Teaching game about tags

A great idea for teaching and learning about tagging from Joyce Valenza’s NeverEndingSearchBlog. The game is called Fastr, developed by Scott Reynen of randomchaos.com. The game generates a group of ten Flickr images and you guess the common tag. As Joyce warns, probably not real appropriate for younger children, given what may pop up in Flickr, although when I tried it I didn’t see anything inappropriate (I only guessed about half).

Fallibility in a print source

As a librarian and teacher, I’m always looking for examples to point out that just because it’s printed (or on the Internet) doesn’t make it so. I found a wonderful example tonight of something really wrong on the pre-printed part of our family kitchen calendar — the Norman Rockwell version we got from our dog kennel last Christmas.

In the block that says November 26th, the calendar printer put “Advent.” Now, any good Lutheran (of which I have been said to be) knows that Advent begins 4 Sundays before Christmas, which is Monday, December 25th. So Christmas Eve, which falls on Sunday, December 24th, is the 4th Advent Sunday.

Guess I’ll save this calendar to use in research classes to illustrate that it’s always a good idea to check 2 sources. It’s not only the Internet that sometimes gets the facts wrong.