Betty Bunhead Blog

Reflections

2009-04-11T04:25:00.000-07:00

I'm back. I figure that I haven't blogged in a month and quite frankly it's been a relief. I have been finding that the weekly posts have been consuming huge amounts of my time and I have started the resent the time it has been taking. I need sleep, I need fresh air, I need to keep house, cook, exercise, visit my children, read, do homework ... Spending hours on the computer to write weekly is not an option at this point. So I have decided to ease up and only write when the mood takes me.
I have learned a whole lot from writing this blog. The most important is that I can write and I think that I can call myself a writer of sorts. Secondly, writing this blog has confirmed to me that writing is hard work. It's no wonder our students resist writing - to do it well requires effort and time. Thirdly, writing is thinking. If we need students to be good thinkers, problem-solvers and creators, then I think that writing is one of the most important things we need to focus on to help students be successful in the 21st century.
So I leave you today with an interesting link to a Kyle Mawer's wiki that uses gaming to help ELL students read and write - I'm thinking that the lesson may also work with applied level and locally developed level classes as well. One of the games has a complete lesson that integrates writing with the game. It's called Grow Cube. I played it just for fun, but I can certatinly see how it can be used as a writing lesson.
Have fun!

Literacy 2.0 Educational Leadership

2009-03-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

First off I'd like to apologize for my rant last post - I should have warned readers that I was in rant mode.

Today, no rants (I hope) - just something I noticed when I read the current issue of Educational Leadership, publication of the ASCD.

The theme of the journal was Literacy 2.0 and it had a number of articles written by well-known read/write web authors. Will Richardson wrote an article titled Becoming Network-Wise about the role of education in teaching students how to navigate, use and create in this 2.0 world effectively and ethically. Anne Davis wrote of the benefits of blogging with students and Howard Gardner wrote of the benefits and pitfalls of using technology to teach literacy. I wish I could link you to these articles, but I can only get you to the abstracts. Educational Leadership is only fully accessible online by buying a membership, and it is not available in full text through any of our databases. But these articles, excellent though they are, are the not the articles that caught my attention.

There were three articles in this issue that made me think about the role of the school library program in this 2.0 world. The first one was Stepping Beyond Wikipedia by William Badke. In the article, Badke writes:

"A 2003 Canadian survey of 3,000 incoming university freshmen found that most included inessential words in searches; used the Boolean operator "or" incorrectly; could not identify the characteristics of scholarly journals; could not distinguish between library catalogs and bibliographic databases; and had difficulty identifying journal article citations, knowing when to cite sources, and evaluating Web sites (Mittermeyer & Quirion, 2003). These recent high school graduates' information skills left them unprepared for further academic work."

He goes on to say that students need to be taught information literacy skills.

"Students will pick up information skills on their own. Just turn them loose in a good library. They'll figure it out. What's so hard about learning to do research?" I hear comments like this all the time, and they dismay me. The "information literacy by osmosis" argument has been debunked by reams of research showing that even university students do not learn how to handle information on their own. They must be taught (see Gallacher, 2007).
[...]information literacy... [needs to be given] ... a foundational role in our instruction. This requires us to reorient the way we teach. Most educators are well aware of the active-learning, constructivist, student-centered approach to instruction, which holds that when students discover things for themselves and attribute personal meaning to the subject matter, they learn more deeply and acquire a more permanent knowledge base. Information literacy instruction has a natural home in active learning."

The second article was Plagiarism in the Internet Age by Rebecca Moore Howard and Laura J. Davies. The authors, just as in the article above, state that plagiarism can be prevented through good teaching - it's not enough just to warn students that plagiarism is grounds for punishment. Howard and Davies go on to write that:

"... [G]ood writing from sources involves more than competent citation of sources. It is a complicated activity, made even more complex by easy access to a seemingly limitless number of online sources. Any worthwhile guide to preventing plagiarism should

Discuss intellectual property and what it means to "own" a text.
Discuss how to evaluate both online and print-based sources (for example, comparing the quality and reliability of a Web site created by an amateur with the reliability of a peer-reviewed scholarly article).
Guide students through the hard work of engaging with and understanding their sources, so students don't conclude that creating a technically perfect bibliography is enough.
Acknowledge that teaching students how to write from sources involves more than telling students that copying is a crime and handing them a pile of source citation cards.

Students don't need threats; students need pedagogy. That pedagogy should both teach source-reading skills and take into consideration our increasingly wired world. And it should communicate that plagiarism is wrong in terms of what society values about schools and learning, not just in terms of arbitrary rules."

The third article is What the Research Says About ... Teaching Media Literacy by Jane L. David. The author writes that:

"Media literacy in the past tended to focus on alerting students to stereotypes, advertising, and propaganda and on protecting them from undesirable influences. Today's digital media literacy encompasses many additional topics, from using search engines, to creating Web sites and online profiles, to participating in social networking. One of the most basic strands of media literacy emphasizes the skills and knowledge students need to locate and critically assess online content."

She also points out a number of studies that suggest our students (and their teachers) lack skills necessary to critically evaluate the type of information they find on the Internet.

"Unlike reading assigned textbooks, reading online challenges students to make judgments about the reputability and validity of the information they see. Researchers who directed several hundred college students to three bogus Web sites about fictitious nutritional supplements found that half of the students lacked the skills to identify the trustworthiness of the information, yet most thought they had strong research skills (Ivanitskaya, O'Boyle, & Casey, 2006). Choosing appropriate search engines, following relevant links, and judging the validity of information are difficult challenges, not only for students of all ages, but also for most adults, including many teachers. More than half the adults surveyed in Great Britain were not able to use search engines or databases at a basic level (Buckingham, 2007). In the United States, almost two-thirds of a national sample of adults doing online searches were not aware of the difference between paid and unpaid search results and believed that search engines provide fair and unbiased results for any given search (Fallows, 2005)."

There was a common thread through these three articles. In all three, the author states that information literacy skills must be taught, beginning in the elementary grades and progressing in sophistication to the end of secondary school. It is crucial for students to have these skills to be able to effectively cope with the wide range and breadth of information that they can access on a daily basis.

This is not new to me or to many others who have held the same role I have. The information literacy skills that the authors said students must learn to be able to competently cope with information have always been taught by a skilled teacher librarian collaborating with the classroom teacher, using inquiry-based learning in the context of a good school library program. Teacher librarians, or library media specialists as they are called in the states, have always taught students many of the skills included in the above quotes.

So why, in this age of 2.0 Literacy are school libraries and highly qualified, competent teacher librarians considered a frill? Why aren't the best teachers put into a school library where they can work with all students and teachers, thus having an impact on the whole student/teacher body? Why are weak teachers put into a teacher librarian position when clearly the position needs a professional who demonstrates life-long learning, initiative and leadership?

It is not fair to expect classroom teachers to know everything about information literacy skills; that's why TLs are referred to as information specialists. We don't expect teachers to know everything about good classroom practices. That's why teachers work in professional learning communities. A learning community always existed in an effective school library program because collaboration between classroom teacher and the TL is the foundation of school librarianship.

If you are a TL, you clearly know, based on the information from the above articles, where to focus your instruction: information evaluation, effective searching techniques, plagiarism, critical thinking, summary writing, citing, using databases, research process, questioning, differences and similarities between information sources, etc. If you are not teaching these things, then you're not meeting the 2.0 literacy needs of your students.

I'm taking a break from blogging for the next couple of weeks. I'm going to visit my parents in Florida over the March Break and will not be bringing the computer with me. I expect that my next post will be around March28/29.

References

Badke, W. (2009). Stepping beyond Wikipedia. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 54-58.

David, J.L. (2009). What the research says about ... teaching media literacy. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 84-86.

Davis, A.P. & McGrail, E. (2009). The joy of blogging. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 74-77.

Moore Howard, R. & Davies, L.J. (2009). Plagiarism in the internet age. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 64-67.

Richardson, W (2009). Becoming network-wise. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 26-31.

Weigel, M. & Gardner, H. (2009). Best of both literacies. Educational Leadership, 66(6), 38-41.

More Doctors

2009-02-28T05:02:00.001-08:00

I am following Teachers At Risk blog written by Elona Hartjes, a spec ed teacher in Ontario. I enjoy reading her posts. She is a caring dedicated teacher who writes of the joys and challenges of teaching students with special learning needs.

One of her recent posts, comments on a news article that the government of Ontario is going to give bonuses to doctors who take on challenging (unhealthy) patients. Seems like there's a trend for doctors not to accept patients who have complicated physical conditions. She suggests that perhaps they should do the same for teachers - give bonuses to those who take on our special learning needs students.

I think that her post was somewhat tongue in cheek (or not). But it really struck a cord with me, especially after I read her comment stream. She commented that:

...by offering incentives to doctors it LOOKS like the government is doing something. It seems to me family doctors are over worked as it is. What we need is more doctors not doctors taking on more patients.

More doctors - that's the issue. However, until the government funds more spaces in Canadian medical schools, there won't be more doctors. My daughter, who wanted to be a doctor her whole life, who obtained an undergrad degree in biology, and a masters in biochemistry, and is no slouch when it comes to hard work, couldn't get an interview for an Ontario med school. She ended up applying to St Georges in Grenada, getting accepted and offered a scholarship. She will be spending her residency in the US and will end up practicing there. Twenty percent of her class was Canadian.
There is no lack of talent or desire for young Canadians to be physicians. Think of all of those Canadian students who are going to foreign med schools. St Georges in Granada is not the only Caribbean school - there are a number of them with many young Canadians attending. And a good majority of these students will end up practicing in the States. Canada's loss, their gain.
There is a lack of will of our governments (federal and provincial) to do anything meaningful about the shortage. Windsor, a major urban area, has a doctor shortage of immense proportions. Yes, it looks like they're doing something when they opened a satellite med school here in Windsor, but it is my understanding that 24 spots were just transferred from the medical school in London - these are not new spots, just a new location. I guess the idea is that students who go to school here are more likely to practice here. I wonder if it is a government strategy to have Canadian students go to foreign med schools so they don't have to fund the education and then try to entice them back - it's probably cost-effective in the long run to do this. It's also cost-effective for the government to sell residency spots and med school spots to other countries. Every sale eliminates a Canadian. When my running partner, who is a physician and former president of the local medical society told me this I was really annoyed.
When Paul Martin was balancing the federal government's budget back in the early 90's, he was warned by the medical profession that doctor shortages would result if he made cuts to transfer payments. Looks like the they were right.

Note: I have edited this post after I published. I realized I didn't give it a title and wanted to add in some additional thoughts.

MLA. and The Element

2009-02-23T03:12:00.000-08:00

MLA Formating

Just passing this information along. Joyce Valenza writes of major changes to MLA format that will be coming out in the spring. Here's some major changes that Joyce summarized:

No More Underlining! Underlining is no more. MLA now recommends italicizing titles of independently published works (books, periodicals, films, etc).
No More URLs! While website entries will still include authors, article names, and website names, when available, MLA no longer requires URLs. Writers are, however, encouraged to provide a URL if the citation information does not lead readers to easily find the source.
Continuous Pagination? Who Cares? You no longer have to worry about whether scholarly publications employ continuous pagination or not. For all such entries, both volume and issue numbers are required, regardless of pagination.
Publication Medium. Every entry receives a medium of publication marker. Most entries will be listed as Print or Web, but other possibilities include Performance, DVD, or TV. Most of these markers will appear at the end of entries; however, markers for Web sources are followed by the date of access.
New Abbreviations. Many web source entries now require a publisher name, a date of publication, and/or page numbers. When no publisher name appears on the website, write N.p. for no publisher given. When sites omit a date of publication, write n.d. for no date. For online journals that appear only online (no print version) or on databases that do not provide pagination, write n. pag. for no pagination.

So those of you who have citation supports for your students will have to revise them.

The Element

After reading Doug Johnson's post about The Element, by Ken Robinson, I immediately went out, bought the book and started reading it. Robinson defines "The Element" as that place where passion and aptitude meet and he says that education often leads people away from their aptitudes and stifles or eliminates creativity. And creativity is what employers are looking for in their workers. He writes of how schools have a narrow view of what counts as intelligence and schools need to re-invent themselves to support students whose strengths do not lie in math, science or English/Language Arts. . I haven't read very far but I'm thinking that the book will provide strong evidence for differentiated instruction and teaching to student's intelligences.
Here's what I wrote in response to Johnson's post:

I am going to read this book ASAP. I have 3 children - one is almost finished medical school, the other is finishing a master's in biomedical engineering and my third just graduated with a bachelor of music in jazz performance. He wants to compose movie scores. Guess who I worry about? But you know, if I didn't have to worry about income I'd probably be in the arts as well - singing in some band! I have always encouraged my third to follow his passion and I know that he'll probably be OK but I still worry.

Daniel Pink in his book A Whole New Mind writes about how creativity will be the marketable skill of the 21st century. Should I not be worrying about my third and worrying about my other two who have followed a 20th century path?

I really can't wait to read more.

PS I wrote my first poem in about 30 years. I am waiting from feedback from my writing group. Not sure if I'm ready to go public yet as it is a new writing format and not sure if it's a risk I want to take.

Teachers Without Borders

2009-02-16T06:36:00.001-08:00

Teachers Without Borders

2009-02-14T05:36:00.000-08:00

I work with a couple of colleagues who have embraced social justice in very visible, concrete ways. One of my colleagues travels to Africa through her local Rotary Club and helps build schools and brings school supplies to impoverished areas. My other colleague has adopted a child from Ethiopia. I am in awe at their commitment to causing change in the world - they have truly absorbed the concept that change can happen one person at a time.
I have been experiencing a hole, gap, emptiness at times teaching and working in Canada. There is a lack of appreciation for what we have and people keep demanding more and more of education and educators. This causes me to think about some of the conditions that I have seen in third world countries - I have visited various places in the Caribbean and have seen such deep poverty that I wonder how people can survive. If their education system could offer half of what ours does they'd think they'd won the lottery and then some.
Which brings me to what I'd like to share today. It's an organization called Teachers Without Borders. I came upon this via Sharon Peters blog.
Here's their mission:
Teachers Without Borders - Canada is a non-profit, non-denominational NGO devoted to closing the education divide through teacher professional development and community education. Our organization focuses on the building of teacher leaders. We work primarily, but not exclusively, in developing countries, in order to build self-reliance, health, and capacity.
I have always dreamed about working for an organization like Doctors Without Borders. Slight problem however - I'm not a doctor or a nurse or other medical practitioner. So when I came across Teaches Without Borders, I thought that this might just be what I'm looking for to start filling up the gaps as it matches my skill set. So I've signed up to join the organization and we'll what happens.
As I was working my way through their site, I came across this resource for teaching controversial issues. It's developed by Oxfam - UK and the resource has a number of lesson plans from Early Years (diversity) to grade 12 by using essential questions, photographs and current event media. For those of you who have worked with Jeffrey Wilhelm ( he worked with teachers and administrators in our board last week) these lessons tie in perfectly with inquiry-based learning.

Recent Bookmarks

2009-02-07T04:10:00.000-08:00

I missed a blog post last week. I was up to my knees in snow at health and physical education conference last weekend (team and leadership building activities). And this past week has been very busy with planning for ministry grants for library resources, secondary PLCs, English Department Heads meetings and Effective Writing pd. I also have been somewhat ill by something called labrynthitis which causes me to get dizzy at the oddest times. I don't have a severe case but it's enough to keep my energy levels down a bit. So that's my excuse for not writing last week.

Here's a short list of recent links posted to my del.icio.us account:

Academic Earth - online lectures from experts from leading universities

Encyclopedia of Life - online biology encyclopedia

Wikibooks - free online textbooks for secondary and higher

Wikijunior - free online textbooks for elementary students

Google Librarian Central Tools - free posters, bookmarks and tent cards to help students with web searches

More and more online resources are available everyday. This is why we absolutely must have virtual libraries and pathfinders for our students. Also, Google Book Search has now gone mobile. These free books can be downloaded to a mobile phone. So I can see more uses for cell phones in schools. Now if we can just deal with equity issues.

Short post as promised. I have to go write a poem for my writing group. If it turns out half-way decent, I'll share here. I'm really NOT a poet.

Lost Generation

2009-01-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

This winning student video for a contest run by the AARP was shared with me by a colleague (Dorothy M.) Simple yet effective!

P.S. I am involved in a Writing Project with my board. It runs for 4 sessions with the end goal of publishing a teacher anthology. The idea is that teachers who write and reflect on their own writing will be better teachers of writing. So for the next little while the posts here will be short (yeah!!).

Handmaid's Tale Challenged

2009-01-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

Another book challenge, this time not by one of neighbours to the south but a parent in Toronto. An article, Parent Seeks Ban on Atwood Novel, in the Saturday edition of the Windsor Star caught my eye and I immediately recognized a blog topic.
Apparently, this is not the first time this book, which, by the way, scared the pants off me the first time I read it (and upset me again the second time I read it), has been challenged. According to the article "Margaret Atwood's dystopic novel The Handmaid's Tale was No. 37 last year on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books of the 1990s, but until now there has apparently been no recorded attempt to ban it in Canada."
Ok, I can understand that some people may be offended by the way that fundamentalist religion is portrayed, and that there is some sexual content. But the book has so many jumping off places for critical literacy discussions that it is a great book choice for Grade 12 Academic English.
We're talking about 17 and 18 year olds here, not young adults, but students who have grown up with with music videos, and all kinds of stuff on the Internet and cable/satellite TV. The goings on in Atwood's book are tame by comparison. However, as educators, we always respect the right of a parent of a student under the age of majority to choose what is appropriate for his child. The school, located in the Toronto DSB listened to the father's complaint and "the student was issued Aldous Huxley's Brave New World to read instead and will leave the classroom when Atwood's novel is being discussed." This is a reasonable course of action, one that most schools and teachers have no difficulty in doing. Alternative selections for literature study are always available to students at their request or their parent's.
But that's not good enough for this father. This father not only wants to censor his own kid but he wants to censor everyone's kid. "Unsatisfied with the school's resolution, the student's father then made a formal complaint to the school board, which has passed it along to a review committee for study and recommendation about whether the "learning resource" should be removed from the classroom."

I am always amazed when people do this. And I wonder what drives a person into thinking that he holds the knowledge to determine what is right for everyone, not just his own. Is there something in that book that acts as a mirror and he sees something in himself that he fears being revealed? Is it fear that drives that parent?

Sidewalks, Civic Literacy or Character Education?

2009-01-11T04:27:00.000-08:00

I live in the Windsor, Ontario area, very close to the most southern spot in Canada (Pelee Island located in Lake Erie is the most southern spot). In fact, where I live is actually south of a good portion of the U.S. (try explaining that to our neighbours in the states without pulling out a map). As a result of our geographic location, we seem to miss really large dumps of snow most of the winter. However for some reason, we got hit over the last 36 hours with over 20 cm of snow.

It snowed all day yesterday, without stop. I was in my glory with snow shovel in hand. I shoveled on at least 4 occasions to keep up with the accumulation. Around 5:30 pm, after my daughter Dana and I shoveled together, we decided to go for a walk - it was one of those days cold enough for snow but not too cold for walking.
We went for a short walk in the neighbourhood. At this hour of the day, not many people had their walks cleaned - in fact we ended up walking on the road for the most part because the snow was so deep on the sidewalk. And that got me thinking.

But let me digress for a bit (I think this whole post is a digression so far - but give me a minute and I'll get to the point of this post). I'm a runner and have been for a number of years. My running partner and I have been running together for over 15 years on a regular basis year round in all kinds of weather conditions. Winter running is always a challenge for us, not because of the cold but because of the sidewalks. I don't know how many times either I or my partner have slipped and almost fallen or have had to go onto the road (which is really risking your life when we run in the winter evenings) because some people don't clean their sidewalks after a snow storm. And some people never do clean them - 2 days later, a week later and the same homes still have an unpassable mess on their sidewalk. So my experiences as an outside winter runner and my walk yesterday got me thinking about civic literacy.

What does it mean to be literate as a member of a community? Well, certainly it includes knowing that if you have a sidewalk in front of your house (or if you are lucky enough to be on a corner with a sidewalk at the front and side of your house), cleaning it after a snow dump. It means other things such as knowing to clean up after your dog (another issue - why do people let their dog do business on the sidewalk and then leave it there for kids walking to and from school to step in?), and respect for your neighbour's property by not throwing garbage on their yard (we have a corner lot and often get empty beer bottles or fast food containers dumped on our yard on Saturday nights in the summer).

But maybe this isn't civic literacy but character education and the trait of empathy - being able to put yourself in the shoes of others. I think that the social upheavals of the 60's and 70's, and the me-generations of the 80's and 90's changed a lot of things - certainly for the better in issues such as women's rights, ethnic and racial rights, and awareness of the environment. However, I think that a lot of things deteriorated - manners, thinking about what's right for the whole not just what's right for the individual, respect, individual accountability. And I think that this lack of empathy, manners and individual accountability explains why we have issues with cyberbullying (and people not cleaning their sidewalks).

As educators, we are now charged with teaching character (something we've always done but now it's officially mandated by the Ministry, like it's something new). So, I'm hoping that in the next decade when our current students become old enough to be homeowners (hopefully by that time the financial messes will be cleaned up), I won't have to worry about uncleaned sidewalks on my runs (or maybe walks by that time).

Images: views from my garage, taken by me on January 11, 2009

Happy New Year - Seven Things You Don't Need To Know About Me

2009-01-02T04:56:00.000-08:00

ImageChef.com Poetry Blender
I took some time off from writing this blog - and from reading other blogs and even from my email. I have what pc calls a "love-hate" relationship with my computer and the Internet. I'm somewhat adept (I'm so glad that I have my colleague DP across from my office just in case), but I find that I am still getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information and the speed at which new technologies, applications, etc. emerge. Is it just me or do others feel this way?
Anyway, I've gotten re-connected to my PLN over the last couple of days and have been thinking about my first post of the second year into blogging. I know that many bloggers do the inspiring thing (check this one here - it's truly inspiring for teachers) and the resolution thing but that's just not my thing. I could blog about my break and the time spent with my family, or the upcoming Christmas celebrations that are coming (I'm Serbian Orthodox Christian and we observe Christmas on Jan 7 according to the Julian calendar. as a result I don't start shopping until Dec 26). I could blog about how I have a love-hate relationship with this blog and how it's made me aware of how I write (badly - at least that's what my grade 13 English teacher told me and I have no evidence that I'm any better) and how the writing process works for me. But I've been reading a number of posts from a number of bloggers whom I follow about 7 Things You Don't Want to Know About Me and have decided to take pc's open meme tag challenge. So without further ramblings here they are:

Before I became a school teacher, I taught childbirth education classes and acted as a doula for women in labour. This came about as a result my own natural childbirth experiences with my first and second children and the home birth of my third. I considered becoming a midwife but unfortunately the timing was off - midwives were not regulated in Ontario at the time and there were no education programs available (however my sister, who attended the home birth of my third when she was 17, is a midwife).
I have competed in triathlons, a couple of half marathons and a relay marathon. I started competing in my 40's but may have to slow down/stop in my fifties because my knees are getting wonky ( I have a torn ALC and meniscus in one knee and the other knee started acting up over the holidays for no good reason I could see. Maybe it was the Zumba class?).
I hate housework with a passion, but give me a lawnmower or a snow shovel and I'll work all day.
I have a tendency to read books over and over again. In fact, I spent this break re-reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series for the the fifth time. I always find something that I've missed in previous readings - I think it's because when reading for pleasure I read really quickly and have a tendency to skip over sentences and long descriptive passages.
I always said that my dream job would be half-time library and half-time HPE. I guess I'm living my dream.
I am becoming a yoga freak. I started it because I was experiencing pain during my runs. Yoga fixed that within a week. Now I'm sticking to it because I'm burnt out from lifting weights. I see myself as a yoga instructor in the future.
I was a provincial synchronized swimming champion (back in the 70's). If you think synchro is a fluff sport try running, walking, aerobics (or what ever it is you do to get your heart rate up) while holding your breath for 1 minute intervals - oh and do it upside down!

Back to work on Monday. Hope your new year goes well!

Image: http://www.synchro.ca/webgallery/juniorteam/2008Championnatsdumondejunior.php

What Type is that Blog?

2008-12-14T13:09:00.000-08:00

Found this on my reader today. It's a site called Typlealyzer and supposedly analyzes the 'personality' attributes of the blogger. Here's mine:

ISTP - The Mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

I thought that I was more of a Duty Fulfiller than a Mechanic but this is what came up. Further analysis shows what part of the brain is active during the writing of this blog. It seems that the thinking, practical and sensing parts of my brain were most dominant - it happens to be mostly the left side of the brain - nothing going on in the right according to the diagram (which won't copy here). I couldn't get it to analyze my wikis (here and here). Interesting stuff!

One Year Anniversary

2008-12-14T04:48:00.000-08:00

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog. I have to say that I had no idea of the amount of time, energy, researching, soul-searching, and tongue-holding it took to write this weekly post when I decided to start last year. I've been able to share some really neat things that have applications to education and some that are just fun. The most gratifying are the comments have been posted. It's just like getting mail from someone unexpected - a real treat!

Just a brief post today about the highlights of the keynote speech by David Warlick from the Western Regional Computer Advisory Committee Symposium held in London on Dec 11. This was not the first time that I've heard David. Last year at the OLA Superconference, he was the OSLA keynote speaker. Here is the list of critical points that I feel he made:

The 21st century teacher must be a master learner
Print resources are beginning to disappear - what are the implications to schools?
The world is moving from a competative stance to a more cooperative stance.
Future job opportunities will be in science, engineering and the ARTS
Students of today are different
Video games are learning engines
Broadband access is an equity issue
Information is raw material
To be literate in the 21st century means: learning literacy, learning habits and adoptin of a learning lifestyle
What are the pedogogies of information abundance?

To me, what really stood in mind was the issue of equity in this 21st century world. David said that many countries are moving to wireless. For example, he said the whole county of Macedonia is wireless and Mexico will soon have broadband access for all in a short time. I fear that our country's politicians are really not focusing on what needs to be done to assure that Canada is able to compete in this flat world. If investment in infrastructure is needed to stimulate the economy, then providing broadband access to all Canadians seems a good infrastructure investment.
I look at many school boards and see issues of equity - new schools have all kinds of technology (computers with Smartboards in every classroom) and old schools struggle with poor wiring and lack of equipment. There hasn't been a new secondary school built in our area since the 70s. Our secondary teachers say that the biggest barrier to implementing read/write web tools is lack of access to computers.
Comments from David's 2 cents Worth blog post about his presentation said that many of the teachers at the keynote would not do anything about the message. I really think that teachers want to integrate more technology into their teaching but are deterred by the lack of access and the reliability of some of the technology.
And what about all of those students who don't have computers and Internet access at home? I fear that they are being left behind. That's my 2 cents worth.

Nearest Book Meme

2008-12-02T17:41:00.000-08:00

In essence, what I have learned from teacher research has made me breathe Eleanor Duckworth's (1996) question as a mantra:"What if it were otherwise?"

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence - either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don't look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

This was lying on my kitchen floor, waiting for me to get in my "to be read" pile. You Gotta' be the Book by Jeffrey Wilhelm, who will be coming to present in our district in February.

You As The Dewey Decimal System

2008-11-30T18:12:00.000-08:00

Sharon Seslija's Dewey Decimal Section:

085 In Italian, Romanian & related languages

Sharon Seslija = 9818549592901 = 981+854+959+290+1 = 3085

Class:
000 Computer Science, Information & General Works

Contains:
Encyclopedias, magazines, journals and books with quotations.

What it says about you:
You are very informative and up to date. You're working on living in the here and now, not the past. You go through a lot of changes. When you make a decision you can be very sure of yourself, maybe even stubborn, but your friends appreciate your honesty and resolve.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Couldn't resist this one. Check out You As The Dewey Decimal System. Just fill out the form and see what comes up. I don't know how this came up , but I do have Romanian roots.

Last Reflections On NCTE

2008-11-30T16:33:00.000-08:00

So many sessions, so much to write about! Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke talking about 25 years of lit circles and the absolute importance of creating community for the circles to work. Writing and inquiry circles as the next generation of students collaborating to make meaning. Jim Burke, Jeffery Wilhelm and Alan Sitomer presenting effective adolescent literacy instruction. They speak about the new 3Rs: relevance, relationships and rigour as being the foundation. Janet Allen, who uses the following definition of literacy:

"Literacy involves the ability to encode or decode meaning in any of the symbolic forms used in the culture."

and quotes that:

"Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing."

Yvette Jackson, who works with underachieving adolescents in New York has a symbolic representation of learning:

L: (U + M) (C1 + C2)

learning: (understanding and motivation) (competence and confidence)

So what does this mean? We need to focus on strengths, building on what our students know and can do and supporting them as they try new learning. Underachievers have the following characteristics: they are resilient, verbal, sociable, tech savy, creative, passionate, energetic, and problem solvers. So as teachers we know our most challenging students have these characteristics and use this information to create engaging, motivating lessons. And we need to expect HIP for them: high intellectual performance by using HOP: high operational practices (critical thinking: evaluating questioning, critiquing, analyzing, judging and synthesizing). One way to do this is through analogies.

Sara Holbrook showing us how to use summary frameworks that lead into poetry. Lee Ann Spillane showing us how to collect survey data using cell phones (can't wait to try this one). And finally, back to Janet Allen who hopes that all teachers embrace lifelong learning. But to remember that the new new literacies are built on the old literacies. She closes with the quote:

" The quality of the education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers."

So everytime we attend a conference, a pd session, a plc or read a professional book/article/journal we remember that these professional learning sessions contribute to the improvement of the education system as a whole and ultimate to the people we serve, our students.

Check out the NCTE Ning for handouts, powerpoint and discussions from the various sessions.

Sessions at NCTE

2008-11-26T09:40:00.000-08:00

My first session was called Applying the Reading Strategies to Enhance Writing, presented by Karen Lanning and Carol Harrell of Kennesaw State University. They worked with students from grades 9 to first year university worked with students to gain insight into how reading and writing are intricately connected by having students apply the reading strategies: questioning, connecting, visualizing, predicting, inferring during revision. They presented a series of lessons to students that connected the reading and writing process and ultimately led them to read what they wrote from the stance of a reader. If we can get students to this point and to be constantly aware of their readers then the quality of writing will improve. The students were working on metacognitive skills as well, reflecting on how connecting, questioning, predicting and inferring could help them write better for their readers. Overwhelmingly, students had improved writing but also realized that writing is hard work.

My second session was called Designing Teaching and Writing Assignments for the 21st Century. The first part of the session was about genre theory. In summary what genre theory says is that texts grow out of situations and reflect patterns of instruction, and the roles, relationships and beliefs of the people using the texts. texts are social, rhetorical, dynamic, contextual and ideological. Ok so what does this mean? My understanding is this: that all ways of writing are genres and we need to help students understand the patterns of a particular genre and when that genre is most appropriate. So the OSSLT is a genre that requires a certain way of reading and writing; blogs and wikis are genres; twits (i.e those short 140 word messages in Twitter) are genres as well as all the traditional genres (forms) of writing. Unless we immerse and teach a genre to students, they will revert back to what they know. And the problem in writing is that students have difficulty moving genres of writing out of expected places. One of the ways of teaching students to understand genres in writing is through compare and contrast, i.e. comparing one genre to another. This portion of the session required a lot of concentration and thinking - since it was around 2:45 pm and I had been up since 3:00 am I was beginning to fade. However the second part was very practical and very read/write web oriented. Here's a list of 21st century genres the presented suggested:

* Amazon Book Reviews (or Chapters for us)
* Ad Analysis (why are commercials different from show to show?)
* Facebook/My Space Page for Literary Character (too bad they block these here)
* Chat/Instant Message Transcript (brainstorming activity, discussion, debates on chat)
* eBay Listing (what would a character from a novel sell on eBay?)
* Blogs
* Digital Narrative or Photo Essays ( traditional personal narrative in digital form)
* Infomercials (e.g. write an infomercial for metaphor)
* Wikis (create a class textbook)
* Podcasts (check out Radio Willow Web This is from an elementary school but one of the presenters was sitting beside a university student in a writing class and the student was listening to a podcast about the 6 traits of writing from this site)

NCTE Convention in San Antonio, Texas

2008-11-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

My colleague Lisa Bott and I are attending the 90^th national convention of the National Council of teachers of English. We flew in on Friday morning and have been attending inspiring sessions about a number of topics. It’s my intension to write a brief summary of the main ideas that were presented at the sessions I attended. Since I have to write a report for the pd committee, the contents of this blog will be my report. Currently, I’m in the hotel lobby at 6:00 am on Sunday. I’m an early riser and have been meaning to get to this blog sooner than this. Last night we spent out time on San Antonio’s Riverwalk. We ate dinner at a river side restaurant after taking a boat ride on the San Antonio River. The night was balmy - not warm as we are in the middle of a cold snap here (cold being around 56 degrees F) and it was quite pleasant. The River walk is filled with people, locals and tourists alike and is quite lively. Today after our last session, we’ll head to the Alamo, another short walk from our hotel. Our days have been spent at the Convention Centre a short walk away – it’s huge, bigger than Toronto’s Convention Centre. The participants are from all over the States and Canada – Lisa spoke to one who was from England.

One of the things that I have noticed, being a Canadian in the midst of mostly American teachers is the overwhelming sense of hope and renewal as a result of Obama’s victory. From what I gather, the No Child Left Behind legislation has wrought low moral, low level, teaching to the test instruction, scripted instruction and loss of creativity and the ability to respond to student needs, lack of differentiation, a shocking lack of respect to learners whose first language is not English and only one pathway for students (college). I know that I will be leaving this conferences knowing that I am lucky to be teaching in Ontario – we are far more advanced in education. The US has a long way to go, but there is a permeating sense of hope and excitement that things will change. Many speakers have spoken about a ‘sense of urgency’ for literacy instruction in the US especially with African-American and Latino children and Kylene Beers spoke about "segregation by educational rigour".

Reminiscing on Ancient Rome

2008-11-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

Found this on my blog travels this morning. Google has created Ancient Rome in 3D. You can actually see what the Forum and Coliseum looked like when they were fully intact. Here's a promo video:

Ancient Rome in 3D includes snippets of information about the various structures that the user can read as she travels through the city. You can:

* Fly into Rome as it looked in 320 A.D.
* Tour the interior of famous buildings.
* Visit the sites in 3D such as the Roman Forum, Colosseum and the Forum of Julius Caesar.
* Learn about how the Romans lived.

And there's a curriculum competition for educators who integrate this new tool into their lessons.

What a great resource for Ancient History for Grade 5 Social Studies, the Grade 11 World History course and English classes who study Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

And Latin. I took Latin in secondary school (from grade 9 to 11) and part of that course was the study of Roman life, history and great writers. I remember completing a project about life in Rome and I still remember meticulously drawing buildings and clothing as part of the project. It actually was one of my favourite assignments in secondary. I went through an ancient Rome reading kick - I read every historical fiction book that I could find in my school and public libraries (and believe it or not there were quite a few). I remember Miss Stone my grade 9 and 10 Latin teacher - she was a wonderful teacher: young, engaging and she challenged her small group of students to the point where we actually completed 3 years of Latin in 2. And the school system was flexible enough then to allow 3 credits to us. The next year Miss Stone was gone - not enough students took Latin so we had to take grade 12 Latin with Mrs. Closser. Mrs. Closser was ancient and smelled of cigarettes and booze - we were all convinced that she kept a mickey in her desk drawer. We didn't make it easy for her and I feel bad about that now. After losing Miss Stone, Latin didn't quite hold its appeal anymore.

So Latin gradually disappeared from the high school curriculum in Windsor and hasn't been seen since the mid-seventies. There are probably no teachers in our area around anymore to teach it even if there was interest (Latin has a curriculum document in Ontario). I know that I benefited from the study of Latin - it made learning terminology in my anatomy course in university easier because I was familiar with Latin vocabulary.

I wonder what course will be the next to become extinct?

Student Body: Classroom Exercises to Increase Mental Focus

2008-11-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

I've been working with new teachers and Daily Physical Activity for the past couple of Teacher Connect sessions (the old NTIP). Browsing some of the videos on Edutopia led me to this one:

I know that I have to move after focusing intently on some task - I'm a kinesthetic learner (as well as a visual learner). We've also been working on differentiated instruction and I'm thinking that for those learners who need to move to concentrate, these 4 exercises might help them do that.
If you try some of these in your class, please tell me how they worked.

Some Recent Tags on del.icio.us

2008-11-03T02:56:00.000-08:00

Here are some of my recent tags:

Redefining Rigor: Redefining our Future
This links to Vicki Davis' Cool Cat teacher blog who links to the original article. I didn't immediate link to Tony Wagner's article because I found Davis' summary and analysis to be just as insightful. You can access her comments and the original article from the above link.

Boolify Project
Neat site to help students and teachers with Boolean search strategies. It's interactive and includes some handouts for teachers to use when teaching website evaluation, Boolean search operators and refining search strategies. There are also links to Teacher Tube videos about searching.

Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind
Interesting article about how online reading differs from print reading. The author argues that 'slow' reading counterbalances web skimming". Here's another interesting paragraph from the article:

Another Nielsen test found that teenagers skip through the Web even faster than adults do, but with a lower success rate for completing tasks online (55 percent compared to 66 percent). Nielsen writes: "Teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That's also why they leave sites that are difficult to figure out." For them, the Web isn't a place for reading and study and knowledge. It spells the opposite. "Teenagers don't like to read a lot on the Web. They get enough of that at school."

Hmm... implications?

Reading Between the Lines - and Everywhere Else: Where Literacy is Headed
An article from Kent Williamson, executive director of NCTE. According to a poll taken by NCTE of English language arts teachers:

Nearly two-thirds of the poll respondents indicated that their teaching methods had undergone marked changes reflecting new concepts of literacy. The most important 21st century literacy skills identified by poll respondents focus on decision making, interpretation, and analysis. Specifically, the top three abilities required for student success by poll respondents are:

1. The ability to seek information and make critical judgments about the veracity of sources (rated very important by 95% of poll respondents).

2. The ability to read and interpret many different kinds of texts, both in print and online (94%).

3. The ability to innovate and apply knowledge creatively (91%).
AND...
Consistent with this view, the teaching/learning methods most strongly identified with building 21st century literacies were

1) learning through cross-disciplinary projects/project-based learning,

2) inquiry-based learning, and

3) incorporating student choices as a significant part of instruction.
Here's further support for a strong school library program, a consistent research process and collaboration between classroom teachers and teacher librarians.

Getting In Touch with Your Inner Tortoise

2008-10-26T10:04:00.000-07:00

Last week was insane and so was the week leading up to it. Four days of full day workshop sessions plus another day attending a session by the literacy and numeracy secretariat. The week before spent preparing everything because you knew that you were going to be out of the office for 5 days. Ideas flitting in and out of your head but not sticking because you have no time to think because you are trying to fit in your exercise program, eat nutritiously (try this when eating catered all week), attend choir practice, a charity fundraising event and go watch your son perform a concert that's located across the border. Oh, and help your daughter study for a major exam for her medical degree.

I woke up Saturday morning fully intending to keep to my regular schedule of reading my feeds, blogging, catching up with Thursday and Friday's emails and watching a presentation or two from the k-12 conference. But I couldn't - I absolutely could not keep to the pace that I usually set. So I ended up not doing much of anything and felt absolutely guilty about it. After all, in our culture, slowing down is frowned upon. It's not the N. American way of life; of packing in more and more into our day and making the most of every single minute.

Well, imagine my surprise and delight to find this little gem sitting in my reader from TED. watching it alleviated my guilt for "wasting" a day. It's from Carl Honore author of the book In Praise of Slowness. In the video, he speaks about the effects of cramming too much into a day, including the effect of our speed-rushed culture on our students. Take a look:

I found that today, Sunday, I am much more relaxed and ready to get back to work. I'm going to get in touch with my inner tortoise more often.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cwalker71/2832256298/

K-12 Conference is Here!

2008-10-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

On Monday, October 20 the 2008 K-12 Online Conference begins. For those of you who are completing your Annual Learning Plans for this year, this is a great way to attend professional learning sessions from presenters who are leaders in the field of 21st century learning.
Stephen Heppell, who is Europe's David Warlick and was featured at last year's OLA Superconference, posted the keynote address last week but you can still access it here as all of the presentations are archived.

The great thing about this is you can attend the 'live event' ( it's in GMT, but they include a time converter. For example 12:00 noon GMT is 8:00 am here) or you can attend at your convenience; they archive all sessions. You can load presentations onto mp3 players to listen to while you run, drive, bike.....

There are 4 main strands: Getting Started for people new to the read/write web; Kicking It Up A Notch for the more experienced; Leading the Change and Prove It

Here's some sessions that caught my eye:
Stephen Heppell's keynote
Free Tools For Universal Literacy Design
Reading Revolution: New Texts and Technologies
Web 2.0 Tools to Amplify Elementary Students' Creativity and Initiative
Parental Engagement in the 21st Century
Monsters Bloom in Our Wiki
Beyond the Stacks: Using Emerging Technologies to Strengthen Teacher Librarianship
The Write Stuff with Blogging Buddies

I've linked to the teasers. Some teasers are posted to You Tube, so you probably won't be able to access from a school computer, but others have used other tools that are accessible at school. These sessions are for elementary teachers, secondary English teachers, teacher librarians, really any teacher who wants to see how students of the 21st century can be engaged in learning - students as young as grade 1.

For the complete schedule look here. There are some other sessions listed that don't have teasers, so check the whole schedule. Here are some others:

Using Online Argument Role-Play to Foster Learning to Argue and Arguing to Learn in a High School Composition Class
Promise into Practice: What It Now Means to Teach Adolescent Readers and the Impact of the Results

Names to look for: Vicki Davis, Bud Hunt, Sylvia Martinez, Chris Lehmann, Donna DesRoches, David Warlick.

I hope that you'll pick at least one session that interests you and is at your level of initiation. This is a way of providing opportunities to differentiate for your professional learning. So find a friend, pick as session or two and go from there. If you want you can join in the online discussions and reflect with colleagues from around the world.

The best thing about this? It's FREE!

Ten Thankful Things

2008-10-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

It's Thanksgiving today and I have a bit of time to blog before the family comes. I thought that today I would write a list of things for which I'm thankful. Here it is:

1. I'm thankful for my wonderful husband. He' s been my very best friend for 30 years.

2. I'm thankful for my three children Dana (27), Petar (25)and Stefan (22) who amaze me everyday with their accomplishments and good heartedness.

3. I am thankful for the health of my family. Good health is both hard work and a blessing.

4. I am thankful that both my husband and I are working and have decent jobs. Many, many people in our area have been hit by closures of the automotive and other manufacturing plants and are not so fortunate.

5. I am thankful for my extended family - my children still have both sets of grandparents, several aunts, uncles, and cousins many of whom live close enough for visits.

6. I am thankful that I live in Canada. My apologies to our American neighbours but there are some truly scary things going on in your country. Clay Burell, one of the ed-bloggers I follow posted this on his blog the other day.

7. I am thankful for my friends. They 'get' me.

8. I am thankful for my colleagues. Their support is too valuable for words and they help make me look good everyday.

9. I am thankful for authors who write good books. I don't know how I would spend my summer vacations without you.

10. I am thankful for my running partner Andrea. We have been running together every week for the last 15 or 16 years. Some marriages don't last that long.

Well there you have it. It's nothing profound but a list of the things that have an effect on my life everyday.

For what are you thankful?

Image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/elkit/67002894/

Inconvenient Youth

2008-10-04T04:41:00.000-07:00

Find more videos like this on Inconvenient Youth

Blue Man Group has waded into the global warming arena with this video posted on a Ning site called Inconvenient Youth a site developed by teens about global warming. This video lead me to think of one of geographies or sciences that examine global warming. What a great hook for beginning a unit or as a model for students to create their own video about the effects of global warming. Or classes could develop their own Ning focused on local issues associated with global warming.

Vicki Davis who writes Cool Cat Teacher blog also reflects that:

This video from the blue man group on the environment has been widely viewed around the world. Such videos spark social change -- these are not TV commercials but viral videos that spread from blog to blog and email to email. How information travels has fundamentally changed.

I find her comment about viral videos thought provoking. The opportunity that individuals have to cause change - for good or for evil - connects me to what I heard about a year ago when I was able to attend a session given by David Warlick at an OLA Superconference in Toronto. He spoke about the 3 Rs - reading writing and 'rithmatic and what they looked like in the new information landscapes of the 21st century. But he added a fourth component - the ethical use of information. As teachers we must teach our students the responsibilities connected with this ability to spread viral videos or viral podcasts or viral anything over the Internet.

I think that this responsibility ties in nicely with Character Education. This was taken off our school board's web site in regards to character education:

Schools play an active role in organizing, developing and implementing programs that serve to foster and develop character. We believe that all members of our school community should strive to be: Caring, Responsible, Fair, Self-Disciplined, Respectful, Diligent and Trustworthy. These traits were determined in consultation with our staff, parents, students and community partners. Our interest in developing character is derived from the fact that these attributes affirm our human dignity, promote the development and welfare of the individual person, serve the common good and define our rights and responsibilities in Canadian society.

I'm not sure how this post started with a video about global warming to a connection to character education and ethical use of the Internet. But it did and I am constantly awed by the importance of our jobs as teachers and by the scope of what we do with kids on a daily basis.

Google Books

2008-09-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today I thought I would write about Google Books. Google is trying to amass a number of free downloadable books in full text. Most of these books are classics and some like Animal Farm are still being used in our English classes today.

Now the reason that I'm writing about this is that I'm thinking that there is a practical use for these online books:
1. If you are studying one of these books in class, then students can't use the excuse of forgetting the text at school and not doing homework - the book is online.
2. A student doesn't have to cart the text home - the book is online.
3. A student can't complain that the book from school (which is 20 years old) is falling apart - the book is online.
4. Now this is the cool part but one I'm having trouble with. Google Operating System blog has some code listed that can be used to actually embed these books into a wiki or a blog. If you had a library wiki you could create a page that housed a collection of classic texts or if you had an English class blog you could have access to the book right on the blog.

Apparently, you just have to copy the html code and then substitute the book id into a part of it and - Bob's your uncle - the actual book pops up in its full version that you can read right from the page you put it on. Joyce Valenza says that it's fairly simple and really, it looked simple. I've embedded code into my wikis and blogs and it usually works fine.

However, this time it isn't and I don't know if its me or Blogger or Wikispaces 'cause I can't get the darned thing to embed.

I'm nothing but persistent. I left a comment on Joyce's blog and sure enough, within 24 hours she responded (I wasn't sure what part of the book's URL held the book id that I had to insert and both Joyce and another reader who also got this thing to work helped me out). So I'm thinking that if they could do it, I could do it. I also read the comments on the Google Operating System blog and tried to do what they said as well. Honestly, I tried to get the code all on one line by doing what they said but Blogger wouldn't let me. I was so much into the flow of trying to get this to work that I lost track of time and was almost late for a wedding (not mine - I sing at these things sometimes).

To make a long story short, I still can't seem to get it. So this entry is minus the book that I was planning to embed. If anyone is able to do it, let me know how.

Too Busy To Be Betty

2008-09-21T13:23:00.000-07:00

For this week's post, I'm going to link you to the Adolescent Literacy Book Club blog. I wrote a post in response to a chapter that I read on Saturday morning. The previous week was so darned busy that I needed the weekend to catch up on my program work. So, here's what I blogged about if you want to take a look. It's about writing and part of it's about drawing as thinking. The chapter is written by Linda Reif and she writes about using a "tellingboard" to aid reluctant writers. Next week I hope to have a regular post.

Book Banning and Palin - The List

2008-09-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

I just received the list of books vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin tried to ban when she was mayor in Wasilla, Alaska. The list originated from a colleague who received it from a colleague who received from a colleague at the University of Windsor. You may or may not have heard or read about it but you can get some background here, and here.

Here's the list of books that she wanted banned (this information is taken from the minutes of the Wasilla Library Board):
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen

Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner

Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes

More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective

Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl

Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster

Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween
Symbols by Edna Barth

Quite a list, isn't it?

GoAnimate

2008-09-13T10:29:00.001-07:00

Check this out:

It's made from a neat online tool called GoAnimate. I'm playing with it now.

K12 Online Conference 2008

2008-09-13T09:32:00.000-07:00

Found the poster for the K-12 Online Conference this morning as I was going through my reader.

I found this last year and emailed our board email conferences as a personal professional learning opportunity that can be attended from the comfort of your own computer. It was through this conference that I was introduced to people such as Konrad Golgowski, a teacher and PHD candidate from Toronto using blogs with his junior students and Dean Shareski in Saskatchewan who is a leading web 2.0 presence and one of the organizers of the conference.

The conference is free. You can attend in real time or attend sessions as they are archived. There are sessions for people just starting out and sessions for more experienced users. You can check out some of the conference sessions here. Catching my eye are the following:

Beyond the Stacks: Using Emerging Technologies to Strengthen Teacher-librarian Leadership
Carlene Walter and Donna DesRoches and

the Getting Started section.

There's a support wiki that has a section for first timers. And if you've heard of David Warlick but haven't heard him, you can do it hear as he is one of the keynote speakers.

I'll be attending, hope you will too!

What Gets Tested Gets Taught; What Gets Reported Gets Measured

2008-09-06T04:15:00.000-07:00

I started this post by first going on a bit of a frustrated rant regarding the lack of a specific curriculum document from the Ministry of Education for information studies and the MIA vision statement for libraries that was submitted to the Ministry last year. Then I changed my mind and am going in another direction because as I was writing I realized that we do have curriculum - it's just that it's embedded into the content curriculum documents and it's not in one convenient spot. It would be nice if it were in one spot but it's not so I'll move on.

So now the challenge is how do we assess these expectations in a precise way? How do we collect data on student achievement with information literacy skills? And how can we use this data to advocate for students in this information-age?

Well, I found this interesting FREE assessment tool for information literacy skills linked in my PLN (personal learning network). It's called Trails: Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills developed at Kent State University. It's free (did I say this already?), it will assign student logins to take an online multiple choice test, gives individual student reports and class reports in pdf. I took the grade 9 test and scored 94% ( I got 2 questions wrong). In the class report it told me exactly what areas needed improvement (topic development and evaluating sources). I can't attach the exact reports that it generated for me (Blogger doesn't allow it) but there are samples available on the site and you'll get an idea of the type of data it's collecting.

It's worth a look. If you can get by some of the American content, it's an excellent outline of the types of skills that need to be taught to help students achieve. For example, I created an account (it's easy) and had a look at the grade 6 test (only tests for grade 6 and grade 9 are posted). One of the first items is narrowing a topic. Let's think about this. Narrowing a topic is really important in this time of information overload. Where else are we asking students to narrow their topics? In writing! And where does this fit when we teach writing? In ideas - the first traits of writing. So you see when we teach skills in information literacy, we are not only teaching them how to research but really how to read and write and think. Literacy skills.

But back to the main theme of this post, how can we use this little tool? In a couple of ways. One, it would make an excellent diagnostic to get both class and individual student base-line data. Based on the data, as a teacher librarian you could target the exact skills that students need to improve. You could then test at the end of the year and look for growth in individual students and classes. Even though it has tests for grade 6 and 9, you could use the test items and modify them for other grade levels based on the expectations in the curriculum docs.

Bottom line is that data needs to drive instruction. We need to collect data on student achievement in information literacy. This little tool may help you do this in a more precise way.
Remember, what gets tested gets taught and what gets reported gets measured.

Hole in the Wall

2008-08-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning doing some maintenance on my blog, reading twits and blog posts and moving my RSS feeds from Bloglines to Google Reader.
I really like Google Reader because it has allowed me to put a feed from Reader on my iGoogle page. So when I go to my iGoogle page, I just get the new feeds without having to go through them all and I don't even have to leave iGoogle to read the posts - they pop up when I move my mouse over the feed. I love this! Talk about having information come to you!
In the same vein, I found this from a recent twit from Joyce Valenza. She is using Pageflakes to create resource feeds for Global Studies, Science and Spanish. Students at her school can go to this site set up for current web-based information that is updated regularly - in some cases on a daily basis. You'll also see that she has linked to her school's databases. So add a Pageflakes link to a pathfinder wiki and students have access to vetted resources by the teacher or teacher-librarian.
Another twit from Bud the Teacher, had me checking out this mind-boggling presentation by Indian researcher Sugata Mitra posted on TED. The experiment is known as Hole in the Wall. :

It's only a 20 minute video, but does it pack a punch! Check out the comments to this video. If you don't wish to watch the video, you can check out this summary here by Gary Stager Here's a quote from the summary that really spoke to me:

Mitra describes his learning theory as minimally invasive education--a hypothesis that even in totally unfamiliar situations, children in groups will learn on their own with little or no input from others, provided the learning environment induces an adequate level of curiosity (my emphasis). Like in minimally invasive surgery there should be no more expert intervention than absolutely necessary.

This work proves that when provided with access to a computer in a social context, all children will become computer literate with or without a traditional teacher. Mitra's careful experiments confirm the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky. Most of all, "The Hole in the Wall," offers a glimmer of hope for concerned global citizens who do not know where to begin in increasing educational opportunity in the developing world. The "Hole in the Wall" project is a testament to the competency and capacity of children to construct their own knowledge in a community of practice. Internet access can connect children to each other and the 21st century.

So how does this impact on our traditional roles as teachers right from the first day they enter school? What do school do to prevent learning as a self-organizing system? I'm still trying to get my head around this.

Research Projects That Motivate

2008-08-22T07:00:00.000-07:00

As we begin the new school year, we need to think about student motivation and engagement. Inquiry-based learning is one of the best ways to motivate students. Students who are able to inquire about things they are passionate about or about things that have a direct impact on their lives are engaged and motivated. So how can we bridge the content we have to teach with student's passion and interests? Design good research projects.

Doug Johnson has 2 posts where he outlines what this means. In his first post he writes about research questions having an 'action element' to them. Take a look at his post where he shows a level 4 research question:

Level Four: My research answers a personal question about the topic, and contains information that may be of use to decision-makers as they make policy or distribute funds. The result of my research is a well support conclusion that contains a call for action on the part of an organization or government body. There will be a plan to distribute this information.
Primary example: How can our school help stop the growth in unwanted and abandoned animals in our community?
Secondary example: How might high schools change their curricula to meet the needs of students wanting a career in manufacturing in Minnesota?

Think about the motivation of adolescents who work at finding the answer to the above question.

Johnson linked to a post he wrote back in 1999 characteristics of excellent projects. Here is a summary:

Motivational research projects have a clarity of purpose and expectations.
Motivational research projects give students choices.
Motivational research projects are relevant to the student’s life.
Motivational research projects stress higher level thinking skills and creativity.
Motivational research projects answer real questions.
Motivational research projects involve a variety of information finding activities.
Motivational learning tends to be hands-on.
The use of technology can be exciting for many students.
Good projects often use formats that use multiple senses.
Interesting projects are often complex, but are broken into manageable steps.
Collaborative learning is often stimulating and results in better products than individual work.
Motivational research projects have results that are shared with people who care and respond.
Learning that is assessed by an authentic tool is more meaningful that a paper and pencil test.
Samples and examples give the learner a clear idea of what quality work looks like.
Well-designed projects allow the learner to reflect, revisit, revise, and improve their final projects.
Teachers and media specialists who enjoy authentic, project-based learning are comfortable with a loss of control over time, the final product, and “correct” answers.
These teachers and media specialists accept active students rather than passive students.
The professional’s belief that given enough time, resources, and motivation, all students are capable of high performance is critical.
Like media specialists, teachers who do exciting projects recognize that their expertise in the learning and research process rather than in any particular subject area.
Teacher enthusiasm becomes more important than ever.
Teachers and media specialists who work on these kinds of project know that they don’t always work the first time.

Keep these in mind as you design projects for your students. In Johnsons's post he elaborates on these points with examples. You can also get more information about quality research projects by accessing our board's resources: Imagine the Learning, Research Success@ your library (see page 23 and 24 of the link for ordering info) and our new Research web page that you can access here.

Learning to Blog

2008-08-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for a bit - I've been busy posting on the book discussion blog that a group of us started as a way of developing a professional learning group over the summer.

Right now, I am in Will Richardson's session on blogging that's being held during the Vision to Practice conference by the Greater Essex County DSB in Windsor, ON, Canada. Will is working with teachers new to blogging.

It's interesting as I sit back and listen to the discussions and concerns. It's evident to me that the message that social networking is a dangerous thing is very strong and that many teachers are not aware of the message that networking through the read/write web can be a very powerful learning tool that can motivate and engage students. Will showed us Anne Davis' blog post Rationale for Educational Blogging where she lists a number of reasons why blogging is pedagogically sound. She says,

There are many skills and concepts that need to be addressed to effectively help teachers learn to use blogs throughout their curriculum to foster these new literacies. It is not just a matter of transferring classroom writing into digital spaces. Teachers need to address writing for a public audience, how to cite and link and why, how to use the comment tool in pedagogical ways, how to read web materials more efficiently as well as explore other ways to consider pedagogical uses of blogs. Blogging requires us to teach students to critically engage media. Students need instruction on how to become efficient navigators in these digital spaces where they will be obtaining a majority of their information.

She writes about new literacies and I think that this is important. I think that we are in real danger of narrowly defining what literacy is. Literacy is not just a highly publicized score on a standardized test. In the quote above, Davis defines other literacy skills that are not part of these tests but are certainly part of what it means to be literate in the 21st century. And we know that what gets tested gets taught. So how do kids get proficient with 21st century literacies if we don't value them enough to place them within our curriculum or our testing systems? The reality is that blogs, wikis, rss, text messaging and social networking sites are part of the daily literacies of our students. If we don't teach them how to navigate and ethically use these technology who will?

If you want to know more about 21st century skills check this out here. There are lots of links on this site that will lead to articles that examine what it means to be literate in the 21st century and the types of skills that we need to foster in our students so that they will be prepared for a world that is totally different then the one for which we were prepared.

We had almost 50 teachers attend Will's 2 sessions. I am excited to see teachers at both secondary and elementary extending their learning by becoming familiar with blogs.

Here are 2 sources for more information on blogging that Will shared:

Support Blogging

Weblogs in Schools

Happy Blogging!

An Online Book Club for Professional Development

2008-08-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

At the end of the year, I offered the opportunity to the English Department Heads in my board to participate in an online book discussion over the summer. I set up a blog to facilitate the discussion and offered to contribute to the cost of the book. I had 3 teachers who were interested and this past week we began our discussion. So far, so good.

One of the things that Will Richardson says about the read/write web is that teachers must use the technology and become comfortable with it before they use it with students. This blog will provide a vehicle for 3 teachers to become comfortable and see the ways they can apply it in their classrooms next year. I'm hoping to expand this and have more teachers involved next time.

Our blog is called Adolescent Literacy. Drop in some time and feel free to comment.

The Trojan Women

2008-08-07T07:40:00.000-07:00

So much to write about, so little time. Here's my impressions about the Stratford play Trojan Women.

I didn't plan on seeing this play. My husband and I had an early dinner and were walking along the river admiring the swans and laughing at the antics of the ducks. We wandered into the Festival Theatre to see what was playing that evening. I think it was Romeo and Juliet. We saw this play before at Stratford and although each staging is different, we really weren't interested in seeing it again. The ticket seller suggested that we walk down to the Tom Patterson Theatre and check out The Trojan Women. She said that it was a short play and that we could get rush seat prices for it. So that's what we did. We'd never been to the Tom Patterson before. It is a small theatre with seating on 3 sides of the stage so the audience is quite close to the action.

The Trojan Women

This play, written by Euipedes, takes place right after the defeat of Troy by the Greeks. Here's the story (taken from the program):

After 10 years of siege, Troy has fallen to the Greeks. Outraged by the desecration of her temples, the goddess Athena persuades the god Poseidon to help her harass the conquerors on their journey home. Meanwhile Hecuba, Andromache and the other women of Troy grieve for their husbands, their children and their home. Now the property of their captors, they are destined to become either slaves or concubines, and Hecuba is desperate to learn the fate of her two daughters, Polyxena and Cassandra. As the day wears on, Cassandra arrives in a state of frenzy, uttering dark prophecies of the misfortunes awaiting the Greeks on their return home. the Greek herald, Talthybius, bring terrible news for Amdromache, and King Menelaus reclaims his wife, Helen, whose actions provoked the war. The women's anguish reaches fever pitch as they prepare to be taken away to endure their new lives in Greece.

Women are so often absent from history - most history is the history of men. This play takes us beyond the history of the Trojan war itself and into the aftermath when all the men are dead and the women are left to pick up the pieces and deal with the consequences. Euripides wrote this play thousands of years ago, yet here we are in the 21st century and women are still picking up the pieces and dealing with the consequences of war. We don't often think beyond what is displayed in our media about war - war is still mainly a male event characterized by soldier deaths and collateral damage (such a sterile term for death of civilians). We have brief glimpses into what happens to some women but usually it is just a line or 2 in a history book or a 30 second sound bite. So when I think about this play, my main reaction is that is refreshing to see history from a female perspective. Apparently, Euripedes was know for his strong women characters and this play was full of strong women whose perspective in this play was not a positive one.

I was surprised at the way Helen was portrayed - as a manipulative, selfish creature who was despised by the Trojan women. In many versions of this story that I have read, I have not seen her portrayed in this manner - usually it was Paris who was shown as weak, selfish and unconcerned by others' needs except his own.

This was the first Greek play that I've attended. I don't remember reading one or studying one in school. One of the drama teachers at my former school did some work with her students on Greek plays and I remember that one of the things that her students had the find out about was the purpose of the chorus in Greek plays. Now I understand what this is. In this play, some lines are spoken 'in chorus' by the actors on the stage.

I'm glad that we decided to see it. I'm not sure that I would go to Stratford just to see this play but it was certainly more entertaining than going to a bar/cafe or back to the hotel room to watch TV.

Image: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080617/ENT01/806170378

Cabaret (and One New Tool)

2008-07-26T02:35:00.000-07:00

PC from Quoteflections (see my blogroll) suggested that I write a post about the plays that I saw at Stratford. I'm no critic; my approach when reading, viewing or listening is for the entertainment value. I tend not to analyse but to feel and make connections. Since I don't want the post to be too long, I'll do this in installments. However, don't look for the next installment until August - I'm going away for a week and I'm not taking my computer with me.

Cabaret
My previous experience with this play is the well-known Liza Minelli/Joel Gray Hollywood movie version. I saw it in the 70's and mostly remember the songs more than the plot. So seeing this play performed in Stratford was like watching it for the first time. The movie version was heavily adapted and focused on the Liza Minelli character (Sally Bowles). The Stratford version is the original play from 1966. Here is a short synopsis (from Cabaret's program):

On New Year's Eve, 1929, a young American writer, Clifford Bradshaw, arrives in Germany to teach English and work on a novel. On the train to Berlin, he is befriended by a stranger, Ernst Ludwig, who secures him lodging at the boarding house of Fraulein Schneider and persuades him to sample the city's night life at the Kit Kat club. That club, presided over by an eerily flamboyant master of ceremonies, features and English cabaret singer named Sally Bowles, who takes an immediate interest in Cliff and loses no time in charming her way into his rooms and into his heart. But even as Cliff surrenders to the dream-like distraction of this love affair, he finds himself increasingly disturbed by the ominous changes taking place in the country (i.e. Hitler's rise to power and the anti-Jewish sentiment developing - my words here) around him - and by their implications for the people he has come to think of as his friends.

There is a subplot in the play about an autumn romance and the Fraulein Schneider/Herr Shultz subplot was new to me. Fraulein Schneider owns the rooming house in which Bradshaw lives while he is in Berlin. Herr Schultz, who is Jewish, owns a nearby fruit store and romances Fraulein Schneider with gifts of rare fruit. They decide to marry, but Fraulein Schneider calls it off when she sees which way the wind is blowing in her country.

I actually felt that in this version, the Sally Bowles/Clifford Bradshaw plot was almost secondary to the sub-plot of the Schneider/Shultz romance. Not sure why. The Emcee's constant presence in every scene was a joy to watch - his facial expressions (and other body parts) reflected the emotions of each scene. The music was excellent of course but it was really hard to forget about Liza Minelli's version of the theme song Cabaret and enjoy Trish Lindstrom's (the actress who portrayed Sally Bowles) version. This is probably because I've been belting out Minelli's version in my shower for the last 30 years!

This year, Stratford is moving back to it's Shakespearen roots, so all of the musicals have been moved to the smaller Avon Theatre rather than performing them at the much larger Festival Theatre as they have in the past. The Avon was packed for the matinee; not an empty seat in the house (in comparison, the evening performance of Taming of the Shrew, held at Festival, had a multitude of empty seats. I'll write more about this when I post about 'Shrew'). I do recommend this play if you like musicals. I'm never disappointed with my Stratford experience.

On a completely different note, I have to share a tool that was posted on a recent Joyce Valenza blog. It's called Glogster and it lets you design really cool graphic pages for your wiki. I quickly made one in about 10 minutes then added it to my pd wiki. When I have time, I'll play with it some more.

Image: http://jam.canoe.ca/Theatre/Reviews/C/Cabaret/2008/05/31/5732196-sun.html

Voluntary Meme: My Seven Deadly Sins and Shakespeare

2008-07-17T15:52:00.000-07:00

Clay Burell had this intriguing voluntary meme on his blog today. Since I tend to slide into the 'idle hands'/sloth mode in the summer, I thought that taking this Seven Deadly Sins quiz might be a bit illuminating. So here's a peek at my redemption factor - apparently I am not a candidate for living in an extremely hot place when I proceed to the next level:

Your sin has been measured. Happily for you, your sin profile leaves room for forgiveness. Just below, discover your full sinful breakdown and see the areas that you must improve, to save yourself from an eternity in hell.

Greed:	Medium
Gluttony:	Low
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Very Low
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

So there's a look at where my soul is headed. I'm surprised that wrath and pride are so low - I think that my husband might have a bit more to say about that. I tend to keep my wrath under wraps in public, but it generally comes out when I'm at home. I'm not going to tag anyone - it's just for fun.

On another note, last week my husband and I went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival (The Festival has a Facebook page that you can see here). Our trip is an annual summer event and this year we saw 3 plays: Cabaret (the musical), Trojan Women (a Greek play by Euripedes), and Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare). Stratford Shakespeare Festival is tradition for school field trips in Southern Ontario and watching Shakespearean plays being performed is the best way to appreciate his talent. It is well worth a summer trip.

I'm off to the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair today. I love summer!

Playing with Some Neat Sites

2008-07-04T03:33:00.000-07:00

Spell With Flickr

Spell with Flickr can be used with vocabulary and spelling lessons, and used to produce unique graphics for a variety of multimedia applications.

Motivational Poster Generator

This can be used to develop posters for many different content areas (character posters, setting posters, history, science - you name it).

Image Chef

The images generated in this site can be used in blogs and wikis. They can be saved as pictures and then used in powerpoint, on print and other applications.

In my wiki, there is a page called Media Making Tools. I have started creating a pathfinder for different tools for multimedia. I've added these tools to it. I invite you to add to the wiki - it is now unlocked.

AH... Summer Reads

2008-06-21T03:51:00.000-07:00

I am finally beginning to see the end in sight, but still have a number of things to do and loose ends to tie up. Next week is the last week of school before summer vacation and I have 2 more sessions to facilitate as part of my Health and PE duties. I will be meeting with our secondary department heads on Tuesday and assisting in running a Red Cross Swim Instructor re-certification session for the teachers who have the qualifications to teach swimming on Wednesday. I have 2 meetings scheduled for the last day of school and one on the Tuesday morning - both planning sessions for next year.

Just this past week I had the opportunity to run sessions for elementary principals and vice-principals about effective school library programs. I don't think that my predecessor was ever given this opportunity so I feel that this is a good sign - a positive way to end the year I think.

I started writing a response to a post from LC's Chip Van Philosophy about summer reading. As I was posting a comment, I thought that it would make for a nice end of year post. So I am following your lead LC.

I have a stack of books - some professional and most not. There is a series that I tend to re-read and that's the Outlander series by Diana Galbadon. It's romantic historical fiction with a sci-fi time travel element. Jamie, the hero-to-die-for and Claire his witty, talented, resourceful wife are my absolute favourite fictional characters. Galbadon's writing make me laugh, cry, think, get really angry, etc... What is most interesting about this writer is she has had an amazing career background - she has three science degrees, wrote numerous articles for scholarly journals and comic strips for Disney. She is currently working on the seventh installment of her series.

I am anxiously waiting for Stephanie Meyer's last installation of her Twilight series due out in August.

Now, if I just had a backyard pool or a beach house.... Have a great summer!

Image: Frazier, Jim. (2005) Hearst Castle Swimming Pool http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimfrazier/31489256/

PS Ok I just realized something. The photographer who took the above picture is named Jim Frazier. The name of the male protagonist from Outlander is named James Fraser. Interesting co-incidence.

My del.icio.us Tags in Wordle

2008-06-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

I was catching up on some of the blogs I follow and this neat tool called Wordle was linked on Cathy Nelson's TechnoTuesday blog . I inserted my del.icio.us tags into it and this is the image it generated. Neat! This tool would be very engaging for revising for the trait of Word Choice. It's a very visual record of over-used words!

Here's my last blog post using Wordle:

I guess my thoughts are turning to summer. Have fun with this tool!

Summer Professional Learning

2008-06-16T02:11:00.000-07:00

Summer break is less than 2 weeks away and this brings my thoughts to a few things that I want to accomplish this summer that I didn't have time to do during the school year. So here's my list of things to do this summer that hope will extend my professional expertise:

write a pantoum poem (a challenge issued by D.H. one of the editors for a student creative writing anthology, the publishing of which I coordinate);

read a number of professional books ( Critical Thinking by Richard Paul, Adolescent Literacy edited by Kylene Beers, Linda Rief and Robert Probst and The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano);

catch up reading my professional journals (English Journal; Educational Leadership; Teacher Librarian - this is available through our board's online databases);

create a wiki for a research project using Wiki Templates for Super Teaching by David Loertscher et al; and

Go through the K-12 Online Conference 2007 and 'attend' some of the conference presentations.

These will keep me busy over the summer break. I also have the usual list of cleaning my house (I don't spring clean - I summer clean. No time or energy for it earlier), golfing, biking, hiking, swimming, weekend trip to Stratford and a 2 week vacation. Not sure just where my husband and I are going - we'll do a last minute booking. As long as it is really warm and has beach with salty water we're good.

For those of you who are waiting for the summer to start playing with some of the read/write web tools, I direct you again to the California School Library's School Library Learning 2.0. They updated it for this year and you can complete the 23 things over the summer and be ready to use some of these tools with your students next year.

Credentialed vs Educated

2008-06-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

Today I am writing this from a Caribou Coffee in Grosse Pointe, Michigan where I am hanging out with my daughter Dana. She's doing her school assignment and I'm working on this post. There is something inherently cool (at least for me it's cool - it's sort of D. Warlickian) about hanging out in a coffee shop, accessing the wifi and listening to some high school students nearby studying for their exams. I feel more like a native than an immigrant.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what someone needs to be truly qualified to be a school librarian. The reason that I've been thinking about this is because I am really frustrated by the process of getting a secondary TL position in our district. While this process gets a credentialed TL into the position, it doesn't necessarily get a qualified person into the position.

In our province, teachers can become qualified to teach in other areas by taking an Additional Qualification courses offered by Faculty of Educations at various universities. Most AQs are 3 parts (Part 1, Part 2 and Specialist) and can be done on-line, partially online or face to face. The AQ for Librarianship Part 1 has no prerequisites other than a teaching degree. In our district, if you have Part 1, then you are credentialed and you can be placed in a secondary school library. And once you are in the library, you are there for the remainder of your career if you want.

Now the really frustrating thing is that we can have teachers who have never written a formal research paper, who don't know YA lit from adult lit, who don't know what the difference between MLA, APA, Chicago Style, who come from a tech background (and I don't mean computer tech I mean auto, construction, metal tech), an art background, a phys ed background - well any background, being responsible for a secondary school library and a secondary school library program. Now I'm not saying that people with diverse backgrounds can't become good and even exemplary TLs. I actually have a phys ed background - but my undergrad was rigorous - I can't count the number of research papers I had to write. In fact, one of my first year undergrad courses was research methods and I remember spending hours in the university library searching for various types of resources required by the assignment given to us by Dr. Leavitt. It was one of the toughest courses I took. I am also a voracious reader - a really important qualification for a school librarian!

Now one would assume that after taking Part 1, that a teacher placed in the school library would have a basic understanding of the role and scope of the position, a basic knowledge and skill level of the teaching responsibilities required to develop information literate students. One would also assume that these credentialed teachers understand and apply collaborative behaviors necessary to plan, teach and assess with classroom teachers. And finally, one would assume that there would be a minimum application of the technical requirements of the role (now I do mean computer technology). But what is happening is that our secondary school libraries in far too many cases have become an 'early retirement home'. And why? Because the only necessary requirement is that one is credentialed with Librarianship Part 1. Some of these credentialed teachers see the library as a place where they can spend the last few years of their teaching career in relative peace, with no report cards and no marking. Book babysitters.

So if we really want to provide a high-quality school library program for our students in this information age, shouldn't the requirement to become a school librarian be more than Part 1? Shouldn't our districts require more than just a credential? Shouldn't there be professional accountability?

When I started thinking about the emphasis these days on credentials and my frustration with the lack of professional accountability of some school librarians, I thought of the book that I read a couple of years ago written by Jane Jacobs, a self-educated activist, urban planner and visionary. She wrote a book called Dark Age Ahead. In it, she theorizes that North American civilization is headed towards a Dark Age similar to that of the Roman Empire:

Her thesis focused on five pillars of our culture that we depend on to stand firm but are in serious decline: the nuclear family (but also community), education, science, representational government and taxes, and corporate and professional accountability.

Jacobs theorizes that the collapse of these pillars will cause a descent into a Dark Age and she provides evidence that these pillars are already eroding. The demise of the 'education pillar' is caused by universities more interested in credentialing than providing high quality education. I guess I'm feeling that some of our secondary school libraries are descending into the 'Dark Age' as a result of needing only a credential to become a TL and the lack of professional accountability once in the position.

Change

2008-06-01T15:29:00.000-07:00

Over the past year and half that I have been in this position, it seems to me that the overwhelming theme that winds it way through my daily life is change. I have always welcomed change - if it has been on my own initiative. I'm not so good at accepting it if it's been thrust upon me. Saying that, I have to say that most of the changes that I go through are usually of my own initiative. I'm always looking for new and better ways to do things.

Recently, I connected to a blog entry by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach who wrote about educational change and the 9 principles for implementing change. This blog entry is worth a read, especially for those who are responsible for bringing about change in their schools. Her 9 Principles for Implementing Change are listed below in italics:

1. People Before Things

Any significant educational transformation creates “people issues.” Teachers will be asked to challenge the status quo, engage in mutual accountability, changed job descriptions, development of new skills and capabilities, and in general school staff will be unsettled and resistant to these changes. A shared approach for managing the change through learning communities — beginning with the leadership team and then engaging key stakeholders and teacher leaders — should be developed early, and utilized often as the change moves through the school or district.

2. Start at the Top

Because change is inherently unsettling for people at all levels of any organization and especially schools, when rumors of change begin to surface, all eyes will turn to the principal and other members of the school's leadership team for strength, support, and direction. Which means- the leaders must do more than talk a good game.

3. Everyone is a Player in the Change Game

Transformational change in a school needs to include everyone. That means all staff, from the custodian to the secretary and even the lunch room staff.

4. Garner Buy-in
Teachers are inherently rational and reasonable folk and will question to what extent the change is needed, whether the principal is headed in the right direction, and whether they want to commit personally to making change happen. The articulation of a formal case for change and the creation of a modified, shared vision statement are invaluable opportunities to create or compel buy-in.

5. Can't Give Away What You Do Not Own
To truly be successful at implementat[ing]... change there must be ownership by those willing to accept responsibility for making change happen in all their areas of influence. Ownership is often best created by involving people in identifying potential problems and crafting solutions- which happens naturally in a community of practice.

6. Communicate and Often
Too often, those involved in the change make the mistake of believing that others understand the issues, feel the need to change, and see the new direction as clearly as they do. The best change programs reinforce core messages through regular, timely advice that is both inspirational and practical.

7. Know Your Culture and Predict Possible Impact

Educational leaders often make the mistake of assessing culture either too late or not at all. Ask yourself, do you know your school's readiness factor in terms of accepting change? Does your school already have strategies in place for how to bring major problems to the surface, identify conflicts, and negotiate outcomes? Do learning teams, and ultimately your learning community know how to identify the core values, beliefs, behaviors, and perceptions that must be taken into account for successful change to occur?

8. Expect the Unexpected
21st Century change is by design emergent and organic in nature. Implementation [...] never goes completely according to plan. People react in unexpected ways; areas of anticipated resistance fall away; and the external environment shifts etc. To manage the needed shifts in your school, the community will need to continually reassess. This is why ownership is so important.

9. As the Individual Grows so Will the Collective Wisdom of the Community

Change is both an institutional journey and a very personal one. Educators spend many hours each week at school; many think of their colleagues as a second family- and as their community away from home. Individuals (or teams of individuals) yearn to know how their work will change, what is expected of them during and after the change, how they will be measured, and what success or failure will mean for them and those around them.

Currently, professional learning communities are becoming more widespread in my district and introducing PLCs into secondary schools is one of the responsibilities of the implementation team of which I am a part. Some of our elementary schools are in their 3rd year of learning communities and as other schools see these schools using a collaborative approach to manage change they are asking for resources to establish PLCs in their schools. So we are setting the stage for supporting change by introducing teachers in secondary to collaborative professional learning teams. We are asking schools to change the way they operate so that all students can achieve.

Shared leadership is an essential component - why? Because one person can't possibly do everything. However, as Doug Johnson says in a recent post about educational change:

"Major cultural shifts are about transfers in power, and nobody gives up power without a fight." In addition, Johnson says that the only way that cultural change will happen is if it is mandated through government policy.

These 2 blog entries got me thinking about the shifts that are needed in education - shifts from isolation to collaboration, from content-focused to process-focused, from regurgitation to creation. I think about how some secondary classrooms operate, and think about the shifts that need to take place to meet the needs of all students. And I think of how we need to prepare students to be part of an unknown future and I know that the way we have been doing it will no longer work.

I think of how our secondary PLCs can be supported and look to Nussbaum-Beach's principles of supporting change. But I also remember what what Doug Johnson says about cultural shifts - that "... schools will not change through internal motivation".

It is an exciting time in education when one can see the potential of and the need for cultural shift and when one is involved in supporting that shift. And after reading about the 9 principals for implementing change, I recognize there are reasons for some of the reactions that we get from teachers as we support this shift. However, it does seem a daunting task when one reads what Johnson has to say about change.

Image: "Change, we fear it...", apesara's photostream. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/apesara/2146031745/>

The Host: a Stephenie Meyer Adult Book

2008-05-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

I usually write this blog on Saturday mornings but I was away at a choir festival this weekend and left my computer home as I knew that I would have no time to even boot it up. One of the things I did have some time for was reading on the long bus trip.

As a result, I just finished reading Stephenie Meyer's most recent book The Host. It is promoted as a book for adult audiences so I was really quite excited to read it. I've read all of her YA books beginning with Twilight and I was hoping that her writing would get a little more explicit for an adult audience ( I am a fan of writers like Diana Galbadon - great storytellers with a flare for ... um ... romantic scenes!).

The book is science fiction, which is a departure from the romantic horror (a combination you think wouldn't work but does) of Twilight, New Moon and Eclipse. The story is about an Earth where alien parasites are inserted into humans to take over the body and brains of their hosts. Here's the teaser from the publisher:

The author of the Twilight series of # 1 bestsellers delivers her brilliant first novel for adults: a gripping story of love and betrayal in a future with the fate of humanity at stake. Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed.Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie''s body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.Melanie fills Wanderer''s thoughts with visions of the man Melanie loves-Jared, a human who still lives in hiding. Unable to separate herself from her body''s desires, Wanderer yearns for a man she''s never met. As outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off to search for the man they both love.Featuring what may be the first love triangle involving only two bodies, THE HOST is a riveting and unforgettable novel that will bring a vast new readership to one of the most compelling writers of our time.

So think of the writer's craft here - Meyer wrote dialogue that had to show internal conversations between Wanderer and Melanie, she had to write external dialogue between Wanderer and the other characters and had to write reactions to the conversations by 'both' main characters without losing the reader! Meyers does an excellent job of this. Amazon has a video of Stephenie Meyer talking about The Host and you can access it here.

This is the reason I think why this book is classified as adult - it will take a fairly fluent reader to keep track of the dialogue. The content of this book is very tame - the romantic scenes are less than one would see on television and no more than what one would read in a YA book. But it's the sophistication of the writing that makes it a book for adult readers, not the content.

I definitely recommend the book for secondary school students. It certainly would be a way of introducing science fiction to students who would probably not read it. Science fiction doesn't appeal to many but here in this book Meyer has taken the genre and softened it to appeal to a wider audience. I really enjoyed the book and recommend it.

P.S. Meyer's fourth book in her Twilight series will be released on August 2nd and is called Breaking Dawn. Chapters is taking orders now.

Image from: www.amazon.com

The Importance of Linking Writing with Science and Social Studies

2008-05-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

I came across an excellent podcast from Tony Stead on Miguel Guhlin's wiki. Tony Stead is an Australian educator who has written books about the importance of reading and writing non-fiction with primary/junior students.

I have always thought that we teach far too much fiction and not enough non-fiction in school and that is why we have comprehension difficulties with textbooks in the higher grades. Our schools have leveled books in classrooms and book rooms - how many of those texts are non-fiction?

Stead has found that:

In K-2 classrooms, 95% of writing experiences were with personal narrative and story.
By 6th grade, children will have spent 84% of writer’s workshop composing personal narratives, stories, and writing from prompts

73% of students read nonfiction at least 3 Reading Recovery levels below that of their fiction.
15% of students read nonfiction 3 grade levels below their fiction.
By third grade, only 7% of students struggled with decoding nonfiction at their grade level.

We teach decoding, how to get through text, but we spend little time helping them understand what the text is actually saying. ESL children can easily learn to decode but because it’s a 2nd language, they don’t have understanding of which words to use for concept. They can read at 28 level of Reading Recovery, but comprehension level of 4.
You know which kids who are going to be your strongest readers and writers—it’s about oral comprehension.
Students who were competent readers of nonfiction were also competent in reading fiction, but not vice versa (my emphasis).
Boys were more competent than girls in comprehending nonfiction but girls read with better phrasing and pace.
Boys slow their reading down because they want to make meaning of non-fiction. They do what every child should do—they fight to read.
Children can read 3–4 levels above what they’re benchmarked on topics they’re interested in.

You can read through the notes to get the flavour of the presentation. The podcast is quite long (it's the whole presentation he gave at the conference) but I listened to it while I was working on other things.

But the gist is integration of curriculum - combining social studies/science, inquiry-based learning and non-fiction writing.

He also talks about shifting the use of the KWL strategy to the RAN strategy. KWL is only useful if the student has sound background knowledge. If a student has weak or incorrect background knowledge, then the second category of KWL (what I need to know) will also be weak because really the student doesn't know the right questions to ask - his research questions will not be set up correctly.

RAN - Reading and Analyzing Non Fiction Strategy

What We Think We Know Yes we were right New facts Wonderings Misconceptions

Whatever the content area is—such as sharks—I am not going to start off with what do we know. As a class, I ask them, what do you THINK you know? Why is this better terminology than what we think we know?

This techniques allows for diagnostic assessment of background knowledge. This gives the teacher a way into kids' heads and allows the teacher to differentiate for the class. He says that kids will read books to confirm what they think they know - they are more engaged. This strategy changes the way kids read and is the basis of thinking and inquiry-based learning. When you use the RAN with social studies, this strategy will bring up bias and prejudices that the students have - a good thing to know so that this can be addressed in the unit.

Lots of really good information on this podcast - perhaps a personal summer professional learning opportunity as you'll need some time to listen to the podcast. Is That a Fact is available through our board's Professional Bookstore (only available to board staff).

Betty on Blades

2008-05-10T05:50:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about spring is I can finally get back on my rollerblades. There is nothing like the feel of moving through space faster than a walk or a run. There is nothing like the exhilaration of flying down the path and passing people on bikes when you are on blades. You really get the feel of speed when you're on 'blades.

One of the benefits of living where I live is it is flat - and I mean flat. The only hill around here is the man-made hill that I can see from my bedroom window. It's a great little hill that is lined with walking/biking paths. At its foot is a large man-made pond that has Canada Geese, various species of ducks and the odd heron that drops by. Trees and naturalized vegetation abound as you walk you way up to the summit of the hill. From the top of the hill there is a panoramic view of Lake St. Clair where you can see sailboats and lake freighters. It's an excellent viewing spot for our area's annual fireworks display that celebrates both Canada's Birthday and the Fourth of July for the U.S.

It's really quite lovely until you realize this hill was born from a garbage dump. Before it was decided to build and develop the surrounding fields into a major sub-division, the 'hill' was a major source of summer fires from the spontaneous combustion of methane gas. It doesn't sound very appealing but the planners in their wisdom developed an extensive network of pathways for walkers/runners/bikers/bladers that stretches for kilometres. These paths take you around the hill, through naturalized areas, and along the main riverfront road. And the pathway is flat and free of cars (you just have to worry about the odd bits a debris and stone - a real threat to 'bladers).

Anyway, a flat topography is a boon to rollerbladers. A visitor from British Columbia once remarked that he was envious of our flat pathways for rollerblading. Quite ironic really because usually no one from B.C. is envious about Ontario.

So what's this got to do with the usual subject matter of this blog? Well, as I mentioned in the previous post, another one of my hats is that of teacher consultant for Health and Physical Education. I came across this neat site that allows you to map your run (or 'blade or bike ride) called Map My Run. It works in conjunction with Google Maps.

You can plot your route and it will calculate distance in kms or mi. You can use this when planning events such as fun runs and walkathons, etc and it allows you to mark out water stops and other areas. You can create an account and save various runs. You can find routes in various cities and keep track of your training. It's really a neat tool.

So where ever you are enjoy the spring weather, turn off the computer, map a route and get out and take a walk, run, bike or 'blade.

Image: Devil's Mountain (aka former garbage dump now East Riverside Hill). S. Seslija, 2008.

A Short Post

2008-05-03T04:59:00.000-07:00

I'm in St. Catharines, Ontario right now and I will be attending a meeting for the health and physical education part of my responsibilities. The Internet connection here is iffy tonight so I'll just post a few new items that I've harvested through the various blogs that I follow.

For those of you who use Animoto, there is a new educator account that will allow you and your students to make videos longer than 30 seconds. Check it out here.

There is a new wiki made by librarians in Florida that has links to various 2.0 tools called
Web Tools 4u 2Use. It puts a number of Read Write web tools in one convenient space and since it's a wiki anyone can add to it as new tools become available.

Here's a link to a wiki called 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Digital Story. It shows how to combine traditional writing with other media. The list of 2.0 tools is extensive. I like it because it emphasizes the planning and preparation that must go into the work before the publishing (something that students have a hard time understanding sometimes).

Wes Fryer has a post on his Moving at the Speed of Creativity blog. It has ideas for summer professional learning. You can view his suggestions here. Most of this can be done from the comfort of your own home if you have a decent Internet connection (I don't have that great of an Internet plan but can still do most of the stuff I want except view video - takes forever to buffer).

I'm still having problems with the connection so that's all I'll post.

Critical Thinking

2008-04-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

I got linked (I think it was through David Warlick, but it might have been through Doug Johnson) to a blog called Artichoke and her post about the value of technology (and you thought Betty Bunhead was a bizarre title for a blog. Although when you think critically about the artichoke, you'll find that it represents a multi-layered concept so it's probably not as bizarre as you think. If you think critically about Betty Bunhead, you'll see my reasoning behind the title. I invite you to post comments about the origin of B.B.)

Anyway, one of her replies to the extensive comments, was about the key questions in critical thinking by Richard Paul. Here is a summary of them:

Paul's Key Questions for assessing claims (Critical Thinking: How To Prepare Students For a Rapidly Changing World, p84)

1. To what extent could I test the truth of this claim by direct experience?

2. To what extent is believing this consistent with what I know to be true or have justified confidence in?

3. How does the person who advances this claim support it?

4. Is there a definite system or procedure for assessing claims of this sort?

5. Does the acceptance of this information advance the vested interest of the person or the group asserting it?

6. Is the person asserting this information made uncomfortable by having it challenged?

There was a link to an article written by Paul about critical thinking in schools entitled Why Students and Teachers Don't Reason Well

The article is well worth the time to read it. He argues that:

"... most students are not good at it. What is more, he presents evidence to suggest that most teachers are not good at it either — at least not at assessing it when students are called upon to use it in their work. One of the major reasons, combining with ignorance of what reasoning requires, is a systematic confusion between intelligent subjectivity (wit, articulateness, cleverness without substance), and reasoned objectivity (careful, disciplined, reasoning about an issue), between subjective opinion (however “bright”), and reasoned judgment (however mundane)."

In a companion article, Critical Thinking: Basic Questions and Answers, Paul lists examples of critical thinking questions about books:

"Take the apparently simple matter of reading a book worth reading. The author has developed her thinking in the book, has taken some ideas and in some way represented those ideas in extended form. Our job as a reader is to translate the meaning of the author into meanings that we can understand.
This is a complicated process requiring critical thinking every step along the way.

What is the purpose for the book?
What is the author trying to accomplish?
What issues or problems are raised?
What data, what experiences, what evidence are given?
What concepts are used to organize this data, these experiences?
How is the author thinking about the world?
Is her thinking justified as far as we can see from our perspective?
And how does she justify it from her perspective?
How can we enter her perspective to appreciate what she has to say?

All of these are the kinds of questions that a critical reader raises. And a critical reader in this sense is simply someone trying to come to terms with the text.
So if one is an uncritical reader, writer, speaker, or listener, one is not a good reader, writer, speaker, or listener at all. To do any of these well is to think critically while doing so and, at one and the same time, to solve specific problems of communication, hence to effectively communicate."

Our goals and expectations for education are to produce citizens who can participate fully in our democratic society. To participate fully in a democratic society, one must be able to think critically. This one of the essential literacy skills for the 21st century.

In a previous post, I commented that thinking was the skill that I was most passionate about for students to learn. But it certainly is not an easy skill to teach and to learn as Paul's two articles suggest. However, these two articles can certainly can be a starting point to helping develop critical thinking skills in both teachers and students.

What about incorporating some of the reader critical thinking questions into our lit/reading circle with the texts that we are using? What about using the other critical thinking questions listed above in media literacy and evaluation of websites? What about providing models of good critical thinking and models that are poor examples and having students analyse them (just like we do with the 6 traits of writing)? What if we slow down and give students longer response times and push them to think more deeply, instead of superficially? What if we backed off teaching as much content and put more of our efforts into process?

Questioning is the key - the right questioning is the key if we are to develop thinking students.

Image: Sculpture of a Thinking Woman, http://www.flickr.com/photos/monceau/853972806/

Digital Nomads - Knowledge Workers of the Future

2008-04-19T04:46:00.000-07:00

I have been up since 5:00 am reading blogs, Twittering and changing the appearance of my blog and avatar. I really don't have time to all of this but it's becoming a compulsion. However, I have been limiting it to the weekends. Sometimes I wish I were more of a Ludite :-)

The Economist magazine ( April 12 -18) had a 14 page special report section on Mobile Telecoms (this is the print version - we get it at home). You can access the opening article online and the other articles are posted to the right of the page on a side bar.

We now have a third term to add to our 2.0 vocabulary: digital nomads (the other two are digital natives [kids who have grown up with technology] and digital immigrants [us]). When we think about how our students' future will look, the era of office cubicle may be coming to an end. Basically the report outlines how more and more business is being transacted through Blackberries and mobile phones, how paper documents are no longer needed because they can be stored online and accessed from anywhere. In Working from Anywhere (one of the side bar articles), the author states:

"James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks. And it is not only the young and digitally savvy. At 64, Mr Ware considers himself a nomad, and accesses the files on his home computer from wherever he happens to be. "

So what does this mean as educators? We need to re-think how we ask students to do things and incorporate 'digital workplaces' if we want to prepare students for the future. How can we use our libraries as meeting places and collaborative spaces (libraries as corporate offices - interesting thought)? Again, I see the tools of blogs, wikis, google docs, RSS, etc. as being ways to support students for this new information landscape (David Warlick's term).

Lastly, I just have to share this link to an article in the Journal of the Research Centre for Educational Technology out of Kent University. It's a small study that outlines how they used technology in a primary research project - very short article but clearly outlines the project and provides links to pdf files that can be used in the classroom. It's called Using Digital Tools to Support Children's Inquiry. This was posted by M. Guhlin on Twitter.

Can Someone Please Explain?

2008-04-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things I find myself doing lately is thinking about my weekly post - what will I write? Well this week I found myself composing my blog post in my head on a drive into work after I heard the news regarding the proposed closing of one of the branches of our local public library. To give a little background, the city council in their budget deliberations asked the library board to cut $800 000 from their budget without closing branches or cutting services. $800 000! Seriously! In conversations with some of the public librarians, to meet this target they were even talking about not buying books! I am the only one who finds this ludicrous?

So this brings to mind a couple of questions:

1. Why are libraries (and school libraries are included in here) always a target of cost-cutting?

2. How, in this age of information, can people even think of cutting library programs and services?

I've ranted about this before in a previous post. The powers that be in this particular city have a propensity to cut and slash the very programs that make cities attractive to people - and then they wonder they nobody wants to come and live here! Libraries are a reflection of the values of a city. A city that has vibrant libraries and library programs shows that it values learning and literacy and equity. I just don't get how some people think. One of the city politicians thinks that just because his family has the Internet, public libraries are not needed. Obviously his family is well off. Obviously his family can afford computers, Internet access, a trip to the the local bookstores to buy books (or maybe they don't - perhaps they don't see the value in books?).

Ok, I'm not going to rant about this anymore because there is another piece to this post. The same week that they announced the proposed closing of a library branch, I received my Educational Leadership journal in the mail (yes even though I can get this stuff through the Educators Collection on the Knowledge Ontario Professional databases, I still love the paper copies). The theme of this issue was Poverty and Learning. On the cover sits a young (about 9 or 10) girl with a book. In the journal, there is an article called "Got Books?" written by Richard Allington and Anne McGill-Franzen, two professors from the University of Tennessee. Basically, their study concluded that increasing summer reading can prevent low-income children from losing ground during summer vacation. How did they find this out? Well, what they did was provide books to students over the summer - they mailed a new book a week to the child (and asked that they return it when they got back to school in the fall). Neat idea.

What was key to a significant increase in reading achievement? ACCESS TO BOOKS!!! No kidding! Did we need another study for this? Haven't teacher librarians and library researchers like Haycock and Todd been saying this for years. Don't we have numerous studies that connect access to superior book collections in libraries with increased reading scores?
And yet, libraries both in the community and in schools continue to be first on the chopping block. If school system and communities and governments say we value literacy and a literate citizen then why do we keep cutting libraries????

We need to practice what we preach as educators and as citizens. As one California parent put it after they had to fund raise to actually pay the teachers in their school: "Our nation chooses to bail out investment houses rather than insuring our children." Are we headed down the same slope?

Can someone please explain this to me - 'cause I don't get it!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shapeshift/1248535405/

Meme: High School Daze to Praise

2008-04-05T04:25:00.000-07:00

My colleague and fellow blogger Paul C. who writes so eloquently on his blog quoteflections has started a meme. A meme is sort of like a blog chain letter but without the warnings of gloom and doom attached if you don't pass it on. This is the second meme in which I have participated (the first was a meme that asked bloggers to write about the most important learning that our students need).

Paul has asked us to recommend a book for use in English classes that will knock the socks off disengaged young adult readers. Since I've been working on some pd for teachers about the use of graphic novels in the classroom, I decided to chose a graphic novel for this meme. However, I have about 6 more books I'd like to add: there are so many great books that will engage students. However, when it comes right down to it, matching the book to the reader is the key to hook students into reading. One book will never do it for all students.

So here are the instructions:
1. Select and briefly review one teen novel, classic or modern, which is a sure antidote to the daze of high school.
2. Title your post Meme: High School Daze to Praise
3. Include an image with your post.
4. Tag four blog colleagues.

The book I've chosen is Maus: A Survivor's Tale, Volume 1 by Art Spiegelman. "A survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist, tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and history itself." (descriptor from Webcat, our online library catolog). The main characters in this graphic novel are humanoid, with different groups depicted as mice (Jews), cats (Germans), dogs (Americans), etc. The graphic novel format appeals to many readers and, unlike film, allows students to linger over images, move forward and back between panels and interact with the text at their own speed to understand the message. This book's subject is not easy - it is very 'graphic'. Among other themes, Maus illustrates how the effects of significant family tragedies can be passed on to subsequent generations. This book won:

1988 Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards - Religious Award: Christian Testimony & Prize for Best Comic Book: Foreign Comic Award (Maus: un survivant raconte).
1988 Urhunden Prize - Foreign Album (Maus).
1990 Max & Moritz Prizes - Special Prize (Maus).
1992 Pulitzer Prize - Special Awards and Citations - Letters (Maus). [1]
1992 Eisner Award - Best Graphic Album: Reprint (Maus II).
1992 Harvey Award - Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work (Maus II). [2]
1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (Maus II, A Survivor's Tale). [3]
1993 Angoulême International Comics Festival Awards - Prize for Best Comic Book: Foreign comic (Maus: un survivant raconte, part II).
1993 Urhunden Prize - Foreign Album (Maus II).

I'm tagging the following bloggers: Joyce Valenza (SLJ Neverending Search), Angela A Thomas, Judy O'Connell (Hey Jude), Doug Peterson (Doug - Off the Record) and Esther (Connect the Plots)

Teleconferencing: Social Networking/Social Tools

2008-03-29T05:33:00.000-07:00

This week I forayed into the teleconferencing world for the first time. Well, not really for the first time - I've participated in them through the Education Institute - but this was my first experience in being the presenter. That I was considered a resource person for social networking is a little surprising since I don't social network all that much - I have a space on TeacherLibraian Ning , and I'm still trying to figure out Twitter for goodness sake - that's the extent of it.
I presented two teleconferences to Junior Achievement Canada - one to their regional presidents across Canada and one to their business advisory board members. They wanted to know how education is using social networking. The point I made was that we're really not using social networking in education, we're using social tools. Got you confused? Well you're not the only one. There is a debate going on about terminology and how we need to differentiate between social networking (My Space, Facebook) and social tools that are used for educational purposes(blogs, wikis, RSS and aggegators, podcasts, webcasts...). You can get more information from my wiki.
I created a resource wikipage for them to access with a variety of the resources that I used to help create the presentation. You can find it by clicking My Wikispaces on the left side of this blog and then going into the Teacher Librarian section (or looking to the contents section on the left of the wiki). I am going to create a podcast of the presentation and add that as well. That I'll do sometime next week - I forgot to bring my microphone home with me this weekend. When it's ready it'll be on the wiki.
My purpose in writing about this is not only to share that there are some more pages on the wiki, but to also reflect on the process that I went through to develop the presentation. The point of all this is how I see my process of researching evolving. I turned to 3 main sources: the online databases on our Student Reference Portal, my del.icio.us account and to my blog feeds. I don't believe I googled even once or even Wikipedia-ed (is that a verb?). I am finding that my del.icio.us account is becoming a very important personal resource - my personal digital library. As I read through my blogs and the other sites to which they connect, I collect information on a variety of topics. When I had to prepare for this presentation, low and behold, I already had lots of resources waiting for me. For more information on how others are seeing the use of RSS with library and research you can check out Hey Jude (a blog from a TL in Australia) here and here.

One last thing which is a geeky, techy thing that I have noticed in other blogs. I'll see how it works on this blog:

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I just installed a nice little tool on this site called Snap Shots that enhances links with visual previews of the destination site, interactive excerpts of Wikipedia articles, MySpace profiles, IMDb profiles and Amazon products, display online videos, RSS, MP3s, photos, stock charts and more.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

Catching Up

2008-03-24T06:01:00.000-07:00

I have just spent the last 2 hours catching up reading my feeds - something that I haven't done since before March Break. My head is spinning with information right now - I finally just had to stop reading. I'm following about 30 blogs and feeds right now and that is probably my limit. David Warlick had a great post about keeping your PLN (Personal Learning Network) managable. You can check it out here - it has lots of tips to keep you going insane from info over-load.

Another interesting and disturbing post that I missed is: Cell phone cameras in the K-12 classroom: Punishable offenses or student-citizen journalism? The gist is students with cell phones videotaped their teachers with cell phones and then posted the videos on You Tube. The videos are not pretty. And it is apparent that the viewer will certainly not know what came before the videos were filmed or under what context. The comments regarding the videos (these videos have been embedded in the post) are worth reading and really look at a variety of issues in education: student engagement, character education, use of technology in the classroom, class management, parental support, administrator support - I could go on. Cathy Nelson blogged about this as did Doug Johnson and you can read their comments here and here. What was amazing to me were the amount of comments regarding the use of corporal punishment against the students.

Image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/856917269/

Poetry For the Networked Generation

2008-03-19T03:18:00.000-07:00

Here's a bit from School library Journal about a new poetry resource:

"This week, the Academy of American Poets announced the launch of Poets.org a mobile poetry archive providing free access to a collection of more than 2,500 poems. For students in English courses, the site also provides such handy tools as biographies of poets and essays about their work. For secondary school educators, there's a curriculum section. Soon, poems posted on the site that are in the public domain will be available for downloading and printing."

So students can download poetry to their ipods or their cell phones and have poems avavilable on demand. The article further states:

"I have always believed that poetry has a necessary place in daily life," says Tree Swenson, the academy's executive director. "Now you can find poems while on the go, as easily as you can read the news, find a map, or check the weather report." Poems can be browsed on the site by author name, title, the "occasion" that the poem describes, the poetry form, or by keywords.

Ok so how do we tap into this with kids? An idea that come to mind is to have them create personal poetry play lists, share these lists on a blog or wiki and then reflect about why these poems were chosen for their personal list. This can be a lead-in to writing lessons on poetry for English classes that culminate in a 'poetry reading' event in the school library.

For more information, check out the Poem in Your Pocket section of Poets.org.

Image:http://www.freefoto.com/browse/?query=cell+phone

Does a Study Group on Facebook Mean Cheating?

2008-03-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

This is just a short post because I have to finish packing for my annual visit to my parents (who happen to be down in Florida right now so it's no great hardship!). One the feeds on my iGoogle page was the following article:

Ryerson Student Fighting Cheating Charges for Facebook Study Group

Here's the lead paragraph:
A first-year student at Ryerson University in Toronto who has been accused of cheating after helping run a Facebook study group could get expelled from school pending a hearing by a special committee.

Apparently, there were 146 members of the study group for a first year engineering course on chemistry - they were all helping each other with homework.

Here's my thoughts on this. There has been an increased amount of 'sharing' of assignments - that was one of the first things I noticed when my own children attended university. Everyone tried to get notes and assignments from people who took the course the previous year/semester. I really didn't quite understand this behavior. I always just did the work on my own and if I got stuck asked the TA or the prof. Sometimes, if the subject matter was difficult, we'd get together with a small group and work together. But it seems the reverse now. Nobody does work on their own, everything is done via group.
Now this is great for collaboration skills and discussions, etc BUT I am hearing far too many stories of students piggybacking their way to a degree with a minimal amount of individual effort.
But maybe it's the nature of the assignments. If homework can be shared and same assignments submitted, maybe, just maybe university professors need to redefine their assignments so that students can't copy and piggyback. Maybe it's time for universities to stop being money machines and to start educating again. Maybe it's time for universities to re-think how they assess and evaluate.

Image:http://www.flickr.com/photos/blackbodypie/2112571322/

Del.icio.us Tags

2008-03-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

I thought today that I would go through some of the stuff I've bookmarked on del.icio.us and share them. It's an eclectic bunch of sites, so here they are:

Arcademic Skill Builders - there's been a lot written lately about using video games for academic purposes. This site had a number of free games that develop a variety of skills in students and it allows the player to print off results. Fun homework assignment!

School Library Media - this is the website for a print magazine that is available through subscription. However, there is free stuff including some lesson ideas and a blog. It is written by TLs for TLs.

INTERNET PREDATOR' STEREOTYPES DEBUNKED IN NEW STUDY - This news article starts out with this lead: "Contrary to stereotype, most Internet sex offenders are not adults who target young children by posing as another youth, luring children to meetings, and then abducting or forcibly raping them, according to researchers who have studied the nature of Internet-initiated sex crimes." With all the media hype and horror, it's refreshing to have an actual study that gets out what is really happening. I think that the biggest issue is cyberbullying, not Internet predators.

Visible Thinking - Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. This comes out of Harvard. This resource could be used as a self-initiated PD module, or as part of a study module for a PLC interested in developing students thinking skills.

Here's a video brought to my attention from an elementary TL in my district. It's from Teacher Tube and it's called Pay Attention (about teachers needing to shift to 21st Century Literacies):

Teacher Pageflakes - You can create your own personal web page. Customize your page to have your teaching schedule, pictures, etc. Or you can create a library web page that's customized to your own school. It's easy to use and set up. There are lots of examples that you can check out to help you set things up.

21st Century Literacy Skills - This is a page from Noodletools that is full of resources for TLs to help teacher essential 21st century literacy skills. Great resource.

Meme: Passion Quilt

2008-02-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

Got this from my fellow blogger who writes quoteflections. It's like a blogger chain letter. I got wind of this thing from Cathy Nelson's Techno Tuesday blog last week- it's kind of neat how this thing spreads. PC picked it up from Blue Skunk and passed it on to me. The challenge is:

"Post a picture that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about, reflect upon it a little, and include links to 5 folks in your professional network."

Here's my picture (ever try to find a picture about critical thinking?). I believe that kids need to learn how to think critically - this is essential in our times. I think that the process of learning is so much more important than content - especially with our older students. I wish that the curriculum revisions our Ministry of Education is focusing on weren't still so infused with content. We need to teach kids how to learn and how to embrace a 'learning lifestyle' as David Warlick so eloquently puts it. So emphasis needs to be on the higher order thinking skills such as evaluation and synthesis. And these skills are so much a part of a research process and inquiry-based learning curriculum.

I follow a blog called Students 2.0 and the post that is linked here is written by a student from Vermont. He blogs about study hall and the idea that schools have the attitude that students must be forced to learn. This particular blogpost ties into the idea of the thinking curriculum and the development of a learning lifestyle. It's worth a look - the comments attached the post have stimulated some thinking from educators about the future of education.

So here are the links to 5 people in my professional networks:

Bud the Teacher

Cathy Nelson's Professional Thoughts

David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth

Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

Joyce Valenza's Neverending Search

Photo from http://flickr.com/photos/fernando_graphicos/280358189/

Teacher Librarian Ning

2008-02-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a new widget on the left side of this blog: it's the Teacher Librarian Ning which is a social network for teacher librarians. I've just recently joined. I've known about it for awhile but didn't join until now.

I'm kind of an introvert and really don't feel the the need to be socially networked but I figured that this would be a great place for professional development and professional networking. I'll let you know more about it as I participate.

Too Little Too Late or Saved in the Nick of Time?

2008-02-18T06:53:00.000-08:00

Scholastic Administrator posted an article on its site called Meet Your School Library Media Specialist. That's where the graphic included with this post came from. A quote from the article really sums up our role as teacher librarians:

“The library media specialist is at once a teacher, an instructional partner, an information specialist, and a program administrator, [...]. They collaborate with teachers, administrators, and others to prepare students for future success.”

The article says that South Carolina's Department of Education has released a set of standards for administrators to help them hire and evaluate library media specialists (teacher librarians). They are worth a look and can be found in part in the article. Obviously this state has recognized the value of strong library programs and effective teacher librarians.

After a long drought, our provincial government, backed by the support of the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat is beginning to recognize (again) the essential value of a strong school library program and the contributions of excellent teacher librarians to student achievement. A recent funding announcement by the premier coupled with the submission to the government of a draft document outlining the vision for school libraries of the 21st century gives cause for hope for those of us who have tried for years to deliver exemplary programs with little support and funding.

Doug Johnson's posts We have Met the Enemy and Not Your Grandma's Librarian and Joyce Valenza's post The Impact of Ubiquity, the Importance of Brand and Doug's Warning though, makes me wonder if all of this is too late? Are we becoming displaced by computer contacts and literacy coaches? As Doug Johnson states:

Why have school librarians not had a bigger impact on information and tech literacy integration?

I had to respond, and did to the post Not Your Grandma's Librarian. Here's part of what I wrote:

[...] in many places, funding for school libraries and teacher librarians are and have been the first to be affected by funding cuts. Many boards of education haven't had excellent library programs for years so no one knows what they look like. [...]. If a school has a teacher librarian, they are too busy providing prep coverage to classroom teachers to even do the job they are trained to do. That's even if the teacher put into the position even knows what to do because, more likely than not, they have absolutely no qualifications. Or you have a culture of unaccountability for library programs so there is no incentive/pressure for individual teacher librarians to do anything.

I think that our govenment's support is not too late. We need to see this as being saved in the nick of time. This new support is a chance to see this as a personal challenge to hone our technology skills, integrate more information literacy skills, and prove our worth through data collection that demonstrates our effectiveness and help us advocate for our role in promoting student acheivement and helping teachers.

Carol Koechlin (one of the authors of Ban the Bird Units) comments on Joyce Valenza's post:

Why have school librarians not had a bigger impact on information and tech literacy integration? I actually think we have made remarkable contributions to these areas, that is not the problem. The problem is that many teacher-librarians do not gather evidence of their successes and take their stories to where the 'power' and 'money' is.

The OSLA Toolkit has many forms that can help document your practice. We need to get into the habit of doing this and sharing the information with our administrators.

School Library Learning 2.0 has started a new session that is running from December to April. It is not too late to sign up and start working on the 23 things to increase your technology skills. Let's be ready as professionals to step up to the plate when we are given the opportunity to use our skills. Some TLs are doing this already and our students are reaping the benefits.

Federation Support for School Libraries and Teacher Librarians

2008-02-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

I just received my copy of Teaching Librarian which is part of my membership to the Ontario School Library Association. While the publication always has lots of informative articles (this volume had 2 articles by our own M.M. and her son M.M. - no M&M comments please:-)), the topic of my post is in regards to two inserts that were included in the mailing.

The Elementary Teacher's Federation of Ontario has produced a pamphlet in suppport of teacher-librarians. The pamphlet is available through the ETFO website and is intended as a tool to describe the role of teacher librarians and to help parents evaluate their child's school library. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation developed their own monograph about the state of secondary school libraries in Ontario. It is called Education Watch: School Libraries and was published in January of last year.

Why were they included? I think that they are a reminder to all of us that our provincial federations are starting to hear our pleas for support. That our federations are realizing that it doesn't make sense to cut school library funding at a time when all students must be literate to survive in today's society. At a local level, with contract talks approaching quickly, it doesn't hurt to remind our local representatives that school libraries cannot be forgotten during these talks. Download these support documents and make copies or call the federation for copies. Distribute them to your local federation reps and ask that they include libraries in contract talks. Put them into your parent council mailbox. Share them with your administration.

Be active and advocate.

Quoteflections Hits the Big Time!

2008-02-07T15:38:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Paul Cornies! He has entered the inner world of bloggers. I was reading Blue Skunk Blog by Doug Johnson who has a major following in the blog word. Imagine my surprise when I found this in his entry:

I've also been enjoying Canadian Paul Cornies's quoteflections blog. He opens each of his posts with a quote or two on a wide variety of topics - and then personally reflects for a few paragraphs. Always worth reading!

With the number of readers that Blue Skunk gets, quoteflections will receive considerably more attention as the link is spread exponentially across the Internet. Quite an accomplishment for someone who just started blogging in January. According to his Clustermap, he is getting readers from all over the globe. I can't wait to see what happens now!

Check out his blog - it is always thought provoking.

Superconference 2008

2008-02-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

I'll make a short post about the Superconference, which was, as usual, inspiring, motivating and thought-inspiring. Even though I could only attend Friday and Saturday, what I experienced still compells me to believe that this is one of the best conferences for ANY teacher!

I volunteered to blog about some of the sessions that I attended. You can find those on the Superconference blog. To whet your curiosity, I had the priviledge to hear Vincent Lam (author: Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures), David Warlick (whose blog I follow faithfully), Carol Koechlin [Session 1802](who wrote Ban the Bird Unit and Beyond the Bird Unit and who I really want to come down and work with our GECDSB TLs), Irshad Manji (author: The Trouble With Islam Today. An amazing storyteller who demonstrates her couarge daily as a Muslim Refusenick), a session on videoconferencing with White Pine (Session 1703) and a session by some secondary TLs from TDSB (Session 1210) that absolutely convinced me that using the 4 stage research process is the way to go. The Superconference 2008 site will have all the presentations posted for all sessions - it's a great place to go for personal teaching resources and pd.

I also attended the OSLA's Hot Issues session and have a draft copy of the new library document. It is not a currciuculum document. What it is, is a vision document that (and this is really important and significant) was commissioned by the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. What is completely important is that it is a vision of what education in the province should look like in the 21st century. And what is amazingly important that the LNS commissioned teacher librarians of Ontario to write it! It will be presented to Avis Glaze (head of LNS) on Tuesday and a pdf copy of the draft will be posted on the OSLA site by Wednesday. Remember that the document Many Roots, Many Voices was a vision document that now has become Ministry policy. If this vision document is accepted by the Ministry, policy will follow and hopefully, curriculum and funding. We have 3 years of this government - we must support this document so that other things can follow. Most teacher librarians at the conference agreed that this was a momentous time for TLs in Ontario. There were also representatives from the Canadian Association for School Libraries who commented that all the provinces were watching what was going on here and are eagerly awaiting the publication of this document.

Growing Up Online

2008-01-26T04:34:00.000-08:00

I hope that many of you had the watch the PBS program Frontline: Growing Up Online last Tuesday. If you didn't, you can watch it online. The blogosphere is certainly awash in discussions regarding the show. There are a number of thoughts that came to mind as I watched the show. I am going to focus on what I see are the implications to education, in particular school libraries and teacher librarians.

I thought that the education portion of the documentary was very reflective of the teacher digital divide that is currently in many schools. We certainly have many teachers who are embracing new technologies because they see this as a way of engaging their students. We have teachers who I think would be amenable to delving into new ways of student engagement but find that accessing the technology is too difficult for a variety of reasons - mostly because the technology is unavailable when they need it (labs are booked) or when they have made arrangements, there are 'technical difficulties' and student time on task is wasted while problems are trying to be fixed. Then of course we have teachers who are either intimidated by technology or not interested in doing anything different.

C.J. Pascoe is one of the researchers interviewed in the documentary. She said:
That's why thinking about participation and not just access is really key to the future of digital media, and to equality and youth.

How do teachers encourage this participation? How can we use the tools that students have access to as part of our classrooms? How can we take advantage of this media saturated world to engage students? And not just our best students but all students. One of the reasons that we have behavior issues with some of our applied level students is they are not engaged. They tend to be very social - we need to tap in to this characteristic and develop learning strategies and activities that take advantage of their social, media-saturated world - through technology like podcasts, videocasts and social tools like wikis and blogs. Every classroom should be equipped with SMARTBoards, computers and Internet access. Every school library should be equipped with a media production area.

Steve Maher was the history teacher interviewed in this documentary. On the interview page on the PBS website, he talks about the shift away from content to process, i.e. the processes of critical evaluation of information and the skills necessary to know how to access information efficiently. He says:

Remembering information isn't as important; accessing it is important. And then, since there's so much information out there, it's judging the information that applies to your particular situation. What types of information do you need, and how can you trust it? How did you know what's valid?

How many times have I seen students wasting time looking for information by simply googling a topic? And then finding totally inappropriate sites and not having the skills to evaluate the content on the page? As teacher librarians, we can help students by partnering with teachers to follow a research process that includes skills lessons in narrowing topics, developing search strategies, teaching tricks to help evaluate web sites and directing students to online databases. There are many strategies that we can use with students to help them. There are excellent resources to help us do this (our own resources Imagine the Learning, Research Success @ your library, Reality Check as well as a number of web-based resources):

http://www.sbhsd.k12.ca.us/sbhslib/reading/choosing.htm
http://www.accessola.com/osla/toolkit/intro.html

Maher also said in the documentary that we need to re-think plagiarism and what constitutes plagiarism. In this I disagree. What we need to do is to redesign the hunt and gather type of project and challenge students with projects that have them use the information they found. We need to make the research process transparent by requiring students to check in at various points along the way through the use of conferencing, blogging or wikis. I've linked two resources that show how blogs and wikis can be part of the research process.

David Loertscher has some excellent publications that show how to design projects that require students to evaluate, synthesize and analyze information. I've included a link to a page on his site - Ban the Bird Unit Action Research Project.
Loertscher's excellent books Ban Those Bird Units and Beyond Bird Units can be purchased through the OLA Store.

Why Libraries Are Not Obsolete!

2008-01-20T05:47:00.000-08:00

I received an email from a colleague asking me to take a look at one of his recent posts regarding libraries. In particular, he asked that I read a comment that was posted in response to his post. This blog post is a rebuttle to dlp's comments.

I don't know when the last time you were in a library dlp, but libraries have been re-inventing themselves lately or at least trying to. It can be really hard when politicians seem to think that they are expendable. I recently had need of the services of not one but 2 public library systems. My experience made me thankful that they were still there and were staffed appropriately. I had help from librarians who went out of their way to help me find the things for which I was looking.

I'm sorry that you could never could find things -that's probably because when you were going to school, there was no qualified teacher-librarian to teach you the information literacy skills needed to find things. And if there was one and he/she was busy with administration all the time, it was probably an indication of lack of funding for support staff or there was a volunteer staffing the library. Is it the library's fault that the purse-string holders are short-sighted?

You also probably were never taught to ask the right questions to help you narrow your search and probably never taught what resources would be the best for your needs. Did you even have to think about whether or not a source was authoritative or reliable when you were in a library? You do when you are on the Interent. Anyone can put anything in a website/blog and there are no gatekeepers. Remember that there was and still are librarians who are choosing resources, making sure that they are dependable, are appropriate to the age level of the student/patron, buying from reputable print houses and publishers and making sure that there is balance in point of view. Who does this now for the Internet? This responsibility falls upon the user.

There is the assumption that everyone has the skills to critically evaluate what they are reading on the 'net. Everyone assumes that people /kids know how to research, but they don't. And there is every indication that even though students today seem Internet savy, they still do not know how to tell when a site is legitimate or not or whether there are better sources of information. Are students going to go to sites like Library Spot? They don't. Their search behaviour consists of the following: Google a keyword, look at the first page, take something from the first 5 listings and if it's 'good enough' they're done. Instant gratification. We need libraries and librarians to teach and require students/patrons to get the best resources, not just the 'good enough' ones.

But what about the 'hidden internet'? How do you access this without libraries? University, public, school and hospital libraries pay for online databases for their patrons so they can have access to resources that are not freely available on the Internet. Most reputable publications do not post their content on the free'net. Who else but librarians and libraries are going make the hidden visible? And you can't get much more current than a database. In addition, these databases are stable - they are not going to disappear one day (like some websites). And you know what - they are available 24/7 and are free to patrons who have a library card - which by the way is free.

Libraries are not just about books. They are about equity in our society. What about people who do not have a computer at home with Internet access? Who do you think provides this sevice for those people? Not everyone can afford the technology. In fact, not everyone has a car to go around to yard sales or the money to spare even to pick up cheap books. We need libraries to ensure equity of access to information and books for all citizens.

Why, why ,why are libraries always a target of cost-cutting? Why in this day and age of information do we cut the one place that can provide guidance through this explosion of facts? Libraries are not a luxury. They are a need in this information age. It makes absolutely no sense that library funding is cut in an information age!

Libraries are not just about books anymore. They are Internet cafes and children's programming. They are places for adult literacy, new language learners and geneology research. They are online "Ask a Librarian" service providers where you can have access to a real live person to help point you in the right direction. They are a place of equity.

When people ask why we need libraries and librarians when there is the Internet, here's what I say:
Why do we need road maps when we have roads? Why do we need cookbooks when we have all the ingredients we could ever want from all over the world? Why do we need teachers when all the facts you could ever want are on the Internet?

Why indeed?

Bits And Bytes

2008-01-19T13:08:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I attended the Regional Literacy Council meeting held at the Thames Valley DSB in London. This group is a group of consultants from boards in southwest Ontario who meet 3 times a year and share literacy information and resources. When we meet, we usually have a ministry update, share new publications and literacy-based conferences and best practices.

The focus of this meeting was oral communication. We shared a number of resources (rubrics, lesson ideas, web sites) and also examined the Ministry documents that provide support and guidance to teaching. assessing and evaluating the oral communiation strand. I will pass these on to the English teachers through the department heads at our next meeting.

Here's some interesting websites that I have found from some of the feeds that I subscribe to:

One Minute Critic - this is from a library in Vancouver. They have created 1 minute booktalk videos for a variety of books. It looks fairly new because there aren't a lot of book talks. But you could use it as a model for either creating book talks for the school library or for students to create book talks.

Top 10 Obscure Google Tricks - For all you geeks out there, here is an interesting collection that tells you how to use Google to track flight information, find the time anywhere in the world, and a whole bunch of other stuff I probably wouldn't use.

20+ Places for Public Domain E-Books - This is a list of sites where you can find free books that can be downloaded to your ipod, pda or e book reader (Does it work with Kindle? BTW this little gadget is sold out according to Amazon's site. I still don't know if my eyes are ready for this).

The Red Room - Here's a site that will allow social networking between authors and readers. It has author bios, lists of works, audio and video.

YALSA Wiki - This wiki has lots of information for school librarians who work with Young Adults. Check out the book lists and advocacy toolkit section.

Poets.org - This is from the Academy of American Poets and incudes bios, lesson plans and other additional supports for the teaching of poetry.

United Nations International Year of the Potato - I kid you not, 2008 is the year of the potato (my husband will be happy to hear this!).

Google Lit Trips - This site combines Google Earth with literature by mapping story settings. Students can create lit trips as part of a book study.

Lastly, I went to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this Saturday morning. I don't think that I have been to the Auto Show since I was very young. My only memory ( I must have been around 8 or 9) is one of collecting pamphlets from as many of the car displays as possible. Well, I now know that pamphlet collection still seems to be the main attraction (besides the cars) as evidenced by the number of people who had a carry bag attached to their arms. I also now know why I haven't been to the show since I was young. I am definitely NOT a car fan.

Random Thoughts/Rants on a Saturday Morning

2008-01-12T09:37:00.000-08:00

One reason that my blog is much easier to produce at home is the unfettered access I have to all of the creative tools on the Internet.

Case in point.

I was preparing this week for a Literature/Reading Circle workshop that I and a colleague are giving after school in a couple of weeks and I wanted to update the cover of the resource binder that we are providing to the participants. I wanted to get some new images - ones of kids reading, reflecting diversity, reading in groups, etc. To put this into context, I have just spent 2 weeks of playing with several Creative Commons (CC) image sites, and without thinking, I tried to do the same thing at work. Dumb! I forgot about the filters! Ok, I know that Google Images have been blocked for some time, but when you are in the flow of creativity, you tend to be so focused on what you are doing that you forget about stuff like filters. Well Flickr is blocked. Big surprise? Well it was to me because I forgot where I was working. A lot of other image share sites licensed under CC are blocked as well. I tried several of the image sites that are listed on a CC wiki pathfinder developed by my hero JV - but to no avail.

Yes I know, go to the databases and to the Media link on the Student Reference Portal - I did that but could not find what I wanted within the time I wanted to spend. Don't get me wrong - I love our databases. And if I am doing serious research I go to them first. But sometimes a database is not the right resource for information needs.

I just read an article about 21st Century Literacy that said that kids are on the Internet 27 hours per week at home and 15 minute a week at school ( this was a US statistic and it is an average). So who is teaching these kids at home about Internet safety and responsible, ethical use of resources?

Random comment by a teacher regarding school filters - "The kids just get around them anyway." Hmm? Thoughts on this one? Is this the norm?

Forest of Reading blogs are sprouting up all over! Just got an email that four elementary school TLs are setting up blogs for Silver Birch and Red Maple. So exciting!

BTW, here's a picture that won't be on any database!

Photo: jonno259. (21 August 2007). Teddy Bears' Reading Group. 12 January 2008. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonno259/1193530883/

Wikia Search

2008-01-09T18:31:00.000-08:00

Both Joyce Valenza and David Warlick had posts regarding a new wiki search engine in development. It's called Wikia Search

This search engine is being developed by Jimmy Wales one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. In a nutshell, the reason they are doing this is to make things more transparent - Google and Yahoo do not reveal how they determine their hits. Wikia Search, since it will be user generated will clearly let users know how hits are ranked.

I had a problem with Wikipedia for a long time - mainly due to the fact that it is a wiki and can be changed at any time by anyone. But I am convinced that it has evolved and is a reputable source for the most part (however, I still would insist on triangulation to verify - especially if it is a topic about which one knows nothing). Wikia Search I think will evolve but will take time.

It is really in it's infancy - I tried a simple search (cat, dog - I know it's really simple but it's late, I'm tired). I got no hits on dog but did get some hits on cat - but most were in languages other than English. I then decided to search triangulation and did get some hits - not exactly what I was looking for but in the ballpark. I decided to add a mini article (one of the features - it can be a definition, short article, etc). I created an account (took about 30 seconds) and then added my definition. I'm sure that by the time anyone checks out the link it will probably be edited by someone, but I wanted to check out how easy it is to add to the wiki.

It is definitely not very useful yet - but it has potential. If Google is creating KNOL to compete with Wikipedia, then why not Wikia Search to compete with Google - somebody has to!

My Daemon

2008-01-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

I completed the questionaire that was posted on LC's ChipVan Philosophy blog. What fun!

My Wishes for 2008

2008-01-04T06:59:00.000-08:00

"You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it all true. You may have to work for it, however."-- Richard Bach

I've spent the last hour with Joyce Valenza's and Doug Johnson's most recent posts. Joyce's blog always has links to many, many resources and always makes me think about the directions to take. But when I read the following from Doug's post, I found myself agreeing:

I'm wishing I wouldn't feel guilty about not liking Twitter, Ning and other very-social, social networking sites. Is there an "anti-social" web somewhere for me?

Since I started this blog, I have found that I am investing a lot of time on the computer lately. I can't imagine how much of my life would be consumed if I was Twittering and Ninging.

But in the spirit of these 2 posts (and many others that I have read in the past few days), here's my wishes for this coming year:

1. I'm wishing for fair copyright laws for Canadian schools. Canadian copyright law as applied to schools sucks. Here are some resources to help understand our current situation:

Canadian Copyright: Useful 'Net Resources

Comparison Chart: Canadian vs US Copyright

2. I'm wishing that more politicians, parents, teachers and school administrators would read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Release 3.0) to see what we are really up against when it comes to India, China and the rest of the world. Then perhaps our politicians would see the benefits of a thoroughly wired Canada (at reasonable prices) with technology easily available to all students, parents would see the need to expect their children to work hard, delay gratification and READ, administrators would support unfettered access to Internet resources and teachers would see the need to integrate technology (not just Powerpoint and Google) into their teaching so that our students can at least compete on a level playing field.

3. I'm wishing that the elementary teacher librarians would be able to have access to grade 6 - 8 students and teachers so that they can teach them the skills of information literacy and the process for research. That way, these students won't just Google, cut and paste. And they would know how to use the databases.

4. I'm wishing that our databases would get more use. Let's ditch the textbooks and get current, up-to-date reading resources for our students. And let's differentiate the reading levels so that all students can meet with success in our classrooms.

5. I'm wishing that all teachers would see the benefits of collaborating with each other - with an LNST, a TTLT, a TL. It really does make life a lot easier and we really do learn from each other. And in the end, if done right, our students benefit.

6. I really wish that we didn't have so many acronyms in education!

7. I wish that there won't be a 50% turn-over in elementary TLs inn the next school year.

8. I'm wishing that we have staffing standards and a job description for the position of TL.

9. I wish that school libraries were more of a priority. When funding is cut, libraries are the first to go. But why is this when literacy is so important? Why is this when study after study has shown that reading achievement and reading enjoyment improves when school libraries are well-stocked and qualified TLs collaborate with classroom teachers? Why does no one ever think to cut inter-scholastic sports (I'll probably get backlash about this one - however, I think that maybe it might be time to let sport be mostly community-based, not school-based. Radical idea here in N. America, but probably not in other parts of the world. This a whole other blog post)?

10. Finally, I'm wishing that I didn't need to write such long blog entries :)

P.S. Goodbye D.B. You will be missed!

Photo: Ilmungo (2006 July 13). The Sound of a Wish. http://flickr.com/photos/ilmungo/188827656/

Overwhelmed

2007-12-30T16:32:00.000-08:00

I am multitasking tonight, watching The Sound of Music (for the thousandth time, but this time in high definition - incredible!) and reading some of the blogs that I follow.

I read the most recent post in Cathy Nelson's Techno - Tuesday blog and I am overwhelmed at how far behind I feel I am when it comes to the blogoshpere. Many of the blogs that I have been following have been part of the 2.0 world for a couple of years or more!

Anyway, I followed her links to David Jakes' blog. In his most recent post, he wrote about professional learning communities. He blogs about the current impermeability of classrooms today, but writes:

That certainly can be changed, and the tools (blogs, wikis, social networking, RSS, etc.) we have now at our disposal make it doable and achievable, but many things have to fall into place. Teachers have to be willing, the technology must be available, administrators must understand the need, and the school’s climate and culture, which is greatly influenced by the community that the school serves, must be supportive.

Where do we start?

Jakes continues:

Teachers have to learn the tools, learn how to connect and contribute (typically through a blog), learn how to manage time and feeds, learn how to adjust the membership of their learning community, and learn how to accept being criticized when their ideas oppose those of others. Teachers need to see firsthand the benefits of a learning community, and what it means to their personal learning, before it can ever translate successfully to students. To get learning communities to develop and stick, start with teachers.

So this is a start. To all of you with whom I have shared this blog, let's start learning and begin our first steps together. That way, perhaps we won't feel so overwhelmed (or else we'll be overwhelmed together!).

Happy New Year!

photo: we're just a wee bit overwhelmed by being AT CINDERELLA'S CASTLE,http://www.flickr.com/photos/ninjapoodles/2110279618

Have You Shifted?

2007-12-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_muLk8iWLanM/R2_uXPv8GjI/AAAAAAAAABY/a7zwlRCSDm0/s1600-h/Academic+Library+2.0.jpg

It's December 24 and I have just put my cabbage rolls in the oven. I'll be a slave to my kitchen for the next couple of hours so I thought I'd do some reading and blogging while I babysit my cabbage rolls.

I remembered reading a post from Joyce Valenza's Never Ending Search blog called Shift happened. The librarian divide about the shift that is happening in respect to the teacher librarian role. The integration of technology is becoming more and more important and as a result, teacher librarians need to become more tech savy. And we have to know and be able to teach kids how and when each technology is appropriate to the needs of the task.

Joyce stated in her blog:

"If our librarians are not viewed as leaders in information and communication technologies, we will lose the opportunity to teach information fluency skills and effect thoughtful change in these new landscapes. But, if our librarians wait for formal training and do not opt to train themselves, we will find ourselves irrelevant and optional. More important, learners will lose. Shift happened. Our response is not optional."

What is the shift? It's the change from just being a keeper of books, a finder of resources and a collection developer. It's still valuing all of this PLUS knowing how to use the many Internet 2.0 tools that are now available to us: blogs, wikis and RSS to develop collections of current resources, wikis for group projects, blogs for metacognitive processing of the research process, collaboration of students not only in their own school but with students around the world using Skype, student and teacher librarian created podcasts, web pages, video, and other digital media. Using the lingo, it's shifting from a 1.0 TL to a 2.0 TL.

And we can't wait for formal training. While we have lots of opportunities to develop our tech and research development skills through after school sessions (see Book It), that alone cannot suffice. Much of our professional learning needs to be self-directed.

I'm linking here to a site that I found this past summer that opened my eyes to what had been passing me by for the last couple of years. This site, called School Library Learning 2.0(developed by the Californian School Library Association), is a self-paced tutorial that introduces teacher librarians to the Internet 2.0 world. I started working through this site last summer, completing the 'things'. I have to tell you that after completing these 'things' I was quite knowledgeable when I participated in the hands-on session with Will Richardson. Through the School Library Learning tutorial I had already set up a blog, RSS feeds, made an iGoogle page and started to set up a wiki (stay tuned for this - I'll let you in on it as soon as I have it developed a bit more).

Doug Johnson in his Blue Skunk blog wrote:

Why librarians should be in charge of educational technology
"If you want well and appropriately used educational technology in your school, turn its planning and implementation over to your library media specialists..."

He lists a variety of reasons why he thinks that TLs should be in charge of ed tech. The blog itself is an interesting and motivational read. But I found the comments just as important. Craig left this comment:

"... Media Specialists [TLs] are taught to collaborate with instructors so they can utilize technology in their curriculum, not just use it to meet state standards. I’ll be the first to admit there are some media specialists who aren’t willing to put in the effort or still have the idea their sole responsibility is cataloging and shelving books, but many others can greatly improve wh[at] students learn and how educators teach. And for those of you out there who have a Media Specialist who’s stuck in the last decade I feel sorry for you, but in the same respect stay positive, they’ll probably retire soon. "

I have fears and that is our position is slowly being eroded by other agendas. If we do not take the initiative to innovate and collaborate in a 2.0 way, we'll be left behind and deemed irrelevant. We have tremendous skills in information literacy and researching and now we need to mashup those skills with 2.0 technology.

So what is my advice? Take as many computer/technology sessions as you can through our board's professional learning sessions. Start working your way through School Library Learning 2.0. By the time that you have done a couple of the 'things' you'll have your own blog and RSS feeds. Read blogs. Get comfortable in this world. Then you can start thinking about how you can appropriately begin to use these tools with students and their teachers.

Start shifting.

Happy Holidays!

2007-12-20T09:19:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note about a site that I found through one of the blogs that I follow. Since it is the Christmas season - the season of giving - I thought that this was a neat way of donating food to developing countries AND developing vocabulary as well!

Free Rice is sponsored by the United Nations World Food Program. I did check if this site was legit by looking at who owns the domain (I learned this from using the Reality Check program from Media Awareness Network - all secondary teacher librarians were sent a copy of this resource cd in the fall). Anyway, the Free Rice game is levelled based on your responses so if you keep getting the word meaning right, you get bumped up to a higher level. In any event, for every word you get right you earn free rice for the hungry.

This could be used with students as part of a community building exercise for your class. Students could be put into teams and challenged to play as part of a weekly assignment - there is an option for the game to accumulate scores. Weekly tallies keep track of the amount of rice each team earns (the more words correct, the more rice earned) - who cares if they cheat by using a dictionary? Perhaps teams/individuals could follow up by choosing one of the words that they didn't know and using it in a journal or blog post. They are working as a team toward a goal, working with vocabulary words and feeding the hungry.

I thought that I would share this with you as we make our way into the holiday break. Have a great holiday!

More on Blogging and RSS

2007-12-15T03:15:00.001-08:00

Here's a picture from yesterday's session with Will Richardson.

My head was spinning after a whole day of RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, podcasts (I'm going to need a couple of hours to figure out Audacity), making videos and screen casting. Here's Will's reflection from his blog Weblogg-ed about his experiences yesterday. In any case, I'm feeling more confident and ready to share this stuff with my teachers.

So here's a suggestion for all of you who attended the symposium on Thursday. Over the holidays, come in and read my blog. Leave comments. Will Richardson suggested that that is the best way to start - by reading other people's blogs and responding to what they have written. Another thing that he said yesterday is that you need to have a blogging experience before you use it with students, just so you get a feel for blogging and know what it entails. Lastly, he said that if you are going to use blogging with your students, that you have a goal and a purpose (you know, those expectations) and just don't do it because its cool (but it is!).

I'd also like you to consider starting your own personal blog. It is really easy! Using this blog hosting site (it's run by Google), you can have a blog up and running in minutes. Here's the link on how to do it (you need an email account but I suggest that you use your personal one rather than the board account. I use my gmail account).

Don't have anything to write about? Here's another Richardson tip - write about what you have read in other blogs or news reports. In fact, to start you out, check out my Blog Roll on this blog where I have added a number of links to some cutting edge teacher librarian bloggers. You can read what they have to say and write about it in your blog. Or you can make a personal blog. That's what my daughter did when she lived out of the county for 2 years and wanted to keep her friends and family up-to-date on her life.

The idea here is to just start. Be selfish and play around for just for you. Once you have gotten comfortable, then you can start looking at ways that we can use this with kids so that they can make connections with others - at their school, with other schools and ultimately with the world!

September TL Workshop

2007-12-14T08:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of Margret Snow's Blue Spruce session at our Teacher Librarian workshop last September. I am a little late in posting some of these pictures but since I am at a workshop learning how to use Internet 2.0 tool given by Will Richardson, one of the things I am learning is how to put in pictures and video.

Here's a video of our session that you can view:

Canada's Current Copyright Issues

2007-12-14T07:59:00.000-08:00

I have been following the latest news about the government's plans to revise the Canadian Copyright Act. The revisions have caused an unprecedented outcry from the Canadian public. I've attached an article from the Globe and Mail outlining recent events. These revisions would make many of the things we do illegal and subject to fines and penalties. An example of this would be buying a cd and then downloaded the cd to your ipod.
The interesting thing about this is that the public outcry was started by a Facebook account posted by a university law professor when he saw that the revisions would practically copy a US law that has caused a granny to be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for making a tape for her grand daughter.
Its pretty frightening that our government seems to just follow in the footsteps of the Americans. Here's a link to the question period regarding this issue.