Library LIVE! -- from the Orange County Department of Education

On Wed, 6/24/09, Glen Warren, Coordinator of Media Resources for Orange County Department of Education announced a test broadcast of a new monthly half-hour broadcast called Library LIVE! The show will feature the latest news in Library Media issues and trends. Here is Glen's announcement:

Library LIVE! will be providing a live test broadcast for school librarians through the California K12 High Speed Network on Thursday, June 25th, from 3:00pm to 3:30pm. (Pacific) This will be the prototype of the live monthly, half hour, broadcast for the 2009-2010 school year.

Thursday's Library LIVE! line up will include:
1. The Winner Twins (award winning, authors who are 13 years old)
2. Digital Literacy News
3. Your Ideas for the 2009-2010 School Year

There are two ways to connect to the broadcast. One through live web streaming and the other through a video conferencing unit (like polycom or Tandberg).
We are most interested in testing the live video streaming chat feature. This allows for live interactive chat through most district firewalls.

Here is the link for the live video streaming connection:
http://www.k12hsn.org/conferencing/scheduler/system/conference.php/6707/stream/live <http://www.k12hsn.org/conferencing/scheduler/system/conference.php/6707/stream/live>

Please use the link a few minutes before the broadcast time to make sure you have the proper plugins.

If you have videoconferencing equipment, feel free to connect using the IP address or the CalREN number:
IP Address: 207.166.4.2
CalREN Number: 534 000 4097

Please contact Glen Warren at the Orange County Department of Education with feedback of any technical challenges encountered directly at gwarren@ocde.us after the broadcast.

Glen Warren
Coordinator of Media Resources
Orange County Department of Education
200 Kalmus Drive
Site Location:
3001 Red Hill
Costa Mesa, California 92626

Phone: 714-966-4208

If your school already has a videoconferencing unit like Polycom or Tandberg, be sure to register your equipment's IP address with Glen. This is an excellent use of your existing technology. Hopefully, you have the unit in your library already. Glen will be showcasing Library LIVE! and uses of interactive videoconferencing at the CSLA annual conference this Fall. He has invited Tandberg to exhibit and demonstrate their videoconferencing equipment at the conference, so come prepared to learn what is new and cool.

Google Wave - Watch for It

Watermole, an early member of the CSLA 2.0 Team (Summer 2007), actively updates her blog with news of cool new tools. Her blog shows a pre-launch introduction of Google Wave at the Google I/O Conference. The video is about an hour and a half, but well worth watching. See below.

Highlights:

• Developers are two brothers who designed Google Maps several years ago. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, as well as project manager Stephanie Hannon preview the amazing product, platform, and protocol.
• The open source software product will launch later this year.
• Features include a slick spell-checker (Spelly), ability to detect and add links as you write (Linky), language translator that translate as you write (Rosey), and much more.
• A "playback" feature allows you or a new person that is added to a discussion to start back at the beginning of an edited discussion or collaborative document.
• "Click and drag" attachments and people to add to a document or discussion.
• Wave extensions extend the functionality. Examples of external APIs include a fun "yes/no/maybe" gadget for a group to use to make decisions, games like collaborative chess and sudoku games -- "playback" feature can be used here, too!
• Wave can be integrated with existing applications like Twitter.

NOTE: A few years ago, Lerdof (Lars) Rasmussen commented on why education should use open source software. See interview with Builder Australia: "It makes no sense to base an educational system on property software. All you are doing is generating new customers for a company as opposed to creating the people that might be the next Microsoft. For example if you have a database course, use an open source database and show them how the database works. Not everyone is going to dig into the guts of this thing, but there will be two or three kids in every class that will, and from what they will learn they can build the next great database. It's crazy when educational systems don't go with open source and go all Microsoft. That is where governments really should be pushing universities."

Yellow Pages Widget - LIBRARY category

YellowPages.com has launched a cool local directory search tool, a YP widget. It lets you do a few cool things. For example, you can set a default location for your state or city, select your own subject categories (libraries, schools, pizza restaurants). On my personal blog, 2CoolTools, I've added a heading that urges readers to look up their local libraries -- what a fun way to promote libraries!