Blogging for You

I attended a NASTech meeting yesterday in the library at Westbury High School. They have a room adjacent to the library with several computers, but the library itself only had a few locked down laptops for their OPAC stations. The school has implemented a very successful COW program that extends to the use of laptops in the libraries.

I was most interested in the presentation given by an elementary bilingual teacher about blogging in her second grade classroom. She chose this venue because it simulated journal writing and she believed she was helping to create an online community of readers and writers. Sure enough, connections were made with a school in New Zealand, and the students are now enthusiastic writers! She recomends using David Warlick's blogmeister because it's made for the classroom, but also check out 21 classes.

Avatars, anyone? Check out Voki and take your pick.

Computers in Libraries 2

I was too ambitious to think that I would be able to share everything in one posting.

Highlights from other workshops:

Screencasting
The presenter for this workshop simply pressed "play" and walked away from the podium while the flash movie ran on the screen, introducing us to the concept of creating flash movies for tutorial purposes. He mentioned programs like Jing, with which we're familiar, as well as Camtasia (for a fee) and meebo. The advice he gave is to keep the screencasts short, and to find a good hosting service. He suggested blip.tv, YouTube (well, Teacher Tube would be better for us), freescreencast.com, screencastomatic. The entire presentation is available at http://screencasting.pbwiki.com.

Bookmapping
This presentation explored the use of interactive map technology to bring a geographical perspective to books. Sites that help make this possible include Google Earth, http://gutenkarte.org/, and Google Lit Trips.

Second Life
I'm still not convinced of the worth of creating a second life for libraries--don't we have enough to do with our first one!!!--but there are avid followers who create virtual worlds for all kinds of functions, including answering questions via an avatar at a reference desk. Visit http://secondlife.com and see what you think.

Teaching Books
I had a fresh look at this program and I have to confess I was much more impressed with it than I've been in the past. We still have access through Nassau BOCES. I recommend you take a look the next time you introduce a new author. There's a lot of highly usable, quality and original material that you could use.

Fish4Info is an example of an open source catalog. It's a great solution for libraries who have yet to automate. I definitely liked the "Amazon" feel to it which makes it intuitive for the novice.

Are you interested in a global project? Check out http://primarysource.org/.

I attended a workshop, Gaming Your Library, that emphasized Johnny Chung Lee's position that students have an organic information need that relates to their own lives. Students need someone to meet them where they are to take them where they need to go. Hence the idea of applying gaming strategies to the learning environment. Recommended title: Marc Prensky's Don't Bother Me, Mom, I'm Learning. I'm putting it on our next order.

Loved what I saw from the Cleveland Museum of Art's videoconferencing presentation. One was featured that combined art and wellness through a study of self-portraits. The question was asked: What do artists reveal? Lots of food for thought. Definitely check it out.

The librarian from the Frank Sinatra Performing Arts High School showed us how she had the students use a variety of online programs to create pathfinders on various topics. The collaborated in Google docs, shared and discussed on Wikispaces as they reflected on their sources through a Read/Write/Think 3-2-1 strategy: What did you discover? What did you find interesting? What is one question you still have? Peer editors completed a reflection: I read...I noticed...I wondered...The final rubric asked the students to contribute what they could teach others, what they still need to learn, what they need to get better at, and what they would like to see done differently.

At the copyright workshop, I was reminded of the "poor man's copyright" strategy. Mail your original work in a sealed envelope to yourself. Don't open it. If you want to do some reading on the subject, there's actually a graphic book called Bound by Law. With so much original work being posted online, it is incumbent upon the "poster" to make sure he or she has permission.

Computers in Libraries:

The Computers in Libraries Conference with its corollary, Internet@Schools East in Washington, D.C. is in its 23rd year. Planned to coordinate with the marvel of cherry blossoms in bloom, this conference offered resources and ideas for us to implement with our home libraries. Some of the time, I have to confess, I proudly noted: we already do that in Uniondale! And we've gone even further down that particular path! Other times I was furiously taking notes, capturing as much as I could to bring back to all of you.

I'm going to share with you some of my favorite newly discovered gems, together with the name of the workshop I attended. Hope you find this useful!

RSS@Schools

Steven Cohen is a law librarian in Huntington who probably has the marketshare on RSS feeds. He has a daunting 900 or so and must have given up any semblance of a life to read even a little bit of each. In any case, why RSS? I know we've talked about the reasons to let RSS into our library lives--the ability to bring all our best-loved sites into one place precludes the annoyance of having to search for them--and remembering to do so! As librarians, posting feeds on our websites for students and teachers could be particularly helpful.

A few familiar and new gems, in no particular order:

For gathering your feeds--Google Reader http://reader.google.com/

Search library feeds--http://www.libworm.com/

Open archive for library and information science--E-Lis http://eprints.rclis.org/

Track bills, issues, members in Congress--Open Congress http://www.opencongress.org/

Voters database in Congress http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/

Monitor changes to webpages http://watchthatpage.com/

Create feed for a webpage http://page2rss.com/

Highlight quote on page and go directly to that passage--very cool and worth a try! CiteBite http://www.citebite.com/ I created an example for you here: http://pages.citebite.com/q4u0q6q1ewsx

A lot of databases have rss feeds, most notably EBSCO. Check them out.

Steven Cohen has a lot to say on his librarystuff.net blog.

Professional Journals

As you know, one of my addictions is to professional journals where I am amazed by the gems of helpful hints, resources, and plain old good ideas that are shared. The April/May edition of LMC (Library Media Collection) is full of articles that 1) spur thinking or 2) confirm that we are on the right track. At our next meeting, I'll share some with you. Of special mention is Joyce Valenza's "A Few New Things" (not to us--we're doing so much!) and "'Old School Meet' School Library 2.0: Bump Your Media Program Into an Innovative Model for Teaching and Learning". Classroom Connect's April issue includes great ideas for livening up literature lessons and an assortment of other tips and treasures. It's available online at http://connectednewsletter.metapress.com/content/111m23380v2utvxu/fulltext.pdf.

I might have shared the article, "The Power of RSS" from Multimedia & Internet@Schools (January/February 2008) with you already. It's an easy-to-understand overview of RSS feeds and their use in the library setting. You have to set up an account to view it: http://www.mmischools.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=13387. I was especially intrigued by the idea of beginning a research dialogue with a student and setting him or her up with a mechanism to receive additional articles and resources as they become available.

March Department Meeting

At our meeting today, we discussed:

1. any questions and concerns that have arisen since we began to use Requisition Manager
   Consensus--program working well, allows us to keep track of expenditures.
   Concern expressed about time needed to use program. Expectation this will ease with increased familiarity. Anyone with problems should speak to me.
2. Poetry Cafe (indicate your plan at http://turtlehook.poetrycafe.sgizmo.com/) If you need any inspiration, check out Nikki Giovanni's poem in the March issue of American Libraries (copies distributed): "a Library is: a place to be free/to be in space/ to be in cave times..."
   I would like every library to have a presence. So far, there are wonderful ideas coming forward.
3. Lost books
   We brainstormed about how to handle lost books and lost book monies. Pending discussion with the business office, our procedure for student replacement of lost books will be:
   a. encourage the student to locate and return lost book
   b. ask the student to bring in a new copy of the same book
   c. accept an alternate book--a new paperback for a lost paperback book and new hardcover for a lost hardcover book
   d. The last choice will be payment for the book with cash. Receipts and records of transactions will be kept. All monies will be turned into each building's main office in January and June.
   Follow-up question for business office: Will each school have a bookkeeper? When monies are turned in, is it possible to allocate them for replacement library books?
4. Summer Reading
   Thanks to a donation that allowed us to puchase books from Borders, we're preparing baskets to be raffled in the fall to summer reading participants. The baskets are built around the theme of insects in keeping with the summer reading program theme for students in grades k-2, 3-5, as well as for middle school students. Totals: 5 k-1 baskets, 5 2-3 baskets, 5 4-5 baskets, 4 6 baskets, 8 7-8 baskets
5. New professional books
   Librarians perused and borrowed new books from our professional collection. A complete list can be found at http://workbench.wikispaces.com/Professional+Books.
6. National Geographic books were distributed for each library.
7. TLC collection-- title recommendations
   Please give me recommendations for additions to our TLC collections by April 16.
8. Remaining monies
   Now is the time to close out our accounts. Please spend your remaining monies by the time we break for vacation.
9. National Geographic books were distributed.

As much as possible, I'll include links to articles rather than distribute hard copies.

Articles and websites of note:

"Meet Your New School Library Media Specialist"

"Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers"

"A Cyber Six-Pack for Educators"

"Addressing Adolescent Literacy"

A Gathering of Readers: An online celebration of indigenous chldren's reading and culture.

We have a new subscription to Information Searcher, a new newsletter put together by Pam Berger. If you're interested I have the most recent issue. The lead article is "Web 2.0 Strategies for Searching". There are also articles on world history resources, blogging in English language arts and election links for young people.

Connected Newsletter's February edition has as its main theme digital photography in the classroom.

Distributed: Nikki Giovanni's poem, "Storytelling in the Web 2.0 Era", "A Vision for Classroom Blogging"

Teaching and Learning Celebration

Channel 13 did it again! I had heard about this wonderful conference, but this was the first year I was able to attend, thanks to Pearline Everett's good fortune to win two free passes and her kind generosity in responding to my strong-arming tactics by agreeing to allow me to have one of them. Thanks, Pearline!

I started the day with Will Richardson. Many of you are familiar with his work on blogs and wikis (TCHRS 371.33 RIC: UHS Library). Apparently he is also a wikispaces devotee. You can visit the site he created for the conference at http://willrichardson.wikispaces.com/. He believes that the ability--and prevalence--of publishing to the web is the single most transformative happening that has emerged from the technology revolution. The capability for all of us, most notably our students, to be participatory journalists is a heady and empowering change. Take a moment to visit his wiki and consider his timely message about connections.

Speaking of connections, one of the amazing things I learned at this conference is how the learning truly doesn't end because of the opportunities literally at our fingertips! Did you know that many universities now have free open courseware? For example, you can take a course of your dreams at MIT, Tufts, U. C. Berkeley and many other institutions here and across the globe.

On that note, Tim Magner, Director of the U. S. Department of Education, explored 21st educational trends and how learning is now location-independent. He introduced us to GELC (Global Education Learning Community) where educators can start or join projects and take advantage of resources. We were challenged to consider that while everything in our world has changed so markedly, why are schools still the same? As educators, we have to create our own transformational toolkit, work with our communities to prepare our students for the world that awaits them. This world features, in a very short list, collaboration, "loose" boundaries, the accessibility of information over a variety of platforms, and connectivity in more ways to more people than ever before possible or imagined.

I had a chance to stop by the Apple workshop on podcasting which also supported the concept and recurring theme of the celebration to create work for a global audience. We can facilitate this by giving our students a voice and the tools they need to make themselves heard. Myriad resources are available on the iPoddess site. Click on resources. (Reminder: the workbench wiki has extensive links to help you get started with podcasting.)

When Jane Goodall walked to the podium for the keynote address, the standing ovation she received was heartfelt and admiring of her lifetime devotion to her passionate interests. Her talk glossed over the work she has done up to now to focus on Roots and Shoots, a program that engages and inspires young people through global community service. She left us with this thought to ponder: "While we all need money to live, we don't need to live for money." She certainly has modeled her life after this mantra.

All this caused me to reflect (surprise :)) on what role librarians play in this evolution/revolution, and what should we be doing in Uniondale to ensure our students leave us, minimally, with the comfort level needed to navigate the new information landscape and, hopefully and with great effort, with the expertise in hand to ask the right questions and discover appropriate resources to lend clarity to whatever bewilders them. Certainly we can line our shelves with books to pique their curiosity and interest, to entertain and delight, but we are also uniquely positioned to infuse student learning with the skills necessary to be informationally literate in the broadest sense, to put into practice what David Warlick emphasized when he spoke of knowledge integration.

Summer Reading

By popular demand, we once again will raffle new book baskets to elementary and middle school students who document their participation in the public library summer reading program. This year's theme is "Catch the Reading Bug" and "Metamorphosis". Visit http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/libdev/summer/ for additional information.

Please share your ideas for titles and non-book items that we should include in these baskets. Let me know if you have any books left from last year so I can plan purchases.

Requisition Manager

Thanks to Jo-Ann Becker for her thorough presentation that taught us how to enter requisitions the 21st century way! From this point forward, librarians will enter their requisitions using the program. Let me know when one is pending, and I will review it for approval.

A few items to remember for long lists so you don't have to include every item in the description box:

1. For a long list of items such as a Follett book order, indicate in the description that the list will be submitted separately.

2. Indicate what the list will include--i.e. books, supplies, etc.

3. For those of you who order online, write "Open Purchase Order for titles to be submitted online". (This only holds true for book vendors who notoriously don't/can't fill an entire order, thereby allowing you to submit additional titles later).

4. After you complete the requisition and it is approved, there is a quick turn-around to convert it to a purchase order. The actual p.o. will be sent to your school's main office. All you need to do is check Requisition Manager, locate the purchase order number, and write it on each of the five copies of your list that you will be sending to the purchasing dept.

5. Whenever you are submitting a separate list of items to purchasing, make an additional copy for me and inter-office it.

If a vendor you would like to use is not on the list, you'll have to complete a special form. You can find it in Library M in a folder called Requisitions. Also in this folder is a set of instructions prepared by Barbara Spiritus.

Questions? Call me.

Library Department Meeting, Feb. 27, 2008

Thanks to Paula Trapani's inspiring blog (http://lrmslibrary.blogspot.com), I am experimenting with this one to see if a blog could be used as our vehicle to share department meeting agendas and minutes. Please excuse its sparse nature as it is definitely under construction!

At our library department meeting on February 27 in the high school library, we will stray from usual business to be trained in Requisition Manager. Using this program will enable librarians to manage and input their own purchase orders that then will be routed to me for approval. We will meet at 2:00. Time permitting, we will address procedures for dealing with lost books, plans for our summer reading program (an exciting development--stay tuned!) and the Poetry Cafe. If there are topics you would like us to cover, please either e-mail me or add a comment to this blog.

Of interest: Teen Tech Week is March 2-8. Visit http://www.ala.org/teentechweek for ideas and resources.

You might want to consider signing up for one of the new inservice courses scheduled to begin in March! Do You Google?, The World of Wikis and Other Web 2.0 Tools, and Interactive Whiteboards at Work soon will be listed on My Learning Plan. Take advantage of these opportunities to become expert techno-magicians! (Speaking of Web 2.0, check out WikiMatrix for an unbelievable array of choices and possibilities).

Our monthly a list of Websites of Note listing is included here for your convenience. As always, at our meeting I will distribute articles that are not available online. Look for one on digital storytelling (I know that many of you are putting into action what we learned on Staff Development Day!) and one on classrooom blogging.

I also wanted to point out to you that I've purchased several professional books that may be of interest to you. Highlighted book titles are below:

Uniondale School Library Media Centers

Vist the Uniondale School Library Media Centers Home Page!

Practice

Practice makes perfect.

Test