Some Novel Ideas

Information Literacy Resources

ETech Ohio 2013: Information Literacy-Crucial Skills for Students Right in Your Classroom

Information Literacy Resources:

Basic Steps in the Research Process from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School: http://www.crlsresearchguide.org/

How Teens Do Research in the Digital World from the PEW Internet & Family Life Project: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Student-Research.aspx

Scoping the Search from Webhound: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/webhound/scope.html

Google Search Education: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/searcheducation/index.html

Larry Ferlazzo's Best Online Resources to Teach About Plagiarism: http://bit.ly/2dD1Zv

Noodle Tools-The Ethical Researcher: http://www.noodletools.com/debbie/ethical/

Info Lit Resources from the American Library Association: http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit

The Copyright Genie: http://librarycopyright.net/resources/genie/

Guide To Web Search from Finding Dulcinea: http://bit.ly/c4L4FJ

All the Information in the Known Universe: A Kid-Friendly Research Tutorial (Elementary/Middle)
http://www.kyvl.org/kids/portal.html

Baltimore City Public School Interactive Research Tutorial (Secondary)
http://www.bcps.org/offices/lis/researchguide_sec/index.html

Doing Internet Research at the Elementary Level- Article from Edutopia:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/elementary-research-mary-beth-hertz

How to be a Webhound from the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/webhound/index.html

SweetSearch’s Ten Syeps to Better Research: http://www.sweetsearch.com/TenSteps

Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely On Wikipedia: http://bit.ly/dw5wyR

Search Engine Alternatives:

SweetSearch: http://www.sweetsearch.com/
SweetSearch4Me: http://4me.sweetsearch.com/ (A Search Engine for Emerging Learners)

Internet Public Library: http://www.ipl.org/

Awesome Library: http://www.awesomelibrary.org/

DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com

It's A Book!

We should be celebrating the printed word more loudly and more often nowadays.  As educators we are all painfully aware of how the electronic word has infringed upon the territory of books, and some of us still hold out hope that the book will endure.  Now that I'm a librarian, I see that plenty of kids still want to hold that bound volume in their hands and take in the fully sensual experience of reading in that form.  

Race To Nowhere

Another video passed on to me by a colleague.  Please watch.  It's important, so important.

Give them what they want...

Lessons learned from eTech Ohio 2010

    I spent two very hectic days at the eTech Ohio conference last week.  I'm so happy the conference even took place, considering much of its funding had been cut.  We also experienced the major snow storm just a couple of days later, so it's a good thing the conference was at the beginning of the week!

    David Warlick was one of the Featured Speakers, and it was invigorating listening to his presentation. I read his 2¢ Worth blog regularly, and so should you if you are at all interested in ed tech. Mr. Warlick's presentation had a great title:  A Gardener's Approach to Learning. The metaphor is apt.  As teachers, we are sowing seeds both for our students and for ourselves, and we must become self-directed master learners in order to be 21st century teachers. He continued the metaphor by comparing today's information environment to an ecosystem, in which each of us has a place and purpose.  It's our job to cultivate our own gardens in the ecosystem, that is, our own personal learning networks, so our own seedlings will continue to grow.  Information and links are available at: David Warlick Wiki handouts.  Mr. Warlick opened his presentation with an idea that I love: Start your class out by presenting students with evidence of something you just learned, something you didn't know the day before.  It doesn't have to be class-related, just something that, through your travels around the web, you picked up and packed away in your brain. We model for students that we are always learning, and that we are cultivating our own gardens.

    Alvin Trusty (best name EVER, right?) spoke about developing a professional digital footprint.  And he used Seinfeld clips to emphasize his points, which apparently is his trademark. His premise for this presentation is: When creating content online, use common sense.  Use your real name when blogging, when leaving comments on blogs, when creating content.  You want your name to be associated with good things on the web, so create that association yourself.  Don't allow others to do it for you!  If you develop your own positive digital footprint, you can teach kids to do the same. I did as Mr. Trusty suggested and googled myself with quotes around my name, and the search came up with more than 1500 results. That's not a huge number compared to many people, but the point is that this is how I am represented on the web.  This is what my digital footprint looks like, and I have to be alert to how it changes and evolves.  I have to be active in that evolution! Mr. Trusty's Delicious eTech conference bookmarks are available at: Alvin Trusty bookmarks.  The presentation was educational and eye-opening.  Read his stuff!

    The final presentation I want to talk about was made by David Huston of Kenyon College (Kenyon Academic Partnership) and the Laurel School in Cleveland.  Mr. Huston spoke about guiding students through the research process in a 21st century way, and he presented a toolkit of applications to help both students and teachers. He emphasized that conducting research means: knowing what to look for and where to look for it, collaborating and sharing, thinking logically about organizing your data, and presenting results. Knowing that students may work on multiple computers during the course of a day, we need to approach research with a system that's connected to the Web,is browser and platform neutral, is always available, stores data in the cloud, and is free or very cheap. Mr. Huston's iCyte project of research tools is available at: David Huston research tools.

    There were several other interesting sessions, including one on using Google Sites in the classroom (http://www.kentschools.net/ccarman/etech/).  The teachers that presented this were supposed to talk about using Google Sites for e-portfolios, but they ran out of time.  However, there are links in their presentation to help with e-portfolios.

    The most profound lesson I learned from eTech this year was not actually about any particular application or piece of software.  Instead, I found myself pondering much larger issues as I sat in on these presentations.  I spent a great deal of time considering the mind shift that must take place in schools now, the paradigm that we have, as Will Richardson has said, no choice but to embrace. Now that I feel pretty comfortable actually using a lot of Web 2.0 tools, I am a lot more philosophical about the why, when, and how of their usage.  More on this in an upcoming post.

    

"Would Holden Caulfield have been tweeting today?"

J.D. Salinger's death moved me. But not for the reasons you might imagine. It wasn't that I identified deeply with Holden Caulfield in my teenage years or that, as a writer, I have been heavily influenced by his precocious, precious characters. I was moved because we'd really lost him so long ago.  His puzzling and unequivocal reclusiveness made him both an enigma and a pariah.  He pushed himself away, like Zooey Glass turning his face from us as he drags on a cigarette, detached.  We were left with conjecture and innuendo, and most of it wasn't pretty.

But that's not really what this post is about, anyway. It's actually about Stephen Colbert.  Well, it's more about the following interview from his February 2nd show:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bananafish Tale - Henry Allen
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

    This is classic Colbert.  He simultaneously intellectualizes and smacks down all that is cerebral. And he raises an excellent question: Is The Catcher in the Rye just one long tweet? Would Holden Caulfield be tweeting if he was around today?  If the teenage years are, as Henry Allen suggests,"an ongoing complaining diatribe," wouldn't Holden have been doing his complaining on Facebook?

    It's an interesting discussion: What would classic characters like Atticus Finch and Jay Gatsby and Huck Finn be doing differently if their stories took place today?  Would they still be characters that we recognize?  Or are they so enmeshed in their cultural context that they just couldn't translate into modern characters? What might Tom Sawyer's mischief look like today?  Instead of getting his pals to whitewash that fence, maybe he'd be texting on his cell phone in history class! And Sherlock Holmes? Well, he'd work in the CSI lab today, wouldn't he? He'd solve crimes from behind a microscope.

    What do you think? What would your favorite characters be doing differently if they were around today?  And doesn't it make your nose crinkle up like you've smelled something bad just imagining it?! 

When does a classic become irrelevant?

Ever heard of the book pictured at left?  It's The Good Master by Kate Seredy, a Newbery Honor Book from 1936. It's about a motherless young girl from Budapest who is sent to the countryside of Hungary to live with her uncle because she is just incorrigible.  Uncle is supposed to "break" her like a wild horse, apparently.  As a modern female, I found the book to be mawkish and antiquated. The heroine wound up barefoot in the kitchen, completely passive, at the end. She'd been tamed. I was disappointed. At least, that's the way I saw it when I was teaching this book to fourth grade girls at The Chapin School in NYC in the early 1990's.

I've read many of the customer reviews for The Good Master on Amazon. They're all positive reviews.  Almost every one that I read was written by someone remembering this book from back in his or her childhood days. There are a lot of "I loved this when I was in 5th grade" or "I read this aloud to my children" comments.  They're heartwarming little testimonials. But they left me wondering: Is The Good Master relevant anymore?  Though the customer critics at Amazon would most likely take umbrage with my assessment, I'd argue that it's not. Not anymore. The Good Master has passed over that very real but rarely discussed line between classic and inconsequential. If you want to teach a book about a girl learning the lessons of childhood, are you going to choose this book?  Probably not. Just like you're probably not going to choose Runaway Papoose (Newbery Honor Book from 1929) if you want to teach about Native Americans.

Now, I know there are a lot of people out there who are thinking: "The classics will always be relevant!  We'll always teach Laura Ingalls Wilder and E.L.Konigsburg and Jean Craighead George!"  And I know that's true.  But are we holding onto some of these books just because we loved them?  And while the themes and lessons learned in many of these books are still relevant, aren't there more modern books that are teaching the same lessons, books to which students today can more reasonably relate? Is there a point where a book seems dated?  A book that adults may find charming and moving may appear to students as cheesy, clunky, and just plain old. The girls at Chapin made it abundantly clear to me that that's how they felt about The Good Master.  

If you want to give your students a great dog story, would you use Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, which won the Newbery in 1952, or Anne M. Martin's wonderful and much more recent A Dog's Life? If you want a story about slavery and courage in the face of brutality, would you use Elizabeth Yates's Amos Fortune, Free Man (from 1951) or Sharon Draper's Copper Sun (from 2006)? Which would your students rather read? Should we even consider that question when choosing books for the classroom?

I am NOT saying that we should just summarily dismiss all older books. Both my students and I adore The Outsiders, which was written around the time that I was born (certainly a long time ago)! But where is that line, the line between classic and irrelevant?  I'd love to hear what you think.

Focusing on Teaching With Purpose

I've read over my last post a few times.  I was a bit overwrought when I wrote it, frustrated with my own shortcomings as a "modern" teacher and annoyed that my school sometimes comes up short as a forward-thinking institution. Now, here I am, coming off my high horse on a Friday, the day I find I am always most contemplative.

I'm reading four books at once right now, two YA novels and two professional resources, which is ridiculous,isn't it? Truthfully, I don't always read professional books in a very linear fashion.  I do a lot of poking around, reading a chapter here and another there, until I've digested the whole book.  It works a lot of the time because these books are often written in a "find-what's-best-for-you" kind of way.  But driving into work today, something hit me: I'm doing exactly what I don't want my students to do.  I don't want them learning in a haphazard, chaotic way.  I don't want to present lessons that jump from topic to topic without settling on a true focus for forty minutes. So, why am I approaching my own professional development in that way?

Here I am, around two decades into my career as a teacher, and I still get so worked up by new, shiny stuff that I'm like my own dog.  Lily, my adorable but dim-witted Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, spends a lot of time barking at the ceiling of my house as she follows shifting light reflections from various objects. That's kind of what I do.  I find a new resource or come across a great idea, and I work myself into a frenzy over the fact that I'm not using it in my classroom yet! I'll skim a chapter in a great professional book, mining for ideas, ideas, ideas, without taking a close enough look at the why I want to use the ideas in the first place. Technology should not be used for technology's sake.  We should use it as a powerful, empowering tool to help students become motivated lifelong learners and leaders. I have to slow down, focus, and think about linking technology to effective teaching strategies.  This will lead to the kind of student learning that is lasting, not the kind that just chases the latest cool Web trends.

I recommend both of the following books, regardless of your level of comfort with technology integration:

Using Technology in the Classroom That Works by H. Pitler, E. Hubbell, M. Kuhn, and K. Malenowski: If you are at all familiar with Robert Marzano's work (or even if you're not!), you should consider checking out this book. It presents methodology for integrating Marzano's nine instructional strategies in the classroom through the use of technology.  The book contains both theory and application, pedagogy and practical resources, for teachers who want to use any number of tech tools to move learning forward.

The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age by William Kist: Kist takes the stance, with which I agree, that schools cannot shrink from the communication challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.  The book presents stories of teachers taking "the sometimes messy first steps" toward integrating social networking into their teaching practices.  These teachers are giving their students the new communication experiences that are necessary for literate citizenship in today's world while striving to keep the kids safe, too. Kist explores the "new literacies" in chapters that mirror the level of technology at the various schools, moving from low-tech environments to schools with unlimited technology situations.

Trudging into the 21st Century

The tortoise ended up winning the race against the hare, right?  Slow and steady wins the race, doesn't it?  Not necessarily. Let's face it: If the tortoise and the hare were school leaders today, (Just go with me on the metaphor-) whose classrooms would be using a wide range of Web 2.0 resources?  Which school would be collaborating online with a classroom in Argentina or Alaska?  Which school would be publishing student work online using the latest multimedia applications? That would be the hare's school. The tortoise's school, on the other hand, thinks that it's up to speed because the students know how to add a chart into a Word document.

Who are you? Is your school the tortoise's or the hare's? The following article by Ernie J. Cox in the Sept./Oct. issue of Multimedia & Internet @ Schools made me sit back and consider my own school's place in that race: Tools for 21st Century Learning. 

My school is not keeping up in the race. Is yours? I know that some of you are saying to yourselves, "But it's not actually a race. Whether schools are or are not using 21st century tools does not put them in a race against one another."  I disagree.  It is a race, because if your school is still stuck in Ernie Cox's first scenario from his article (like mine), you are the tortoise and it's not just the hare but the whole world that's passing you by and guess what? No one else is going to stop and take a nap so you can catch up.

I have done a few things that have worked well and have gone a long way toward satisfying my desire to keep moving forward with technology.  Last year, I set up an interactive blog on Moodle that the students posted to as they read Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. The students felt quite empowered by the ability to get their thoughts out there and share them with their peers. The kids expressed themselves on the blog in a thoughtful, reflective manner, and I witnessed quality conversations online. This project whet my appetite for more, more, more!

But the tortoise is still crawling through the hallways here. I am not allowed, at this point anyway, to have my students set up Google accounts. The only students in my k-12 school who have email accounts on the school server are the kids in the Upper School (9th-12th grades).  My students cannot collaborate dynamically, and I cannot create the collaborative learning environment that I believe the 21st century demands because of the walls surrounding our beautiful, but very "old school," classrooms. I read a lot of blogs, and I'm so impressed with the kinds of projects and everyday learning that goes on in so many schools today.  Classrooms are using everything from collaboration and communication tools on Google to online discussion tools like Ning to MUVEs like Second Life. As Alan November said at the last conference workshop of his that I attended, "You should all be doing this!"

So what is stopping schools from moving forward? As Mr. Cox indicates, for many schools, it is budgetary restraints. The school does not have the money to invest in expensive site licenses or costly software packages.  But, ALL of the tools I mention in the preceding paragraph are FREE, as are so many of the resources available on the Web.

I know that budget is not the thing that is keeping my school firmly planted in the 20th century. For us, there are two factors: fear and more fear. Fear on the part of the parents and administration that if the kids have any kind of connection to the outside world at school, they will no longer be inside the Bubble.  You know the Bubble.  That's the padded, opaque orb that parents have created for their children, the protective balloon in which the kids float through life.  Without the Bubble, bad things may happen.  The parents don't necessarily know what those bad things may be, but they are sure that they will happen. The rest of the fear comes from other teachers. Are there teachers at your school whose only connection to technology is the Xerox machine? There are plenty of teachers out there who shut their door when class begins, who hope that no one ever visits their room.  Teachers who are still using handouts that they made up (or xeroxed) ten years ago. There are plenty of teachers who don't really see how technology can truly enhance their traditional classrooms and engage their students in their world, the 21st century world that is all these kids know.

I'm going to put my best foot forward here and actively pursue change at my school. I spend so much time thinking about implementing these materials, I'm practically bursting at the seams (if a person has seams)! I would very much like to hear from those of you who are moving like the hare into the next decade.  What 21st century learning and collaborating goes on at your school? How does it look in the classroom?  Do you get pushback from parents or administrators? What barriers do you face and how do you deal with them?  Basically, are you a tortoise or a hare?

The New Debate: Do we still need (actual) libraries in our schools?

Chances are, your school library looks something like the one pictured to the left.  Shelves, tables, chairs, carrels, computers, and loads and loads of books.  That is, unless you teach at a place like Cushing Academy, a prep school outside of Boston.

Cushing Academy is getting rid of its library's books.  Please read the following article and note your initial reaction: boston.com article

Yes, you read that correctly. The Headmaster believes that books are outdated, and he is promoting his school's "bookless campus." 

I passed this article along to my colleagues here at Columbus Academy a few weeks ago, and I asked for their responses.  Here are a few:

       "I think I'll start curling up at night with my girls and my laptop.  We can even have a digital voice read the stories...why learn how to read or spell?  Why do I even need to be there with them?"

       "I love holding a book in my hands. No six inch screen can ever replace that experience. In my opinion the school has made a serious mistake."

       "I'd rather spend hours in a library (with books!) or bookstore than on the computer anytime."

       "My favorite places are libraries, 1/2 priced book stores, my own shelves of favorite reads, etc., with racks and racks, pages and pages of experiences waiting to be had. I don't know... I'm not sold."

       "The only good thing coming out of that is the cappuccino machine."

And my favorite comment, from one of our librarians:

        "I can't imagine a world without books."

When I read this article the first time, I was shocked and dismayed.  As a language arts teacher, an part-time library science student, a mother, a book-lover, I could hardly believe what I was reading. Flat screen TVs, Kindles, and a coffee shop?  What are they thinking?  I was sure Cushing was an anomaly.