Teachers’ Domain: A Powerful Tool

Perhaps our greatest contribution to media specialist/teacher instructional design is sharing our knowledge of the vast repertoire of resources available for educators. And if, during these tough economic times, those resources are free, all the better!

I would guess that most teachers are aware of how to access top quality videos through United Streaming, but another tool that bears presenting to faculties is found at www.teachersdomain.org : Teachers’ Domain. This is a resource that is designed for classroom use and professional development and links to video and audio segments, Flash interactives, images, documents, lesson plans, and student activities on virtually any topic desired. It is an online library of more than 1,000 free media resources from public television (WGBH). Such programs as NOVA, Frontline, American Experience, and others are included and are related directly to (some) state and national standards.

There are many features to Teachers’ Domain. Folders can be set up to organize chosen media, including notes of explanation with each item. Folders can then be shared with other educators who have been invited into a group that you can establish. So, you can share access to resources you’ve saved and notes you’ve assigned to resources with any other members.

Teachers’ Domain is divided into two main areas, one for K-12 teachers and one labeled College Edition. The area for teachers hosts public television resources and provides sections for retrieving video, images, lesson plans, and various other resources, follow up activities, connections to related resources, and a link to relevant standards (such as NCTM for mathematics materials). Ratings and reviews are given for items, and they can be saved to a folder or recommended to a colleague. Also, proper MLA citation is included as well as a downloadable transcript of each video. All topics are searchable by word, grade level, or format.

Within the College Edition, there are staff development components as well as selected videos available to “enhance lectures, course assignments, and student research.”

All in all, this is an awesome tool with high quality content. I strongly urge you to check this out and see if it useful in your staff development sessions and collaboration meetings with faculty. (Thanks to James McLendon for sharing information about this site with our group.)

(Teachers’ Domain is a Pathways project of the National Science Digital Library. Major funding for Teachers’ Domain is provided by the National Science Foundation.)

Phyllis R. Snipes,
University of West Georgia

Need Resources for Women’s History Month? GALILEO Has Them!

First, explore Britannica’s spotlight on women, the Encyclopædia Britannica Profiles 300 Women Who Changed the World. There, students will find an illustrated timeline of women throughout history along with articles, essays, speeches, video clips, and learning activities.

A quick search of SIRS Discoverer (elementary and middle school), SIRS Researcher (high school), or History Reference Center (middle and high school) for the word, women, will bring back many news and magazine articles, images, and more on topics ranging from fighting for voting rights to women in aeronautics and astronautics. SIRS Discoverer also includes a spotlight for Women’s History Month, so click the Spotlight of the Month feature at the bottom of the SIRS Discover home page to investigate this. SIRS Researcher includes an extensive leading issues feature about Women’s Rights with a detailed timeline, global perspectives, statistics, and more, so don’t miss that opportunity to delve into the pros and cons of this issue with your students.

Want to meet important women in Georgia? Take a look at the Women of Distinction in Georgia feature in the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Your students can read about Mary Musgrove, Hazel Raines, Rosalyn Carter, Alice Walker, and many more fascinating women.

And, to quiz students on this, catch the GeorgiaInfo’s Daily Trivia Question during the month of March. Students can also take a look at the ladies pictured in Famous Georgia Women.

A webinar to explore these resources has been scheduled for March 9 at 3:30 p.m. Register for it at the GALILEO Training page.

GALILEO staff appreciate your feedback and ideas. Please leave comments to let us and other media specialists know what resources you find helpful for this topic.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please use the GALILEO Contact Us form to get in touch with us.

Courtney McGough
GALILEO Support Services

What makes collaboration successful?

Collaborating is a challenge. The demands placed on educators pulls us in so many directions that I find it very difficult to find time to sit down  for the much needed time to make a large project successful. I celebrate when I have successful collaborations, and I look at these successes and ask myself what made them a success. How did we find the time to meet? Why did it work so well?

One of my most recent collaborations has been such a rewarding experience. Natalie Hicks, a gifted teacher, came to me with an idea that she wanted to do with her fourth grade students. It started as an idea: do inquiry-based learning projects with her students. We both met together in my office and brainstormed possibilities on a couple of occasions. We looked at I-Search, Web 2.0 tools, various research tools, and possibilities for final products the students might consider. We found that the more we brainstormed, the more questions, uncertainties,  and unknowns we discovered. I remember telling her, “This is the fun of learning: the unknown. We have to give ourselves permission to not know the answers and work through things as we come to them. We enter into this with a plan, but we’ll come to roadblocks along the way, and we’ll work through them”. I have been amazed by her courage in trying the unknown and seeing what happens.  She constantly tells her students that they are pioneers and must work through difficulties as they arise.

Our collaboration also brought in Steve Piazza, an instructional technology specialist, in the district. Natalie met with Steve on her own, and we also met as a team to talk more about the possibilities of this project. Steve came and assisted us periodically on our journey. After brainstorming in person and via email, we crafted a plan of action.

What resulted was a project that spanned multiple weeks with extraordinary learning taking place. In the first weeks of the project, students self-selected topics and learned about what inquiry-based learning is all about. They did background reading and developed questions that they wished to explore.  Much of their question development took place within their classroom. With their questions ready, I introduced search strategies including the Google Wonder Wheel. Students explored this tool and gathered information about their topics. We also included analyzing sites for the most reliable information and following copyright and using photos with creative commons.

Natalie, along with her fellow gifted teacher Katie Biehl, contacted a mentor for every student in the project. The students interviewed these mentors via email or in person in our media center. For example, one student’s mentor was a panda keeper at Zoo Atlanta. She sent him questions, and he graciously emailed her back. We were blown away by the willingness of so many people to give their time to these students and their questions. Some spent as much as an hour sitting with these students and sharing their knowledge.

As students began to gather a rich amount of information, it was time for them to begin thinking about their final products. One goal was to explore numerous technologies to use in the project. I took a couple of days and did introductions to Animoto, Screencast-o-matic, Powerpoint, Photostory, and Windows Movie Maker. Students then began to storyboard their information and thought about which technologies would best meet the needs of their projects. Many of them decided to use multiple tools. For example, most students used Powerpoint, but they might have a Photostory or Movie Maker file embedded.

The next few weeks involved the students getting into the computer lab and putting their final product together. As they needed reminders or had ideas for what they wanted to do, I would pull small groups in front of the Smart Board and do follow-up lessons to help them along with their projects. A few students wanted to use Flip cameras to film scripts that they had written or film experts in their fields. Steve Piazza also came in during these times and helped students with roadblocks or questions that came up and taught small groups. What amazed me was how students took technologies that they had never used and explored them with open minds. When they discovered something new, they shared it with the person beside them, and soon, that new knowledge spread to the whole class. They became a collaborative team and willingly shared their knowledge and asked one another questions instead of just relying on the teachers.

When the projects were finished, we held a media festival in the media center to showcase their work. Natalie and Katie invited parents, district leaders, all the mentors, and other classes in the school to come view the projects. The students ran their stations and shared not only the knowledge that they learned about their topics but also what they had learned about technology and research.

Since this project came to a close, Natalie has started additional projects with her fourth grade students and began a similar project with her third grade students. Other teachers in the school are getting interested in what we have done and are thinking about what this might look like in their own classrooms.

I hope you will take time to view their projects here, view some pictures from our media festival, and watch our Animoto of the process.

4th Grade ELT Digital Inquiry Projects.

As I look back, what made this a success?
• We made time to sit down together and brainstorm before making a decision
• We gave ourselves permission to have some unknowns to work through along the way
• We each took our own expertise and took responsibilities in the project. There wasn’t just one person doing all the work
• We relied on multiple resources, including support from district personnel
• We allowed the students to take ownership of their work and gave them opportunities to showcase their knowledge
• We allowed students to become creators of information
• We equipped students with the tools they needed to search successfully for information and think about reliability of sources.
• We shared the success we had with multiple people in the hopes that more teachers would like to become involved

I invite you to think about your own successes with collaboration. Share those successes. Share what made them a success. Perhaps our sharing might spark other ideas for how to create more collaboration success.

Andy Plemmons
School Librarian
David C. Barrow Elementary
Athens, GA
http://barrowmediacenter.wordpress.com
http://www.clarke.k12.ga.us/webpages/aplemmons

Books, Butterflies and Mexico

School in Cerro Pelon

Every year Monarchs Across Georgia, an environmental organization, takes a group of teachers to visit a K-8 school in Cerro Pelon, located in central Mexico, to deliver children’s books written in Spanish. The school, located near a protected monarch butterfly preserve, has no library, computers, or technology other than one overhead projector. Instead, they have two teachers and only a few shelves of books, including their teaching materials, for almost 80 students. Their only “library” consists of two sets of encyclopedias.

Last week I was part of a fortunate group that visited this school.  We brought a box of children’s books written in Spanish that was ordered from Follett and mailed to Mexico. Shipping charges and customs fees limited the money we had to spend, so there were not enough books for every child to get one.  The children shared the books with great excitement all reading aloud to one another at the same time. These books meant so much to them, just as books mean so much to children everywhere.

We can all recall our favorite books from childhood.  Perhaps the best children’s authors differ from others in their ability to recall their childhoods and learn from children as adults as well.  Children take a special delight in feeling snug with bedtime stories, experiencing delicious thrills in scary books, being enthralled by a soaring Superman or Peter Pan, talking animals, and small creatures (like themselves) in A Bug’s Life or The Secret of NIMH.

Book Plate for Donated Books

Why does Monarchs Across Georgia, a group dedicated to providing habitats and educating the public concerning the importance of pollinators, visit a school in Mexico to bring children’s literature?  They want to support the area that protects the butterfly preserve. Part of their mission, too, is to educate teachers on the importance of having pollinator gardens in schools and home gardens to maintain our declining pollinator population.  Georgia is also part of the flight path for monarch butterflies migrating to and from Mexico every year from Canada to central Mexico (their winter roosting home).  After the teachers see the butterfly preserves and surrounding area, they can then pass on their knowledge to their students. 

This special tour is geared for teachers and those interested in the protection of the beautiful butterflies that grace our lives.  It would be hard to imagine a world without butterflies, but, there are less of them every year in our country. Illegal logging in Mexican preservations also threatens the millions of monarch butterflies that winter in central Mexico.  To learn more, I urge you to visit Monarchs Across Georgia’s website that includes lesson plans, written for all grades, concerning pollinators that you can share with science teachers and others at your schools.

Website for Monarchs Across Georgia:   http://www.monarchsacrossga.org/

Betsy Razza, Druid Hills High School

Library Day Rescheduled for March 10

A message from Carol Stanley, GLA President

We had overwhelming encouragement to reschedule and were able to for March 10th, so Library Day is back on!

The new registration form can be found HERE.

If you need to change or cancel your previous registration, emailgordonbaker@clayton.edu or karamullen@clayton.edu.

A Virtual Library Day will take place the same day for those who can’t attend.  Please watch for more information on attending virtually!

Thank you for your support!