May is…

Check out the fun events and celebrations of May on Susan Grigsby’s blog.

Look what I found!

Mole & Thomas, Photographers, Chicago, WWI era

 

I received an amazing photograph in an email recently.   It was a human Statue of Liberty made up of 18,000 soldiers taken at Fort Dodge in 1918 by Mole & Thomas.   The first thing I did was go to SNOPES and check it out.  Please take the time to read this entry for a truly interesting art form used to sell war bonds during World War I!  Of course, the next thing I did was to look in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division for other photographs by Mole & Thomas.  There they were – including three taken at military bases in Georgia!  Follow the links in order to be able to see more details.

                                                               

Here are two from the LOC….do some searching yourself for more!

 

Human Statue of Liberty; 18,000 officers and men at Camp Dodge, Des Moines, Ia.; Col. Wm. Newman, commanding; Col. Rush S. Wells, directing; 1918.

 

Machine Gun Insignia; Machine Gun Training Center; 22500 officers and men, 600 machine guns; Camp Hancock, Augusta, Ga.; Brig. Gen. Oliver Edwards, commanding; Lt. Col. E.P. Pierson, directing; 1918.

 

Click here for other “people pictures.”

Somewhat Controversial Topics and How We Deal With Them

There are many issues that we face as school library media specialists where decisions must be made based upon our convictions and passions. I’m thinking of things such as how we develop and administer our reading incentive programs (AR, RC, etc.), our procedures for informing faculty of proper copyright law compliance, processes for purchasing and organizing foreign language materials in an English-speaking society, or “do you tell Johnny’s parents the name of the overdue book he has out?” The policies and procedures we develop to address such issues are often open to our own individual philosophies regarding the matter (in the absence of state or system mandates).

Over the course of the next several months, I will present “burning” issues of major interest to all of us and present a variety of opinions on how these issues might be addressed in your media program. While the decision of how to handle these issues is sometimes left to the discretion of the LMS, there is some measure of research and publication on the topics that might provide insight into how others address those specific situations. I will share some findings on the following topics:

1. Should classroom experience be required in order to become a school library media specialist?
2. Should all materials in a foreign language be shelved together based on the language (such as all Spanish), and should funds be budgeted to purchase materials in that language for students who are in the school speaking only that language? Or, should students be able to access materials written in English only in an effort to have them adapt to English more quickly and be less dependent upon their native language?
3. What is the best way to introduce/reinforce copyright compliance among faculty and students?
4. In schools where fixed scheduling is practiced, what steps can be taken to convince the administration to move toward flexible, or “flix,” scheduling in the LMC?
5. What is the best plan for implementing and administering a reading incentive program in the schools; what role should the LMS play in this program administration? How should these books be organized within the collection?
6. Should we follow the ALA position that parents should not be informed of titles their children have checked out due to privacy laws? Or, is there a time when parents should know about what their children are reading?
7. Should media specialists who are provisionally certified be hired, or should only the fully certified candidates be hired?
8. When the Principal requests that you remove a book from the collection, and due process using the system Reconsideration Policy has not been followed, should the LMS remove the item without hesitation?

These are a few issues we discuss in my Administration course and students research these topics with oftentimes very interesting findings! Over the next few months, I’ll report on one of these topics each month and encourage you to respond to the postings with thoughts and “position statements” of your own. I look forward to presenting, and hearing, interesting dialog on these topics!

Phyllis R. Snipes, Assistant Professor

University of West Georgia

Happy Poetry Month!

Making Connections through Poetry  http://www.loc.gov/teachers/history/

Looking for ways to combine primary sources and poetry?

A new activity from the Library of congress, Making Connections through Poetry: Finding the Heart in History, allows students to review and analyze primary sources and then synthesize the information and create poetry based on what they have learned. They can create “found poetry” from selected documents on many topics….or they can write a poem to accompany an image.

Students can print out their poems and the primary sources on which they are based and teachers can compile the poems and make chapter books that can be shared with students, other teachers and parents.

This is ready to use…the images & documents have been selected for you!  Take a look!  Try something new!

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Vote in ALA Elections!

There are only a few days left to cast your vote in the AASL and ALA 2008 elections! Voting will close on Thursday, April 24th.

As of 4/15 only 23% of AASL eligible voters had cost their vote in the ALA election. If you are a ALA member, you need to vote! This is the time to make the presence of school librarians stronger in ALA. There is even an AASL member and school librarian running for President of ALA. In order to have a stronger voice in ALA it is important for AASL members to vote and elect school library people to these important roles.

Voting is very easy-go to:https://www.alavote.org/2008/

If you are an ALA member you should have received a logon and password through email. Don’t know who to vote for and don’t want to read all those long bios? Here is a listing of those candidates that are either AASL members or members of other school/youth divisions: http://www.ala.org/ala/aasl/aboutaasl/aaslgovernance/aaslelections/general.cfm

Melissa P. Johnston, Silver City Elementary

Charting the Future for P-16 Information Literacy Collaboration

Hello GLMA folks!

Since this is my first post as a guest blogger, I’ll use it to introduce myself and explain why I’m here. I’m Nadine Cohen, a reference and instruction librarian at the University of Georgia, with a mission to collaborate with school and public librarians to embed information literacy in Georgia’s education curriculum, from pre-school to college. My mission is born out of the frustration I sometimes feel with my teaching. I employ all the current pedagogical goodies - active learning exercises, peer teaching, group work, etc. but I’m not happy with the level of learning taking place. Most of the students come to UGA with few or no information literacy skills, are overwhelmed by the academic databases in GALILEO, and don’t understand why good research isn’t one-stop-shopping in Google. There’s just too much to teach them in too little time and no amount of good teaching practice can make up for that. Why are most freshman coming to UGA with such poor information literacy skills? And even worse, why are so many leaving as seniors in pretty much the same shape? What can be done to fix the problem?

In the winter of 2005 I decided to call a media specialist to get another perspective on the issue. Not knowing any, I arbitrarily called a local high school and, to my great good fortune, stumbled upon the irrepressible Mindy Doler at North Oconee High. For every frustration I described, she replied “I know, me too!” Our problems were identical – underprepared entering students, not enough teaching opportunities to get them up to speed, and teaching faculty and administrators who don’t realize we’ve got an information literacy problem on our hands. The conversation went the same way with Lindy Pals at Jefferson Middle and Sharon Mitchell at Benton Elementary. We discovered that our information literacy teaching methods and objectives were complementary, and in a perfect world where we could spend enough instruction time with every student, we would produce competent researchers at every grade level.

It became clear to us all that the problem doesn’t lie with us or the students, it lies in the lack of a systematic, P-16 information literacy program in Georgia, one that teaches students research skills in manageable increments with lots of built-in reinforcement. And one that is embedded in the curriculum and tied into the Georgia Performance Standards so that teachers can appreciate how information literacy will enhance their lesson plans and even improve student test scores.

Creating that program and finding partners to work with us on implementation is the next step. In my future posts I’ll describe the efforts that are currently underway. If you want to be involved, come to the GLMA Summer Institute in Macon in June, and attend the meeting of the task force called “Charting a Course to Improve Information Literacy in GA through Organizational Collaboration”. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me! My email address is ncohen@uga.edu.

2 Million Minutes

This relatively new video (watch the trailer and link to the blog through the web site) has been getting a lot of press, including a mention in Time Magazine in a story about reforms needed in education. The back story is that the creator of the video, who made his mega millions in the world of high tech, decided to make a video highlighting what he sees as critical issues for high school education in the US. He bases many of his ideas on The World is Flat. (Aside, have you seen the web site WikiSummaries? That’s a new one to me-and The World is Flat is there!)

2 Million Minutes follows 6 high school students-2 in the US, 2 in China and 2 in India–and compares their experiences for the two million minutes they’ll spend in high school. I was so interested just from watching the trailer that I spent the $25 to buy my personal use copy (a school version is $100). I’ve shown it to several faculty colleagues. Everybody agrees that this is the PERFECT title but some have hated it and some have loved it-nobody was left indifferent.

As media specialists, one of our roles is to try to work for change in our schools. I love the professional learning community idea (even though I know it doesn’t always live up to the ideal). This video would be a great tool to use to start a dialog about some big issues we’re all facing.  I’m really interested in anything we can do to help our students develop global perspectives.

If you’ve seen the entire video I’d love to see your comments.

Have a great spring weekend,

Judi Repman

Georgia Southern

NCWIT Aspirations Award

 

The NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing is a great opportunity (with great prizes) for any young women in computing you might know. The award recognizes young women with aspirations in computing disciplines and raises the visibility of women’s participation in computing.

The deadline is fast approaching (April 30) and this year’s award is a pilot for the following cities: Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, New York City. If you live in one of those metro areas, please read on!

Online self-nominations must be submitted by April 30, 2008. Supporting documents must be received by NCWIT by May 2, 2008.

Each qualified awardee will receive:

• $500 in cash
• a laptop computer, provided by Bank of America
• an expenses-paid trip, provided by Bank of America, for each awardee and a parent/legal guardian, to attend the Bank of America Celebrating Stars of the Future Technology Showcase and Awards Ceremony, August 1-3, 2008, in Charlotte, North Carolina
• an engraved award for both the student and the student’s school
• inclusion in a video that highlights her accomplishments in computing, her future aspirations, and her participation in the Award events in Charlotte, North Carolina, as well as a copy of the final Award video
• For awardees who will be high school seniors in the Fall of 2008, an expenses-paid trip for the awardee and an accompanying parent/legal guardian to attend NCWIT’s national workshop on Women and IT at the University of California at Irvine, November 5-6, 2008.

For more information and videos of past winners, please visit the NCWIT award site: www.ncwit.org/award

Enabling Teachers to Promote Reading to their Students

The most important function of the Georgia Peach Award for Teen Readers is to get our teens excited about reading. Our committee tries to gather information on ways people promote our nominated titles, as well as promote reading in general. We share this information on our website as well as when we do presentations. There is nothing more fun than when a student comes up to me and says they finished the last book I recommended to them, they loved it, and ask for another title. I decided that I needed help spreading the word about these books so my media center started a contemporary literature book club for the staff of our school. The wonderful thing is I was able to get this class approved for a PLU. The response was overwhelming and I had teachers from every department, APs, clerks and nutrition staff all reading books that our students would be interested in. For example, we read and discussed A Thousand Splendid Suns, Book Thief, and Glass Castle just to name a few. We would meet from 2:30 - 4:00, once a month. These book club members were so excited about the books we read that they started talking about them with the students and we cannot keep them on the shelf. 

If you have other suggestions for promoting your book titles - please share them with us.

Amy Golemme

Georgia Peach Committee, Chair

GPB’s Georgia Graduation Stories Blog

TELL YOUR STUDENTS’ STORIES!

SHARE SUCCESSES AND CHALLENGES!

Georgia Public Broadcasting, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Education and Communities In Schools of Georgia, is gathering stories and interviews as well as video and audio clips that reflect the journey that middle and high school students make towards the goal of high school graduation.

We know that one story may not look like another.  We welcome them all!  We are particularly interested in “user-generated” content, especially student-created multi-media—videos, interviews, etc. of their academic struggles and successes and those who have made an impact on them.  If you would like to feature your students, your school, and your efforts to impact the graduation rate across the state, please share this message with those in your school who can bring this project to life—especially the students themselves!

Submissions can be sent in the following formats: 

Digital Pictures: JPG, GIF, or PNG

Video Clips (30 min. or less): MOV, AVI, MPEG, or WMV

Audio Clips: MP3

The final product will be available to all educators, students and parents in a variety of new media formats, including GPB’s Georgia Graduation Stories Blog.

http://georgia-gradstories.blogspot.com

 

If you have a completed media project, story to share, or questions, contact:

Barbara O’Brien, Senior Education Project Manager, GPB bobrien@gpb.org 404.685.2545