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.

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).