary terms this year. As a library we are without a book budget this year, the kids are going through withdrawal pangs. We knew this was going to be a lean year though, planned ahead, and found ways to fund our databases and subscriptions from pockets of funds Dr. Payne found for us out of last year’s monies.
The State Library for Arizona has also come through with statewide access to the EBSCO database for every school and library in the state.
Within EBSCO there are levels of information available for everyone. It starts with the graphically rich Searchasaurus for the Kindergarten through third grader all the way up to a professional development collection for teachers.
Grades K-3 Searchasaurus
Grades 4-6 Kids Search 
Middle School Research
High School Research
Teacher Resources
NoveList – a reader’s guide to good books
As always with databases, you have to login, and our username and password is “sabino”. You can exclude unnecessary sections of the database search to speed up your inquiry by deselecting them before you search. Not everything is full text. That can be remedied by checking the box on the right and updating your results so you only see citations that have articles attached. The peer reviewed box is there, if your student is asked to use scholarly sources, frequently required at the college level, although I don’t find that this does the job in this database. The Gale Databases do a much better job with their tab for Academic Journals. On the left hand menu you can limit your citations to the type of source: periodicals, newspapers, books or to the particular database it came from: Environment Complete, Newspaper Source Plus, etc.
Last year we even managed to add one database, ABC-CLIO’s World History. It can be accessed from home or school. It was purchased to support the World History classes at Sabino. Teachers can set up research lists and questions on the database.
