October is…

Boo! It’s downright scary when you look at all the ways you can celebrate in the month of October . . . and YOU thought it was all about Fall and Halloween. Oh no, my learned friends.  You’ll be so busy planning your special events you’ll barely have time to troll Goodwill or Value Village for a good Halloween costume (and we all know the “hobos,” “hippies,” and “tacky tourists” are the ones who waited ’till the last minute, don’t we?).
So…bake and decorate something to go with your popcorn while you read a book wearing roller skates and making sarcastic comments to your dyslexic friends eating caramels and telling knock-knock jokes, y’all! October is here and she’s ready to rock!
Roll on over to Susan Grigsby’s blog for the original post!

Debatable topic #5: Who’s In the Driver’s Seat…You, Or Your Reading Incentive Program?

A simple search of GALILEO, google, or any other search tool yields many results when researching reading incentive programs such as Accelerated Reader or Reading Counts. Some writers are vehemently opposed to such programs, while others tout its amazing contributions to student development of lifelong reading habits. There is strong support from both camps, so let’s briefly examine some of the arguments.

Comments in support of reading incentive programs:

• Provides self-paced tests so students can proceed at their own best rat
• Provides immediate, constructive feedback from AR/RC quizzes
• Motivates reluctant readers with incentives to read more
• Enables frequent, detailed, consistent, and stable assessment
• Provides formative feedback for the teacher
• Improves student test scores
• Increases circulation of materials in the media center
• Allows for individualized and differentiated instruction for students
• Provides wide range of accompanying tools that help students remain focused and motivated to read
• Allows students to set their own goals for reading.

Several research studies purport the effectiveness of AR among school students. Johnson and Howard (2003) found that three groups of students who used AR to improve reading skills and vocabulary development all showed improvement when taking the Gates MacGinitie Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Tests. Likewise, Sayaman (2003) conducted a three-year study at Harlem Elementary School that revealed gains of five percentiles per year on the ITBS for students who used AR as a component of their reading program. Also, circulation in the media center quadrupled, with each student reading an average of 158 books a year. A reading specialist was hired to guide the implementation of the program, so that was a major factor in the program success.

Comments not in support of reading incentive programs:

• The point system has negative effects on struggling readers
• Students can very easily cheat on tests covering books read
• The program can replace reading instruction rather than be used as a supplemental tool
• Students often do not read what they prefer to read if it is not on the approved list, therefore, students lose their desire to read for pleasure
• Proper administration of the program is time-consuming and requires dedicated personnel in order to function properly
• Many excellent books are excluded from the program because no test exists for the titles
• Unhealthy competition between students is often fostered
• Students who do not read at grade level are labeled as slow readers by classmates
• Teachers are usually not trained in how to properly implement a reading incentive program.

While some studies show that AR increases student reading levels, some studies reveal opposite findings. Melton, et. al. (2004) found that AR did not significantly increase reading achievement growth among 5^th grade students when compared with another class who did not use AR. Instead, students who did NOT participate in AR actually showed a significant increase in reading achievement growth.

Some media specialists suggest that reading incentive programs make a tremendous impact on creating lifelong reading habits in their students. Others suggest that students are “trapped” into reading limited titles because they are AR/RC books, and they miss excellent literature and books on topics of their choice because they are not AR/RC books. This practice inhibits lifelong reading habits.

The success and effectiveness of reading incentive programs is contingent upon HOW it is implemented within the school. Some students soar with the program, reading a mixture of what they enjoy whether AR/RC or not. Other students walk away from the media center broken hearted because the book they WANT to read doesn’t have a “dot” on it, so they cannot select it! Most media specialists agree that, when implemented as a supplementary, supportive tool where students are encouraged to read based on their interest and not whether a book is “dotted” or not, reading incentive programs are quite successful. As media specialists, we should use all tools that benefit our students by helping to develop lifelong reading skills and habits.

Perhaps the media specialist should make it known that he/she has the expertise to share in the development of a successful reading incentive program in his/her school. Perhaps this is the type program that, when implemented correctly, could be the catalyst that is needed to improve reading skills and develop a love of literature amongst our students. The issue here is: correct implementation and administration. Are these tools worth exploring, and are they worth the time investment to implement correctly? This is an issue that each media specialist should have a voice in determining within their school.

Then there’s the question…how should reading incentive program books be shelved – intershelved with other titles, or pulled out from the general collection??? Another debatable topic!

Johnson, R.S. & Howard, C.A. (2003). The effects of the Accelerated Reader program on the reading comprehension of pupils in grades three, four, and five. The Reading Matrix 3, 87-96. Retrieved July 10, 2006 from http://relearn.com

Melton, C.M., Smothers, B.C., Anderson, E., Fulton, R., Replogle, W.H., Thomas, L. (2004). A Study of the Effects of the Accelerated Reader Program on Fifth Grade Students’ Reading Achievement Growth. Reading Improvement, 41, 18. Retrieved July 15 from http://relearn.com

Sayaman, A. (2003). Average ITBS reading scores at Harlem Elementary School Rise 5 Percentiles Per Year. Retrieved July 10, 2006 from http://relearn.com

Phyllis R. Snipes
University of West Georgia

Have You Joined the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning?

If you have not had an opportunity yet to join the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning, take a few minutes to surf over and sign up for free!  Our Ning is a great way to network with other library professionals, get ideas for incorporating Web 2.0/ Library 2.0 tools into your library program, and to get sneak peeks at conference sessions.  Our network is designed to encourage learning and the sharing of ideas for everyone, whether you are attending COMO in person or not. 

If you have not ventured into the world of Library 2.0, our Ning is a perfect entry point.  If you have any difficulty, please feel free to contact me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us !

21st Century Skills Conversation Starters

One of the things that I most enjoy doing as a faculty member is giving my students a chance to go out and discuss school issues with teachers and media specialists in the field. Lately one topic my students and I have been exploring is information literacy. As media specialists (and the library profession as a whole for that matter) we’ve been talking about information literacy for many years and the concepts are clearly expressed in both the Information Literacy Standards for Student Learning and the new Standards for the 21^st Century Learner. Yet far too many of my students report to me that teachers have never heard the phrase “information literacy” and have no idea that there are standards that we should be addressing through media center programs. I find that pretty discouraging both personally and professionally and I’ve been thinking about how we might change that. Maybe it’s time to try a different phrase to get to the same outcome (all students and teachers are effective users of ideas and information). My suggestion is that we try to hang our hat on the phrase “21^st century skills” and use some new Web 2.0 tools to try to get the message out. My real idea is to use some of the very thought provoking short videos that we can access through the web to get the conversation started.

 

Here are some of my favorites:

 

Did You Know?

This 8 minute video is probably the best known one on my play list. It clearly highlights how our world is changing and challenges the viewer to reconsider where the United States “fits” in the world.

 

A Vision of K-12 Students Today

This 4 minute video is poignant and points out the disconnect between the lives our students lead outside of school and the way schools are structured for learning.

 

Learning to Change, Changing to Learn

This 5:30 video clearly addresses 21^st century skills and how educators need to accept personal leadership for providing instruction in 21^st century skills.

 

Having Our Say

This is one of my newest video favorites. The video gives a voice to middle grades teachers who address 21^st century skills in 21^st century schools.

 

Pay Attention

This is another very popular video. It was specifically created to start a conversation about 21^st century learning.

 

Of course there are great print resources out there too. A new document published by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (of which ALA/AASL is a member) provides a great summary of issues and resources:

21^st Century Skills, Education & Competitiveness: A Resource and Policy Guide

 

If you want a longer book-length treatment, I’d recommend  Tony Wagner’s new book, The Global Achievement Gap

 

I think that New Year’s resolutions don’t really work for our school calendar lives. So make a beginning of the school year resolution to start talking about 21^st century skills!

 

Judi Repman

Georgia Southern University

Get a Taste of Georgia COMO 2008 via Del.ici.ous!

Come check out our new Georgia COMO 2008 del.icio.us network!  Del.icio.us is a free social bookmarking service that allows members to bookmark, tag, and share favorite web resources.  You can also subscribe to the RSS feed for bookmarksfrom our del.icio.us account!  This account will bookmark web resources related to the upcoming Georgia COMO 2008 conference.  Please look later this evening for the new RSS feed to these bookmarks on our Georgia COMO 2008 Ning page. 

Register your own del.icio.us account and join the Georgia COMO 2008 del.icio.us network!   You can bookmark a link to share with our network, or you may email me directly at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us if you have a link you would like added to our catalog of web resources related to the conference.

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.edublogs.org

21st Century Skills – AASL and ISTE Standards Engaging Students in the Making of Good New Ideas

Jamie McKenzie, editor of From Now On –The Educational Technology Journal, and former Director of Libraries, Media and Technology (Bellingham, WA schools), asked me to share information about this professional learning opportunity.

 

Jamie is planning a series of seminars in various cities across the nation, and has scheduled a seminar for the Atlanta region on October 16, 2008, at the Hyatt Place Airport North. The focus of the seminar is on 21st Century Skills as well as the AASL and ISTE standards.

 

Take a look at the content for the day…

 http://fno.org/good/good.html ]http://fno.org/good/good.html

 

I hope to see many of you at GaCOMO in Athens, October 15-17.  However, for those unable to attend GaCOMO, joining Mr. McKenzie in Atlanta “for an exciting day of hands-on learning activities devoted to the concepts of synthesis, invention, imagination, and novelty,” would provide an excellent professional learning opportunity. 

 

When Jamie learned of the scheduling conflict with GaCOMO, he stated, “I am saddened, of course, that I will miss many of the teacher librarians because of the clash of dates and events. It is difficult to plan a 12 city tour without some conflicts, but I am still disappointed.

Fortunately, the seminar is aimed at a much wider group… (The seminar) would serve the cause of both AASL and ISTE standards if regular classroom teachers came to my seminar and learned how these standards apply to their assignments.”

 

 

Rosalind L.  Dennis

Instructional Coordinator

Department of Educational Media

DeKalb County School System

Come Join the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning!

Georgia COMO 2008

Come join the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning!  What is the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning?  It is a social networking space where COMO attendees (as well as those who may not be able to attend in person but who want to get a taste of the conference happenings from afar!) can share ideas and network with other professionals and peers! 

In addition, we are inviting everyone who is presenting to jump into our “Session Discussions” forum!  This is a space where speakers and presenters can tell others about their presentations and embed content for their presentations.  As a member of our Georgia COMO 2008 Ning, you can embed content on “My Page” and share ideas with others.  Ning allows members to upload videos, photos, and other multimedia content—what a great Web 2.0 way to share the knowledge from our upcoming COMO 2008 conference!  In addition, members may create or join special interest groups where you can network with colleagues on a smaller scale.  You may also add a Georgia COMO 2008 Ning badge to your blog, wiki, or website!

To join our Ning, you must first register a free Ning account.  Click on this link to register for free! Once you have registered, you can then join our Ning going to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and click on the text link, “Sign Up”, on the left side of the page.

You can keep up with the latest news from the Georgia COMO 2008 page via your favorite RSS aggregator.  Our RSS feed is:  http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/forum/topic/list?feed=yes&xn_auth=no .

The Georgia COMO 2008 Ning is a terrific way for speakers and presenters to share information from their sessions.   Our network will allow attendees to get a taste of the sessions that they may not be able to get to; the Ning provides a means for those who cannot attend in person to experience the essence of the conference vicariously.  We have created in our Ning in the spirit of the NECC 2008 network, and we hope that our network will prove beneficial to you as a learning space. 

If you have any difficulties registering or navigating our Ning, please feel free to contact me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us .  The network is open for discussion and registration (free for everyone!), so surf on over to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and join today!

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com

Everything is Miscellaneous and School Libraries

Everyone has been talking about the book Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberg this summer. Many of his ideas directly affect the way we work in school libraries – I’ll highlight three here.

1. The Dewey Decimal System, like most “second order” information organization systems, has lots of problems.  Weinberg provides a strong and lengthy critique of it, and some librarians may be offended. However, we all must admit that it makes no logical sense to the average person to file fairy tales in  nonfiction, and there are many other problems.  These problems inevitably stem from the fact that no one item can be physically placed in more than one place, and a decision had to be made.  Weinberg understands that it would be far too expensive to scrap the system and start over, and points out that no new system would be any better.

Computers and OPACs certainly help. However, we’ve been using OPACs for at 15 years in Georgia school libraries –  and I’m not sure that people are yet finding them a natural way to locate books.  Further, we are quite good at helping students find resources when they know exactly what they want.  We are not nearly so good at helping them when they’re not quite sure what they’re looking for – and I would say this is the case at least half the time!

2. Social tagging, also known as “folksonomies,” is the new big thing, and there’s absolutely nothing organized about this phenomenon.  We, as catalogers, are proud of our professional ability to determine the “proper” subject headings for “information packages,” and so much work has been put into a disciplined approach to this over the years.  But let’s face it – kids don’t think like professional catalogers. If people can individually come up with their own tags, and those tags can be shared around, our cataloging vocabulary expands.  The most important idea here is that electronically, objects can actually belong in an infinite number of places, not just one physical space. And they can occupy multiple places simultaneously.  This is really quite revolutionary, when you think about it! It’s likely that we will move away from putting single things in single folders, and then building a hierarchy of folders.  If things are tagged, we can let the machine do the searching for us.

3. All of this social cataloging may seem threatening to us.  Certainly, all Georgia employees are nervous right now, hoping that we won’t suddenly be found extraneous.  But in the school library profession, we can’t hold onto old practices just because we are the only ones who know how to use them, thinking it makes us indispensable.

So do we throw out our Dewey schedules and recatalog our entire collections using Delicious or AR levels?  Aboslutely not.  New tagging systems will develop alongside our current systems and eventually edge them out. This is probably going to happen without any contribution from us – but we should make efforts to incorporate new organizations into our existing structures. Instead of spending all that energy teaching kids the different Dewey classifications, I suggest:

• Teach the idea of indexes. There’s always an index; figure out what it is and access it. If the user has to take a college course to memorize the index, then the index needs to change.
• Teach about personal tagging.  Kids are doing this anyway.  Make sure they are harnessing the incredible power of “smart leaves” for educational purposes as well.
• Think about how well your media center promotes browsing for items for patrons who are not quite sure what they’re looking for.  Bookstores do this quite well. Displays, front-out books, and peer reviews are all good practices in this regard.
• Continue to help learners deal with information properly once they find it.  This is where the energy should go, after all.
• Point out that some of the standardized tests are outdated, requiring students to answer questions about information skills that are no longer relevant – like catalog cards.  This needs to change.

For a quick overview of this book, there’s a video of the author giving a talk on his book here.  I highly recommend this book to you!

Mary Ann Fitzgerald

University of Georgia

Web Page Images – Which Format to Use

Many media specialists also act as the webmaster for their school web site. Some have web design training, some do not, but I think all can benefit from understanding the types of image formats available and when to use each type.

Before tackling the image file formats, you must first decide how you will edit images and make them ready for a web site. First, there are free options for both Windows and Mac computers.

On a Windows computer, I recommend skipping the cumbersome features of Microsoft Paint and Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Instead, take advantage of a fast, free option that is an enhancement from Microsoft for Windows XP as part of the Microsoft PowerToys line of programs. The Image Resizer adds an option to resize an image in a web-ready format by simply right-clicking any image file.

On a Mac, the Preview and iPhoto applications have the features needed to crop, resize, and save images in a web-ready format, but the features are limited.

Rather than limiting yourself to resizing and cropping images, I recommend investing in an image-editing program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or the full version of Adobe Photoshop. If you go to the Adobe Education web site, you can take advantage of the education discount. I find the slimmer Elements version is more than enough for web site images. Not only will you be able to save images for the web, you’ll be able to crop, edit, add text, and transform the images as needed.

Now for the meat of the discussion…

The two main types of images on web sites are GIF (.gif) and JPEG (.jpg) files. Each image is made up of a series of pixels of different colors. GIF files have one value per pixel to make up a whole image. JPEG files compress the image to make the image smaller at the expense of reducing the image quality.

The rules:

Rule 1: Save images that include text as a GIF image file.

The Reason: If you compress an image that is made up of text, what tends to happen is that “blobs” of color appear around the letters. Rather than just keeping one consistent color, the compression causes artifacts around the letters that look blurry. Saving the image as a GIF file prevents these artifacts from appearing because each pixel is given a precise value. Although the differences between these JPEG and GIF images may be subtle, enlarging both shows the issue more clearly.

JPEG Image Enlarged to Show Detail

GIF Image Enlarged to Show Detail (Preferred for Text Images)

Rule 2: Save photographs as JPEG image files.

The Reason: Photographs saved as JPEG images appear more crisp and colorful than a GIF image does while reducing the file size to make the image ready for a web site.

GIF Image

JPEG Image (Preferred for Photographic Images)

Rule 3: Never save a JPEG file over and over again.

The Reason: Each time you save a JPEG file, the image is compressed. The more this happens, the worse the image becomes.

Rule 4: Save JPEG files between 60% and 80% compression.

The Reason: This level of compression is normally not noticeable and keeps the file size small enough to load quickly.

Rule 5: Resize your image to only the size you need on the web page.

The Reason: This rule is affected by two properties of the image: the image dimensions and the image resolution. Digital cameras are typically the cause of large images on web pages. Digital cameras can take photos with large dimensions at high resolutions for printing. To prepare a photo for a web site, you should take two steps that often take place at the same time:

1. Change the resolution down to 72 dots per inch (dpi). 72 dpi is the resolution accepted as a resolution suitable for computer monitors. Since the images are made for viewing more than printing, a lower resolution provides a smaller file size.

2. Resize the image to the size it will be shown on the web page. To give you an idea, the photos above are 400 pixels wide while an image from a digital camera could be 3000 pixels wide. You can add an image from a digital camera to a web page and let the web page resize the image, but why waste time loading a highly detailed image just to reduce its size? Changing the dimensions before placing an image on a web page prevents wasting time loading images.

A last word…
If you invest in an image-editing program and follow these rules, your web site images will be good-looking while your web site will load quickly for your visitors.

Craig Coleman
Media Specialist, Mundy’s Mill Middle School, Clayton County, Georgia
Clayton County Public Schools 2008 Media Specialist of the Year

GLMA NewsLeader Digest: September 2008

Upcoming events:

September 7: Deadline for GaETC 2008 Presentation Applications.  Submit your online application by going to: http://gaetc.org/sessions08/1sessions_app08.htm

September 21 – October 4: Banned Books Week

October 3 – 4: Georgia Conference on Information Literacy, Coastal Georgia Center, Savannah

Catch Up on the Month’s Information:

August 2008 posts

Media Matters for August

Media Center Newsletter Templates

Remember to…

Register for GaCOMO

Register for GaETC

Start a team for Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl

Tip of the Month

Are you familiar with GALILEO’s new interface?  Take a training session then train the teachers.  When teachers are familiar with a resource they will require and expect students to utilize the resource and open the door for instructional collaboration.  Check out the training offered at http://www.usg.edu/galileo/help/library/training/

Question of the Month

How do you promote the Georgia Children’s Book Award and/or Peach Award for Teen Readers program(s)?

 

Kris Woods

GLMA Communications Chair