yolink Education in AASL's Top 25!

This week the yolink Education website and team received the honor of being recognized as a Best Website for Teaching and Learning 2011 by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL)! The AASL is a division of the American Library Association whose mission is to advocate excellence, facilitate change and develop leaders in the school library field.

In the ALA press release it was stated that the top 25 sites for 2011 were chosen because they were free, web-based sites that encourage a community of learners to explore and discover.

"These websites are creative, innovative and fun - and the most important - they support the integration of 21st century skills into the curriculum," explains Pam Berger, committee chair. "Together with the two previous year's winners, educators have an effective, high quality toolbox of Web 2.0 tools to support inquiry learning and the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner."

The announcement was made at the American Library Association's 2011 Annual Conference in New Orleans and the yolink team is proud to be a part of such an amazing list.

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Oregon COEDTech Day 2011

COEDTech

This April the yolink education team was pleased to participate in the Central Oregon EdTech Regional Education-in-Technology Day (COEDTech Day), which took place in La Pine, Oregon. Approximately 300 educators from across Central Oregon participated in the full-day COEDTech event. The yolink team presented topics in three sessions, two focused on 21st century research skills, and one session was a round table discussion on popular educational web apps. Both the yolink browser add-on and SweetSearch were well received, and the ability to seamlessly share search results with Google Docs was an added bonus as the state of Oregon is moving in the direction of utilizing Google Docs statewide.

COEDTech Day was a wonderful opportunity to not only share yolink and SweetSearch with new users, but to also provide training and support to schools and educators bringing the 21st century research skills to classrooms across the state of Oregon. For those not able to attend COEDTech Day 2011 see a few Flickr highlights.

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NSBA 2010 Technology+Learning Conference

The NSBA 2010 Technology+Learning Conference in Phoenix, Arizona was a huge success as the yolink education team welcomed over a hundred inquisitive educators and administrators to the booth.

Those new to yolink were excited by the technology and shared various scenarios about when and where yolink could help them save time and effort, such as searching for projects on intellectual property or preparing for a doctorate. The most frequently asked question of the conference was the incredulous, “yolink is seriously free?”

People were also pleased to learn that they can add yolink search enhancement to their blog by installing a simple widget that can be found at www.yolink.com/yolink/widget/. Mark Garrison installed yolink to his blog www.GarrisonSites.com/ that afternoon after the conference.

Conferences are a fantastic way to meet and interact with new people on a personal level. A great big thank you to everyone who came by the booth and followed our live twitter updates at @yolinkeducation.
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yolink Open Office Hours

yolink is having its first Open Office Hours at 1pm PST on Thursday, September 16th. Drop in and chat with a yolink evangelist, to learn new ways to use yolink, and to discuss how you use yolink to search, collaborate, and share. We look forward to speaking with you! Here is the link to join the yolink Elluminate room.
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yolink integrates Creative Commons for attributed finding

The power of yolink’s next-generation search technology is now combined with Creative Commons (“CC”) ‘copyleft’ copyright protection to promote the proper attribution of creative work when saving, sharing and creating content. Since 2001, Creative Commons’ goal has been to “increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in ‘the commons’ — the body of work that is available to the public for free and legal sharing, use, re-purposing, and remixing” (http://creativecommons.org/about/what-is-cc). CC offers a standardized method for people to share and build upon the work of others, by making it easy to grant copyright permission terms that range from “no rights reserved” to the restrictive “all rights reserved.”

The latest yolink update integrates CC’s licensing support. Now, when a yolink result contains CC licensed content and is saved to Google Docs, the license will be retained and displayed in the document. This newest update ensures that creative work is easily accessible and properly attributed.

Check out the Creative Commons Weblog for more information.
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Classroom 2.0 LIVE! Archived Link

If you missed the recent yolink search technology presentation on Classroom 2.0 LIVE! you may now listen to the archived session. The Saturday, August 7 presentation featuring Brian Cheek from TigerLogic and noted California-based educator, Ken Shelton, was well attended with many interested educators. Brian demonstrated the benefits of yolink as a valuable tool in education and Ken illustrated how he uses yolink to help teach research skills to his students. Brian also introduced the yolink API technology, which when implemented allows website visitors to use yolink to search, save, and share without downloading any software. One great example of our API widget is on the student search engine, SweetSearch, which provides qualified links for K-12 education that have been evaluated by research experts. Mark Moran from SweetSearch surprised attendees by joining the call and describing how the search engine with embedded yolink technology into the site side bar creates an even better research experience.

Other API examples Brian touched on were the Google Alerts feature from our yolink Labs section and Steve Hargadon’s blog. Here is more information on both the yolink API and the Classroom 2.0 LIVE! Saturday presentations.
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Punahou Technology Lab School

A few weeks ago, the yolink education team had the special opportunity to visit Hawaii and participate in Punahou’s Technology Lab School. Punahou is a private K-12 1:1 school in Honolulu which hosts a technology workshop each summer for educators and technology directors from across the Hawaiian Islands.

Both the yolink team and Lucy Gray presented at the Lab School together with other presenters from Apple, the University of Hawaii, and FableVision. Our presentation focused on Google search tools and strategies and how yolink augments the time spent searching online. Lucy Gray also gave a presentation on Global Education and shared an upcoming Global Education Conference which she and Steve Hargadon are co-chairing this year November 15th through 19th. The two presentations from Punahou are available on SlideShare.

During our time at Punahou, we were thrilled to work with many great teachers and students in the Summer School Program. We demonstrated yolink and yolink + SweetSearch during a high school Social Studies class, a mixed middle school and high school Science class, and three high school English classes. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet with educators, see a 1:1 school in action, and experience firsthand technology integration in education.
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