To Blog or Not To Blog…

This summer I’ve been reviewing the data from my end of the year media center survey for students and teachers.  I’ve combed through the data, shared it with my media technology committee, and looked at it using a protocol with members of the National School Reform Faculty.  Each time new eyes look at the data, I learn something new.

One piece of data that keeps coming up is the low usage of the media center blog.  At our school, I’m the first person to use a blog, and I feel that it can be a valuable tool for communicating media center news, resources, community connections, and more to the learning community.  However, out of the teachers and students surveyed, only 3% of teachers and 48% of students used the blog.

This data troubles me because it makes me question what my purpose is in creating a blog.  The recommendation from people looking at my data has been to stop doing the blog in order to free some time for other endeavors.  However, this disturbs me even more because I feel that blogs are now one of the standard forms of communication online.  It’s interesting to me that more students use the blog than adults, which leads me to believe that there is much to be learned as adults about how blogs might be used in education.

I was honored to be asked to contribute as a guest blogger for GLMA.  The invitation actually sparked a thought about a new direction I might take with my media center blog in an effort to support the participatory culture of the media center.  This year I want to invite guest bloggers to contribute book thoughts to the blog.  Who will these guests be?  I hope that they will be teachers, students, parents, and even community members.  I’ve always believed that to be a teacher of reading, you must be a reader yourself.  The power of modeling the life of a reader is a valuable teaching tool in the classroom and beyond.  My hope is to invite and regularly schedule guests to post information and thoughts about books being read from our media center.  Not only will this create a more meaningful purpose for our blog and hopefully increase readership of the blog, it will support my goal of sharing the books that we are reading, which in turn supports book selection.  If I can get my idea off the ground, I hope that it might inspire other ways of sharing books through displays, Wordle, book reviews in Desitny, podcasts, and whatever else we can dream up.  Even with this new direction attempt, I’ll still use the blog to promote the media center in other ways and include information on book events and community resources.

In addition to this new idea, I’ve started a Facebook page for my media center to have one more avenue of reaching my community.  Since I’ve started working on this blog post, it seems that everywhere I turn there is an article, blog post, or Facebook group about the importance of blog book reviews, web 2.0, and reaching your learning community in a variety of ways.  Here are a few examples that caught my attention:  July SLJ, July SLJ (again),  Social Media Schools,    So…I’m not giving up on my blog as recommended by others, and I’m hoping that a new path is forming out of my learning from my first year.  Wish me luck and suggestions are always welcome!

Andy Plemmons

Media Specialist

David C. Barrow Elementary

Athens, GA

Just the Thing to Scratch Your Web2.0 Itch

Scratch Logo from Wikimedia Commons

Over the past two Wednesdays I took a fabulous class with technology diva Freda Williams in which I learned the basics of Scratch, a fun and fabulous new Web 2.0 tool. Scratch was created to teach the basics of programming to kids. 

Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab research consortia.

You can download it (for free, of course) from the Scratch website and start teaching it to yourself, or go to a great website called Learn Scratch that helps you learn how to use it.  The Scratch website also contains a gallery of ideas that you and your students can download and remix into new programs. Scratch programming language enables you to create your own games, music, art, interactive stories, and animations. Once you finish your creations, you can share them on the web, where you can receive an embed code that will enable you to post your product anywhere else you wish to share it.

Just imagine using this new tool to teach critical thinking skills to your students! Scratch can help you develop twenty-first century learning skills in your students. As they learn essential mathematical and computational skills, they will gain a deeper understanding of the process of design and become more highly engaged in the learning process.

Ruth Fleet, Library Media Specialist

Dean Rusk Middle School

Spread the Word: We made it!

Do you remember that shampoo commercial about the girl who used the shampoo and told two friends who told two friends, and so-on, and so-on?  Let’s see if we can get our email subscribers up over 100 members.  The tally meter is at the top right corner of the blog.  We are currently at 75 77 79 82 91 95 97 104 members subscribed to receive an email of new content on the GLMA blog.  This feature enables those media specialists who cannot access the blog at school to receive posts in a timely fashion.  When there is new content, the subscriber will receive an email with the new GLMA blog content embedded in the email.  Friends could also add the RSS feed to their feed aggregator.

Click here for the link to subscribe or click the link in the right corner above.  Spread the word to engage all Georgia media specialists in their professional learning network.  Thanks for spreading the word to two friends who spread it to two friends and so-on, and so-on, and…

Free Your AASL Standards

If you didn’t either attend ALA in Chicago in person or follow it from afar through assorted social media backchannels ,then you may be blissfully unaware of an imperfect storm brewing called “Free the Standards.”

In the course of teaching a workshop on using the standards, Chris Harris discovered that our standards, the very ones that are to be our compass in our efforts to infuse information literacy as an integral and seamless part of all curricular areas, are subject to some rather restrictive copyright limitations.   In a nutshell, Harris learned that:

Under the new permissions for use, I actually had to tell librarians that they can no longer quote the standards that they are using within their lesson plan documents! Given the push to spread the standards and the whole Learning4Life initiative, this is surely in unintended outcome of AASL’s attempts to secure the standards. And yet, an over zealous locking down of the standards is unfortunately preventing most use.

As stated on the permissions page: “Permission must be requested for publishing or posting a portion of the text or the original document in a print or online publication or on a Web site as well as linking to the PDF.” [AASL] A lesson plan is a print or electronic document, therefore permission must be requested for quoting the standards as is usually done in a standard lesson plan format. Additionally, a lesson plan could be considered a derivative work under the current wording: “The learning standards document is considered the core content if the publication cannot be written without the use of the content of the learning standards document. Such usage requires a license agreement and may include a fee.”[AASL]

A fee for including the standards in each lesson plan?

Most librarians in the workshop assumed that the permission for educational use granted in the standards document covered use in lesson plans. I did as well…until I read the new permissions page. The permissions page limits educational use to only the pdf document itself. “The PDF versions available on the AASL Web site are intended for personal and educational use. Printing or forwarding copies for your own private use or to share with others for purely informational or educational purposes is acceptable.”[AASL] Any quoting of the document (i.e. listing standards on a lesson plan) would fall under the “Publishing or Posting Excerpts” section and would therefore require permission (and maybe a fee) for each lesson plan. ( July 10, 2009 post)

On July 11, Chris followed up with additional information on just how severely restricted we as school librarians are from even linking to the PDF document:

Under AASL’s current permissions for use, you CANNOT use the language. CANNOT put the standards into Rubicon Atlas (or another curriculum mapping program). CANNOT even link to the pdf document on your website or in an e-mail. I know that Alison Cline wrote back yesterday saying this could be “easily taken care of” but it cannot. We need to change the policy that guides use of the standards.

Your participation in this dialogue is critical in our efforts to freeing the standards for liberal non-commercial use.  Suggestions for a Creative Commons License have been made via various blogs, Twitter, and the AASL Forum discussion list.    I urge you to make your voice heard via one or more of these vehicles for conversation—how can we hope to integrate the standards into district and state curriculum if we are not allowed to even identify the standards in a lesson plan or link to the PDF document?

Here are some resources for getting up to speed and being an active part of the conversation for #freethestandards .

• Joyce Valenza has two thoughtful and analytical blog posts; you can read the first post from July 13 here; the second post from July 14 is available here. Heather Loy, a South Carolina school librarian, also has a helpful synopsis on her blog.
• Monitor the Tweets for the hashtag #freethestandards to see what other library professional are saying about this crucial issue; better yet, join Twitter and contribute to the conversation!
• If you are a member of AASL, subscribe to the AASL Members Forum discussion list.
• If you are so inclined, contact AASL and share your ideas and possible solutions to this dilemma in a professional manner.

This is a serious issue that is of concern to all school librarians.  What good does it do our profession and organization if everyone is too afraid to reference the standards for fear of violating copyright or being assessed a fee?

As school librarians, we face enough obstacles in trying to go above and beyond our mission of creating lifelong learners and infusing information literacy as an essential literacy for K-12. The current restrictions only make our task even more challenging—should it really be this difficult and worrisome to use our own standards?

Adding a Creative Commons licensing or some kind of compromise that allows more liberal use/referencing of the standards is a “do or die” in my opinion—if the current restrictions stay in place, our standards are sure to go absolutely nowhere in a hurry.   Whether or not you belong to AASL, the use of the standards is of concern to all—please take time to share concerns and possible solutions you may have in a professional and proactive manner.

Buffy Hamilton,
School Library Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wikispaces.com

#freethestandards

Random Musings on summer reading from the Peach Book Committee

When summertime rolls around, a school librarian’s, and Peach Award Committee member’s, mind turns to reading.  Lots and lots of reading.  Now about half of us on the committee are public librarians, and I don’t know how those wonderful people ever get enough time to read all they want.  Lots of late nights and wrinkled laundry?  No, I have those, and what’s MY excuse?  I guess the score evens out, though, when a Peach person knows she needs to read several relatively new titles for possible addition to the Consideration Database.  It’s strange to think about the current suggestions going on a list that will become the nominees for the 2010-2011 school year.  In fact, it’s kind of freaky to even start using a second digit at the end of 2000-anything.

 Anyway, so something like ten beautiful weeks stretch out before me like a canvas of good intentions at the end of May.  Well, I tell myself, now’s time for a little reading reward—some fun grown-up reading.  Already a fan of the Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire series by Charlaine Harris, I was turned on to the Kim Harrison Hollows series that begins with Dead Witch Walking.  Seven of those fell before me in fairly rapid succession while I felt intermittently guilty that I wasn’t reading (or re-reading) the four 2009-2010 Peach Nominees that I have to make competition questions for yet.  I’m also reading Twilight aloud with my ten-year-old girl.  Much like with information about sex, I figure she’s better off learning about it through me.  I’m doing The Hunger Games with my twelve-year-old son.  It’s on this year’s list, and I can’t praise it highly enough.  It rocks and rolls and bakes banana bread.  It’s that good.  The sequel comes out this fall, and I hear there are some Advance Reading Copies making the rounds—It’s called Catching Fire, and I would bake banana bread myself for anyone if I could get my hands on a copy.  I only knew Suzanne Collins from the Gregor the Overlander series, and while that had some merits, no baked goods were produced for me from those.

 Anyway, now it’s past the 4^th of July.  Summer break is way more than half over, somehow. I’m done with my questions, sort of; and I have a meager slice of summer left to try to read some new good stuff off the cart of books at my media center that arrived right as school was ending.  Oh, and there’s still time to lose ten pounds, right?

Suzanne Gordon