New York Times on Banned Sites

If you haven't read it, check out The New York Times article on Banned Sites Awareness Day -- it quotes several librarians, including our very own Judy Gressel!

And thank you to all of the teachers and advisors who graciously encouraged their students and advisees to participate in our Banned Sites Day survey. With their help, we were able to gather responses (almost 400!) from over 10% of the student body at the Winnetka campus and to also roughly reflect our population by gender, grade and sending school.

We truly appreciated the students' participation; hopefully it was a small step in helping raise awareness at other schools where students find that many sites are blocked. Overall, it was a great opportunity to add to a dialogue about technology, to simply teach students about QR codes, and to encourage all of us to think about censorship in its many forms.

More on Vizualize Me!

I wrote to the Vizualize blog suggesting that this would be a great educational app for historical figures and here is the (prompt!) reply:

Iris Van Kerckhove just commented on the post "Vizualize.me Featured on BBC News" on Vizualize.me's Blog

Hi Judy. You can now log in without LinkedIn and create your visual resume by filling everything out manually. Let us know how your historical character resume goes! Sounds like an awesome teaching tool.

That's what I love about social media...so immediate...so helpful...so awesome! We do learn better by crowdsourcing. I did discover that their "timeline" for education/jobs, etc does not go back before 1950 which is unfortunate.

Give it a try:

vizualize.me: Visualize your resume in one click. via kwout

Kindle Fire on Order

Read the commentary by Business Week:

Amazon, the Company That Ate the World - BusinessWeek via kwout

Seems Like QR Codes are Still Alive and Well

QRPedia.org, developed by Wikipedia, is a QR code creation service that lets smart phone users snap a picture of a QR code and be automatically directed to a linked mobile Wikipedia entry in whatever written language their phone uses.

QRpedia also allows you also to generate a QR code from a wikipedia url.
Here is one I made from the wikipedia article on Banned Books week:

Wikipedia Unveils Probably the Coolest QR Thingy Ever Made via kwout

Want Your Resume to Pop? Try Vizualize.me

1. Step one - update your Linkedin Resume
2. Login to vizualize.me  -- a new web app that creates an infographic visualization of your LinkedIn profile’s data. 
3. In just a click, import your Linkedin resume information and it transforms into an infographic.

As an education app, it would be great if students could set up a Linkedin resume for a historical character and create the infographic to share in a class presentation! However, the current Linkedin user agreement policy prohibits misrepresenting your identity.

Are QR Codes obsolete with the new Google Wallet?

Few consumers are actually using QR codes.  According to a recent study: from digital analyst comScore, " a measly 6 percent of mobile subscribers currently use the technology. That 6 percent tends to be male, white and wealthy".


NFC or near field communication could replace QR codes. Last week Google launched its first NFC app, called Google wallet which could bypass QR codes altogether.  Read the story at NPR.

Kindle Downloads and Returns on Overdrive

At some point our library may consider loaning books out to Kindles via Overdrive. Read more about the deal recently reached with Overdrive at the amazon.com website.
Here's a video from a library which is already doing this:



Teaches you to download Overdrive titles to your Kindle. From the High Plains Library District


Read Bobbie Newman's  thoughtful post about what libraries may not be getting as a result of the Overdrive deal with Amazon.