Welcome to Study Hall! The Internet can be a great resource as long as you know how to use it. Here you will find tips for effective web research to help you get the most out of the Internet.
Maya
Cyber Defender & Databank Supervisor
Because of her unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Maya started out as a librarian. While she loved her job, she wanted to do more to help protect people.
Since Cyber Villains such as Ms. Information and Elvirus can corrupt websites and the information on them, Maya teaches people to protect themselves by using caution when visiting websites and avoiding sites that are not trustworthy.
Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime
- Chinese Proverb
Anything chocolate
Interests:Browsing bookstores, baking
June 30 2008
Summer Reading: Week 4
How is your summer reading coming along? If you haven’t registered yet, please do so at the Carnegie Library's site so you can track all of your progress this summer.
Last week I read The Computer Bug by Stephen Tucker. This story is about Annie, a spider living in a city park who's fate is controlled by a computer program. Something wicked has been threatening the park inhabitants and the computer’s analysis program is their only hope. However something is also threatening the computer program, it is under attack by computer bugs!
Annie is swept up into adventure when she finds herself face-to-face with the computer analyzing her park home. Since she is hungry, the computer invites her inside to help take care of its bug problem. Annie meets many of the computer world’s inhabitants and is joined on her quest by Bit and Byte, two very willing but often bumbling sidekicks. While Annie is powerless against the monstrous evil destroying her park, with her courage, her spider smarts, and the help of her new friends she can ultimately save both the inhabitants of the computer world and her home.
This book is beautifully illustrated and is a wonderful introduction to the inside workings of computers. Computers are not really “smart,” their abilities are actually very limited. They have to be told exactly how to do something and they only understand what they are programmed to do, just like how the computer world’s data have a hard time understanding Annie because of their limited knowledge.
This book also shows you not only how something very small, like a computer bug, can cause major problems, but also how someone very small and seemingly insignificant, like Annie, can really save the day! I think Annie would have made a fantastic Cyber Defender.
posted by Maya
topic: Summer Reading
June 27 2008
Helping Betty
I’ve been watching Betty struggle through repairing the Clubhouse for a while now. I’m starting to feel sad for her. I know she volunteered to sacrifice her beloved Clubhouse to capture Nils, but we’ve left her to deal with the damage herself. From now on I’m going to do what I can to help her restore the place.
posted by Maya
topic: Miscellaneous
June 23 2008
Summer Reading: Week 3
How is your summer reading coming along? If you haven’t registered yet, please do so at the Carnegie Library's site so you can track all of your progress this summer.
This past week I had a little fun researching computer "bugs" to go along with this year's summer reading theme, Catch the Summer Reading Bug. Do you know the story of the very first computer "bug"? Or where the term "debugging" a program comes from? Debugging is a term programmers use when they are looking through their code for pieces that aren't working correctly, usually referred to as "bugs". However, the first computer bug wasn't a bit of malfunctioning code at all.
The very first computers were big bulky calculating machines that were nowhere near as sophisticated as today's computers or even today's pocket calculators. In 1947, one of these calculating machines began experiencing problems. When they opened it up to take a look, they found a moth trapped in the machine! After removing the moth, or "debugging" the machine, everything worked smoothly again, and the term was born.
You can read all about it on this site and maybe even do some more of your own web research about computer "bugs". Don't forget to record the time you spend reading Web sites!
posted by Maya
topic: Summer Reading
June 20 2008
My Summer Reading List
After I wrote the tracking program that hasn’t been much left for me to do but check it occasionally. I’ve dug though my personal library to find books I want to read this summer.
Jane Eyre has been a long time favorite of mine. And I like to read Moby Dick in the summer. Tales of whales and the sea. It is unexpectedly funny if you know how to look at it.
posted by Maya
topic: Miscellaneous, Summer Reading
June 17 2008
Finding Reliable Sites: What do others think of the site?
One way to tell if a site has reliable information is if it is recommended by many other Web sites. Many Web sites only link to sites that they consider reliable, so you can check to see how many backlinks the site has to help you determine if the site is reliable. A simple way to do this is to type "link:" followed by the full site URL into a search engine to see some of the other sites that link to it. You can also check to see if the site is included in a reliable Web directory.
Some search engines also determine a site's ranking based on how many backlinks it has, so consider how high on the list of search engine results the site shows up. Sites that are harder to locate and that no one else recommends or links to tend to be less reliable than the ones that everyone goes to.
You may also want to search for other people's opinions about the site and its author and see what they have to say about them. Try to be objective when reading other people's opinions and reviews though because some people will write nasty reviews just to be mean.
posted by Maya
topic: Finding Reliable Sites
June 16 2008
Summer Reading: Week 2
How is your summer reading coming along? If you haven’t registered yet, please do so at the Carnegie Library's site so you can track all of your progress this summer.
Last week I read Secret Identity by Wendelin Van Draanen. This is the story of Nolan, a nerdy kid who loves math. Life is tough for Nolan at school, he and his classmates get picked on a lot by Bubba, the class bully. Nolan decides that it would take a superhero to stop Bubba, so he creates an online secret identity, Shredderman. He launches Shredderman.com as a place to post embarrassing photos of Bubba and evidence of his bullying to get back at him.
While I thought this book was fun to read, it also made me think. Nolan created his Web site to get back at Bubba, but really what Nolan was doing was becoming a bully himself, a cyber bully. Also, by posting pictures of Bubba on the site, he was putting Bubba in a lot of danger by exposing his personal information. That's even worse than bullying someone at school! Even if someone is a rude and mean bully, there’s no excuse for putting them in danger. It would have been better if Nolan had talked to a trusted adult about how to deal with Bubba instead.
There are 4 books in the Shredderman series. I encourage you to read them all and enjoy them, but to also really think about what the characters are doing. How would you react in the same situation? Knowing what you do about Cyber Defense and cyber bullying, what would you have done about Bubba the bully?
posted by Maya
topic: Summer Reading
June 13 2008
Tracking Cyber Villains
I can't believe the Cyber Villains got away, even after Ward and I checked each of the traps to make sure they couldn't.
I'm getting tired of being under constant attack, I want to bring the fight to their doorstep. But Commander Omni is forcing a couple months of rest on everyone. She can't stop me from trying to track them though. Maybe we'll finally be able to trace them back to their real identities.
posted by Maya
topic: Miscellaneous
June 9 2008
Summer Reading: Week 1
The academic year is coming to an end and soon we'll have weeks of long summer days stretching ahead of us. To keep from getting too bored over the break, I encourage you to join our Summer Reading program. This summer the Academy will be working with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and this is the first official week of the program so be sure to visit the Carnegie Library's site to register as soon as you can.
The theme of this year's summer reading program is Catch the Reading Bug, so our reading list features a lot of books about bugs. You can view the book list here, but don't forget that magazines and web sites count as reading too! Since this is the Carnegie Cyber Academy, I'll challenge you to look beyond these books for anything about "computer bugs" as well.
Do you know what the 10 worst computer bugs in history were? Learn all about them here, then record the time you spent reading the web page at the Summer Reading web site!
posted by Maya
topic: Summer Reading
June 3 2008
Research Tip: Find an Expert
When you're researching a topic, it can be very helpful to find an expert in that topic and search for anything about them on the Web. If you stumble across a particular name several times while researching your topic, that person may be an expert, and it's a good idea to try and find out more about them or to find anything they may have written about your topic. You can also talk to a teacher or librarian to get the names of a few people to research, and then look them up online to learn more about their work.
But be careful about separating fact from opinion. You can refer to Finding Reliable Sites: Is this Fact or Opinion? for tips on telling the difference. You will also want to make sure that they are a credible source. You can refer to Finding Reliable Sites: Who wrote this? for some help with this.