This week was all project, all the time. The students slowly entered panic mode as they realized that their digital story was due on Friday. Most of the students in these classes are pretty responsible, and their desire to create a worthwhile product really kicked in late in the game. I was seeing Windows Movie Maker in my sleep, we were so busy.
It's worth noting that the students interest level increased dramatically when they were engaged in the actual creation process (3.1.3, 3.1.4). As far as the new Bloom's taxonomy is concerned, they're engaging in higher order thinking when synthesizing and creating with information, so we were happy to get them there, but their motivation levels jumped when they were creating too, so much so that I might recommend removing the research aspect of this activity when I try it again in the future. I like the notion of them locating their own resources (1.1.4, 1.1.6) but it requires a lot of time that could be focused by preparing a web portal for them. In fact, it could serve a lot of alternative purposes to create a resource pool, giving you an opportunity to discuss copyright issues and ethical resource usage in digital media (1.3.1, 1.3.3). I can envision expanding this project by contacting a local veteran's organization (VFW, VA Medical Center, etc. for local options) and having students interview the organization members directly. Then, have them draw media from a prepared resource list of copyright safe sources, discussing the proper use of resources in digital media creation. Once the projects are finished, we could contact the LOC Veterans History Project and see about uploading their submissions to the LOC. There's a lot of good possibility in there.
In the end, most of the students created a very worthwhile project, and I'm proud of what they accomplished. We had a lot lot LOT of technology snags, so the importance of flexibility was made annoyingly obvious to me, but on the whole it was a really great experience for us all. And I have survey results to prove it. :)
On an unrelated note, we had an opportunity to test one of the board games we would order with grant money, should we receive any. I was really impressed with how quickly the students took to the strategic aspects of the game and, despite having widely different academic ability levels, they were all playing and competing and engaging the game on a very deep level, in an incredibly short amount of time. They leaped to higher-order problem solving in no time, and as often as not the lower-performing students emerged the victors. It was pretty impressive, and really made me believe that games can serve an excellent academic purpose. I'll definitely try to stock some in my libraries in the future, with careful selection of course.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Week #8 - Technology Resistance
This week marked the beginning of the collaborative project a classroom teacher and I cooked up, where the students are creating digital stories from the personal accounts of WWII veterans. The students displayed a little resistance to the notion at first, mostly because they just finished taking their AP test and were hoping that they'd be done for the year. After seeing some examples and discussing what we were looking for, some of them got more motivated, some did not. Motivation is important for a lot of reasons, so I've been trying to think about what worked and what didn't while I was attempting to increase their motivation. Some of them just needed to have the picture put in focus a little, so I asked them who they were thinking about interviewing/researching and then elaborated on how that could be interesting, heavily emphasizing the personal connections and showing students how content relates to them directly. For the students that weren't interviewing someone they knew personally, I had to rely on the content of the story and tap into their imagination. It is pretty interesting to consider what it would be like to live through some of the events these veterans did. I didn't meet as much success with this technique, though. Some of them got a little more interested, some just blew the entire assignment off. This week was pretty chaotic all around, it was a short week and the student had a fog delay on Thursday, so by the end of the week they were extremely squirmy and it was tough to keep them on task. We'll see how next week develops.
A few weeks back we saw a pretty heavy increase in use of the chess boards and checkers board held in the library. They aren't in very good shape and aren't set up to actually circulate, but a lot of students were using them. When I inquired whether they wanted more games in the library they expressed a lot of interest, so we started looking at some grant options for next year. We decided to apply for a Dollar General Back-to-School grant and we'll probably apply for a FunAgain Games monthly grant as well. We focused on board games, and a fair amount of research has been done to illustrate how certain board games offer a new way to teach literacy and can greatly enhance problem solving and critical thinking skills. There are a lot of opportunities to align games to AASL standards too, like 1.2.1, 1.2.4, 2.2.2, 3.2.3, etc. It often depends on the game being used, but there's a lot of potential there to teach some of the actual skills and encourage inquiry in a really entertaining way. The Dollar General grant was due on Friday and I prepared the proposal myself, which was pretty exciting. My host librarian tweaked the final product, of course, and we ran it by the principal as well, but I think I did a fairly effective job. We didn't have to ask for a huge sum of money either, and came up with some measurable results to gauge student impact, so here's hoping the proposals get approved. It was great experience for me and I've got a better grasp of the grant process, and we collected some really great data so I can use this in the future to try and get some good, quality instructional games in whatever collections I develop in the future.
I sat in on a Technology Council meeting too, which provided me with a ridiculous amount of motivation to be a curriculum leader in the future. There was a lot of really interesting discussion, but the highlight revolved around Web 2.0 technologies and social networks. I'd never really considered how big a disadvantage school librarians were at in Ohio, having only guidelines instead of actual standards, but I got a pretty ugly look at the way some teachers and curriculum partners look at some of the technologies we advocate for. I saw multiple educators, all professionals, passionately arguing against allowing access to any social networks, for students and teachers both. Several people argued against this, and the opponents of social networking kept demanding to know how social networks relate to the standards. And, sticking to the Ohio content standards themselves, it isn't always easy to answer them. I'd like to think that we all recognize how much things have changes in the past seven years, but without concrete revisions from the state, it's that much more difficult to argue with someone who only cares about test results and standards correlations. We tried to show them some options and argue for a little more inclusion, but it was an uphill battle and will continue to be in conservative districts. The challenge in this situation is to think of ways to still teach students the benefits of social networks and how to use them effectively and ethically...without actually having access to any of them. I'm sure there are ways.
Next week we'll try to get the students back on track with their digital stories. The end of the year is closing in pretty quickly, too.
A few weeks back we saw a pretty heavy increase in use of the chess boards and checkers board held in the library. They aren't in very good shape and aren't set up to actually circulate, but a lot of students were using them. When I inquired whether they wanted more games in the library they expressed a lot of interest, so we started looking at some grant options for next year. We decided to apply for a Dollar General Back-to-School grant and we'll probably apply for a FunAgain Games monthly grant as well. We focused on board games, and a fair amount of research has been done to illustrate how certain board games offer a new way to teach literacy and can greatly enhance problem solving and critical thinking skills. There are a lot of opportunities to align games to AASL standards too, like 1.2.1, 1.2.4, 2.2.2, 3.2.3, etc. It often depends on the game being used, but there's a lot of potential there to teach some of the actual skills and encourage inquiry in a really entertaining way. The Dollar General grant was due on Friday and I prepared the proposal myself, which was pretty exciting. My host librarian tweaked the final product, of course, and we ran it by the principal as well, but I think I did a fairly effective job. We didn't have to ask for a huge sum of money either, and came up with some measurable results to gauge student impact, so here's hoping the proposals get approved. It was great experience for me and I've got a better grasp of the grant process, and we collected some really great data so I can use this in the future to try and get some good, quality instructional games in whatever collections I develop in the future.
I sat in on a Technology Council meeting too, which provided me with a ridiculous amount of motivation to be a curriculum leader in the future. There was a lot of really interesting discussion, but the highlight revolved around Web 2.0 technologies and social networks. I'd never really considered how big a disadvantage school librarians were at in Ohio, having only guidelines instead of actual standards, but I got a pretty ugly look at the way some teachers and curriculum partners look at some of the technologies we advocate for. I saw multiple educators, all professionals, passionately arguing against allowing access to any social networks, for students and teachers both. Several people argued against this, and the opponents of social networking kept demanding to know how social networks relate to the standards. And, sticking to the Ohio content standards themselves, it isn't always easy to answer them. I'd like to think that we all recognize how much things have changes in the past seven years, but without concrete revisions from the state, it's that much more difficult to argue with someone who only cares about test results and standards correlations. We tried to show them some options and argue for a little more inclusion, but it was an uphill battle and will continue to be in conservative districts. The challenge in this situation is to think of ways to still teach students the benefits of social networks and how to use them effectively and ethically...without actually having access to any of them. I'm sure there are ways.
Next week we'll try to get the students back on track with their digital stories. The end of the year is closing in pretty quickly, too.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Week #7 - Scan That Barcode
Well, I have finally experienced that magical thing we call inventory. It was...well, it was inventory. A bit tedious, but it's a necessary evil and it's a really great opportunity to weed. The library was closed most of the day on Monday for AP testing, so we seized the opportunity to get most of it done. Now if only I could forget that we're going to have to help the middle school teachers...
I spent the rest of the week collaborating with one of the social studies teachers. I had approached a few teachers with some collaboration ideas and she was the first to accept. She has three AP European History sections, all of whom take the AP Test on Friday. They're going to feel like they're done after the test, so she wanted to collaborate a little to see if we could come up with a project they can do in two weeks that will push them a little while still being relevant. They're going to engage in some digital storytelling, creating videos that describe the wartime experiences of a relative or acquaintance. They will be generating the interview questions themselves for the inquiry process (1.1.1, 1.2.1) and then assembling a narrative out of the information the collect. That narrative will be paired with images, video clips, music and audio narration to create a digital story (3.1.3, 3.1.4). We're hoping most of them have a real-world connection to a war veteran in some way, to make the experience a little more authentic (2.3.1). I'm going to hunt down some resources for those that don't know any war veterans. We'll see how well they handle the lesson.
Thus far, the experience has really illustrated to me some of the benefits of collaborating. A lot of those seem obvious, but experiencing them first-hand is a bit different. I've already had two other teachers inquire about collaborating with me since we started this particular project, and it feels pretty good to have teachers come and ask me, rather than the other way around. A little effort can go a long way. Of course, there are plenty of other teachers who don't know my name and couldn't care less about what I'm doing, so it's hardly a miraculous conversion. Still, collaboration is extremely important for a school librarian, and this gave me an opportunity to initiate communication and establish some connections. Were I staying longer, that would be a good foundation to build off of to start reaching out to more reluctant teachers.
In information literacy news, I got to spend some time discussing camel spiders with a few students. Back when American soldiers were first entering Afghanistan, stories camel back about these huge camel spiders that would sneak into sleeping bags and suck blood, that could jump three feet and . Some of the students had heard about those and, on a wayward internet search, got to talking about it. The spiders are big and not terribly attractive, but in truth they're just another arachnid. Gave me an easy segue to talk about information evaluation and authority (1.2.4, 1.3.2).
I spent the rest of the week collaborating with one of the social studies teachers. I had approached a few teachers with some collaboration ideas and she was the first to accept. She has three AP European History sections, all of whom take the AP Test on Friday. They're going to feel like they're done after the test, so she wanted to collaborate a little to see if we could come up with a project they can do in two weeks that will push them a little while still being relevant. They're going to engage in some digital storytelling, creating videos that describe the wartime experiences of a relative or acquaintance. They will be generating the interview questions themselves for the inquiry process (1.1.1, 1.2.1) and then assembling a narrative out of the information the collect. That narrative will be paired with images, video clips, music and audio narration to create a digital story (3.1.3, 3.1.4). We're hoping most of them have a real-world connection to a war veteran in some way, to make the experience a little more authentic (2.3.1). I'm going to hunt down some resources for those that don't know any war veterans. We'll see how well they handle the lesson.
Thus far, the experience has really illustrated to me some of the benefits of collaborating. A lot of those seem obvious, but experiencing them first-hand is a bit different. I've already had two other teachers inquire about collaborating with me since we started this particular project, and it feels pretty good to have teachers come and ask me, rather than the other way around. A little effort can go a long way. Of course, there are plenty of other teachers who don't know my name and couldn't care less about what I'm doing, so it's hardly a miraculous conversion. Still, collaboration is extremely important for a school librarian, and this gave me an opportunity to initiate communication and establish some connections. Were I staying longer, that would be a good foundation to build off of to start reaching out to more reluctant teachers.
In information literacy news, I got to spend some time discussing camel spiders with a few students. Back when American soldiers were first entering Afghanistan, stories camel back about these huge camel spiders that would sneak into sleeping bags and suck blood, that could jump three feet and . Some of the students had heard about those and, on a wayward internet search, got to talking about it. The spiders are big and not terribly attractive, but in truth they're just another arachnid. Gave me an easy segue to talk about information evaluation and authority (1.2.4, 1.3.2).
Monday, May 10, 2010
Week #6 - Ominous Messages
Spent a fair amount of time cataloging and processing this week. Not terribly inspiring from a student-learning perspective, but a necessary aspect of library life. The only reason we had so much to process was because the huge new book order came in, 202 titles. The process is streamlined in a way that I approve of: the aide does the bulk of the processing, leaving the librarian free to concentrate on students. We compare the arrivals to the invoice and download the MARC records, but that's really about it. Gives us the opportunity to review the new books and handle them without spending too much time on them. I spent some time uploading them onto the new books blog as well, which provides the students with a running tally of new materials, tagged by genre, so they know what's coming in, what they might find interesting (4.1.1, 4.1.7).
The big excitement for the week involved a pretty ominous message found written on a bathroom wall. A date followed by a threat of violence is not something any educator ever wants to see. Thankfully it was just a prank, the culprit was identified and confessed to it about a half an hour after the message was found. Unfortunately, several students must have read the message before it was reported, because news of the threat showed up on some facebook pages, which spread some bad information like wildfire. Administration got bogged down with calls from angry or worried parents. It's amazing the power of social networks to spread information like that so quickly, even if it's misinformation. And students aren't even supposed to have their phones on them.
That alone initiates an interesting discussion, because the school policy is to confiscate a phone that is seen or heard. I suspect most teachers approve of this policy, but how many of these same teachers keep their own cell phones on their person all day, or possibly use them in front of students? The constant inter-connectivity of life and technology these days makes it really difficult for many of us to disconnect, especially teens. We like to think that, as adults, we know when it's appropriate to use our phones, but plenty of us do not. For that matter, how do you find opportunities to educate students on proper use of that kind of technology when there is a blanket ban? At the very least, the incident with the message did provide some good in that it created an obvious example to initiate a dialogue on proper use of phones and social networks (4.3.4). Even if the discussion is somewhat moot because the district is not interested in modifying the policy.
We're planning on starting inventory next week, so we spent a little time preparing the scanners. XHS recently purchased a new scanner from Follett, and it's pretty slick little machine. It connects to Wi-Fi and, once they upgrade to destiny, will interact with the system in real-time. I can see a lot of potential in the device for making the librarian mobile, able to move around the school and do some cool things in classrooms. Instead of making classrooms come to the library. I want one.
The big excitement for the week involved a pretty ominous message found written on a bathroom wall. A date followed by a threat of violence is not something any educator ever wants to see. Thankfully it was just a prank, the culprit was identified and confessed to it about a half an hour after the message was found. Unfortunately, several students must have read the message before it was reported, because news of the threat showed up on some facebook pages, which spread some bad information like wildfire. Administration got bogged down with calls from angry or worried parents. It's amazing the power of social networks to spread information like that so quickly, even if it's misinformation. And students aren't even supposed to have their phones on them.
That alone initiates an interesting discussion, because the school policy is to confiscate a phone that is seen or heard. I suspect most teachers approve of this policy, but how many of these same teachers keep their own cell phones on their person all day, or possibly use them in front of students? The constant inter-connectivity of life and technology these days makes it really difficult for many of us to disconnect, especially teens. We like to think that, as adults, we know when it's appropriate to use our phones, but plenty of us do not. For that matter, how do you find opportunities to educate students on proper use of that kind of technology when there is a blanket ban? At the very least, the incident with the message did provide some good in that it created an obvious example to initiate a dialogue on proper use of phones and social networks (4.3.4). Even if the discussion is somewhat moot because the district is not interested in modifying the policy.
We're planning on starting inventory next week, so we spent a little time preparing the scanners. XHS recently purchased a new scanner from Follett, and it's pretty slick little machine. It connects to Wi-Fi and, once they upgrade to destiny, will interact with the system in real-time. I can see a lot of potential in the device for making the librarian mobile, able to move around the school and do some cool things in classrooms. Instead of making classrooms come to the library. I want one.
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