Jimmy Says Wikipedia Good… Teachers Bad

Posted on December 7, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia says that teachers who don’t let students use Wikipedia are “bad educators”.  He says that new editing and checking procedures have made Wikipedia more trustworthy.

Try to edit the article for Hillary Clinton.  The edit tab has been removed.  Notice the lock in the top-right corner of the article.  To modify this particular resource, you must first login.  This is one of the measures that has been incorporated to protect articles from vandalism.

I think there are two valuable components to Wikipedia.  One is the shear volume of information.  The second is the external references to supporting information.  The combination almost guarantees something about almost any topic with a link to an authoritative site.

One of the 21st century skills that our students need is to be able to determine what is authoritative and what is not.  Wikipedia is the perfect place to develop this skill.

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NY Times Retractions

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Just about all the blogs I read have mentioned Linda O’Connor, the New Jersey middle school librarian that has created a campaign against using Wikipedia in schools.  She sites at least two cases of incorrect information in Wikipedia.  In other words, out of the more than 2 million articles, she has found two errors.  That is unbelievable.

New York Times Retraction

I hope she has banned the New York Times from the school library.  A google search indicated they have had about 47,000 retractions.  Would those count as errors?

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Bubblesnaps

Posted on December 5, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I have been looking for a good “bubble” dialog program to use with elementary students during writing exercises.  I found Bubblesnaps today.

The picture above is directly from the Flickr account of my good friend John. Bubblesnaps connects to any Flickr account and grabs the photo you select. Then the bubble and text are added. The final creation is saved as a Flash file that can be sent to someone via email or embedded in a blog (as above).

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Maps of War

Posted on December 4, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

If you like maps and are interested in history, you will like Maps of War.  The site shows a multimedia map for most major military operations.  In addition, there are religious time lines and other significant events such as the war on crime, global migration and the Darfur tragedy.

The library links to some external resources similar to those on the main site.  Most of the maps are Flash movies and some have audio.

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Cyberbullying

Posted on December 3, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Here is a good video on Cyberbullying.  Give it a watch if you are not familiar with the term.

http://www.digizen.org/cyberbullying/fullFilm.aspx

With technology becoming more ubiquitous among younger children (I know 4th graders with cell phones), I can see how many of the actions depicted in the short film can happen.

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