An organic 2011

     

photo © 2009 Martyn Hutchby | more info (via: Wylio)

I spent a lot of 2010 making myself crazy. Immersed in my RSS feed, I saw so many new things I could accomplish for our students. Our learning commons is a sign of change in our school and over the past few years, I have been working very hard at leading the charge from the front.

This year I am in a very different place. Why the change? It isn't because the need for ratcheting up collaboration in curriculum planning to include information and media literacy skills is any less crucial for our students. It isn't because students no longer need to understand the power of their digital footprint and what citizenship means in 2011. None of that has changed.

The change is in how I approach student learning and progress. We will still be keeping data on curriculum, skills, and standards. I'll still be teaching as many classes as I can shoehorn into the day. But the watchword is going to change. It has been "21st century skills," and I will tell it to you true, everybody hates that phrase. You can see the hackles rise. It is too strident, accusatory, and has become empty jargon.

Leadership from the front spreads the message, and I think the message is pretty much out there.  Leadership in the field is what we need right now - nurturing new skills and new literacies with personalized professional development when and where it is needed.
This year my watchword is going to be "organic."  I'll cultivate students and teachers by focusing on their specific need or task and build the skills into the educational moment.  I'll look to nurture each student and teacher with what they need, when they need it.

I came to this model after reviewing what worked over the past academic year to date.

• Our new student CCHS YA Galley Group Blog.  New staff member and YALSA Teen's Top Ten Committee Chair, Jennifer Barnes (you can read Jennifer's blog here) worked with our passionate student readers to create a review blog for YA galleys. These students are credentialing themselves in their joy of reading and publishing to the world. My favorite part is they not only assign a number on a scale in their reviews, they describe the book as a food experience. An example from a recent student post: "The combination of terrible emotions and timeline, yet satisfying ending that gives those silly characters what they deserve add up to give the book 3 stars. Imagine a funny tasting candy that's nice to just crunch down on and finish."
  
• Our new ebooks aren't gaining as much traction as I would like, but this is okay. We are building the information infrastructure ahead of need. This is important behind the scenes work that will keep our school moving forward and well situated for the coming transition to a more digital learning environment.
  
• Introducing new, more user friendly databases is working. Text-to-speech functionality and UDL compliance are the nectar luring teachers to this one.
  
• Supporting teacher requests for more rigorous source evaluation skills for students is working.
  
• Supporting teachers in more rigorous citation expectations is working.
  
• Supporting teachers and special education staff requests for guidance in identifying and obtaining alternate versions for students with reading disabilities is working.
  
• Supporting students in media production to synthesize their learning is working. Our media lab is busier than ever and the role of learning commons staffed skilled in advanced media production more crucial than ever.
  
• Going to a paperless pass system, making life easier for faculty and more accountable for students, is working.
  
• Establishing the learning commons as a place for academic as well as community building activities is working.

All the things that have worked best so far this year have come from an organic need. They dovetailed with work already being done and/or served our community. Transformation has come by nurturing and tending to teachers and students based on a personalized approach that goes beyond good, responsive patron services. It is both more holistic and more effective.

So for the balance of the 2011 academic year, I am going organic. I'll be working in the fields alongside teachers and students, checking in on them, seeing what their needs are, and seeing how we can support them. The nutrients will be skills and resources, and the sunshine will be collegial service with a smile.

Wishing my fellow teacher-librarians an exciting 2011 filled with happiness, health, and a wonderful harvest in June.

Farmer Robin : )

      photo © 2010 Uberto | more info (via: Wylio)

BLC

The BLC 2010 Conference starts tomorrow, and I am raring to go!  Passionate teachers gathering to discuss/share/collaborate/plan to deliver a cutting edge, student-centered education for their students; it is an electric environment that charges me for the entire year. I will be part of a team of 20  K-12 educators attending from our schools, and am deeply grateful to work for a district that supports teachers in attending learning opportunities like this.

Usually conference going entails my laptop and a mad scramble for a seat by the LCD projector. Where there is a projector there is electricity, and there will also be people digging around under the table cloth looking for an outlet. I tend to live blog my notes, inserting links as I go, and then posting, errors and all. This really works for me, keeps me hyper-engaged in the speaker, and captures all the resources highlighted during the session. My conference posts support me all year as I cycle back for ideas and clarification from the conference.

This year I'll be bringing my iPad, and am a little nervous. Embedding links on the fly might be a little tougher. As much as I have explored the iPad, this might require me to do more in the way of post-production editing for posts. This will be akin to jumping off the dock.

Oddly, my trusty laptop died yesterday. I can't count the conferences, meetings, countries and digital adventures we went through together. It was actually tough to say goodbye. The white palm plate was grey and cracked. The keys as well. But the toolbar, bookmarks and Firefox extensions were perfection. I spent today with my new, pristine, shiny white laptop, rebuilding, reloading.  I switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. The changes have me a little less sure-footed, but that is OK. It was time to shake things up a little.

Feeling good, and ready to learn. Can't ask for more than that!

BLC Conference | November Learning

Phot credit:
Flickr Creative Commons
Cannonball!
Uploaded on July 20, 2007
by luna.nik

Only YOU can prevent helmet fires

The school year is a roller coaster ride that keeps accelerating.  By the time spring rolls around you hear words like "overwhelmed" and "overload".  My personal favorite is  "helmet fire", defined by Wikipedia as "an expression for a mental state characterized by unnaturally high stress and task-saturation and loss of situational awareness." The phrase originated with the military who said "the pilot is undergoing so much stress that his brain is on fire or smoke is coming out of his ears." Basically,  you have so much to do, and so many tasks to accomplish during a critical window that it is physically impossible to complete it all.  I think this describes a lot of teachers during the month of June!


Educational technology is often times the scapegoat of stressed teachers (and is a good example of the ideas put forward in the Information Gap).  Thoughtful professional development is required to nurture teachers and provide the support for continued growth in the quickly evolving world of information and education.

A lot of the skills and new literacies described in this excellent two minute video are found in the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner. As information and media specialists we have an obligation to provide leadership and thoughtful professional development opportunities for our colleagues during the summer.  Our teachers need us. Only YOU can put out helmet fires!




Source:
YouTube - Partnerships for Powerful Learning

Photo Credit:
Flickr Creative Commons: My Co-Pilot

Mind the Gap!

One of the challenges I face is channeling the quickly changing world of information and media technology into collaborative planning with teachers. Often times they seem overwhelmed with choice and the changes in assessment and management that come with incorporating many of the new tools and skills into their content goals. I get it. But how do I address this? How do I more effectively address their concerns and support their goals without stressing them out?

An example is NoodleTools, the powerful citation and note taking platform. Instead of passing out style sheets teachers, with my assistance, have to teach students how to create accounts, share them with the teacher, and go through the process of evaluating a resource and generating a citation. Then they must learn how to use the (brilliant!) note card feature take notes on their resource. After that there is the outline where they build the structure of their paper. This takes a different type of planning and time allocation, but the benefit is the teacher and I have access to student work and can monitor progress and intervene when necessary. This is about the teacher substituting "content time" with some "skills time".  Ultimately students complete the final paper more successfully. The first time is a real leap of faith, and not all are ready to hold my hand and jump.

Dr. George Loewenstein wrote a paper called The Information Gap in 1994 that neatly frames this dilemma, and it sure isn't isolated to school libraries. Luckily there is a neat 3 minute video interpretation put out by a blog called mondaydot that explains the theory and puts it in context with neat little animations.



So, back to my dilemma. I need to focus my collaborative efforts and teacher-directed professional development role on the size of the information gap. If the gap is too small it means I am not moving my students or staff forward. If I push new tools, skills and platforms too aggressively the gap becomes too large and fear sets in, causing them to draw back. Again, they will not move forward.

By keeping track of the tools, skills and platforms that I introduce and support, hopefully  the information gap will fall in that comfortable middle range. The goal is for students and teachers to continue to move productively, and happily, forward.

Source:
Stephen's Lighthouse: Mind the (Information) Gap

Photo credit:
EveryStockPhoto

12 Differences

A re-mix from thewikiman  on Doug Johnson' s original post Yesterday's libraries, tomorrows libraries - 12 differences. The use of Prezi in interpreting the post is very effective. This serves as a great self-reflection tool.

Yesterday's Librarians, Tomorrow's Information Professionals on Prezi

My toolbar

These are my daily tools, and this is how I work. Every single day my iGoogle page acts as my portal for work, play, and socializing. So, let's break it down. (You can click on the image for a clear enlargement.)

The upper toolbar holds the bookmarks I use most often. Google Wave is still in beta, and I play here, seeing what it can do and how it might be used by students and teachers. Once it is opened for general use I can see it as an ideal collaborative space for group project work. My blogging tools are Blog This, Blogger Dashboard, Share on FaceBook and Flickr Creative Commons. I can grab interesting posts from my RSS feed and quickly add them to a post to blog about later, or even just to re-visit and think about and try. Of course, a picture tells a thousand words and Flickr Creative Commons is my one-stop shop for great images I can use with attribution.

The next bar is for Diigo, a FREE social networking site designed for researchers. The Diigo toolbar allows me to grab a website or blog post, annotate it on the live web, attach digital sticky notes, archive it for later use, save it to lists, and if I want I can share it with my Diigo network. Every morning I get an email from my Diigo groups with articles that have been shared by other educators and researchers. The generosity of the Diigo community is a large source of information, most recently from a guy in the U.K. who has been sharing wonderful European primary source sites. I follow lists for school librarians, Web 2.0 Educators, History and English Teachers and a couple of others. Each morning (at the ridiculous hour of 5:30am)  I have my tea, listen to the weather, ignore the dogs, and go through my Diigo updates. Right then I will pull out valuable resources and post them to the library wiki. This allows us to keep enriching our  portal to be a true 24/7 support and resource for students.

After Diigo comes the YoLink toolbar. Another FREE resource, this facilitates deep web searching in a very elegant, easy to use way. As a case study, if you look carefully you can see I accessed Google Scholar (academic sources - terrific resource!) to search "Brecht" and "anti-colonialism", used YoLink to help with the search, and annotated the site using Diigo. YoLink plays beautifully with other applications and also archives searches and sites for notation. If they would partner with NoodleTools life would be perfect in research land. (Why I was searching Brecht and anti-colonialism is another story that involves my college age daughter, a late hour call and a fast approaching deadline.)

Finally you can see the tabs I had open at the time, which are generally always the tabs I have open. Google Docs holds my library documentation, primarily the forms we created to track library data and lesson plans. These forms keep our data organized and churn out beautiful little graphs that I can share on a moment's notice. At this point Google has so much information about me they could create a clone and nobody would ever notice. I got over that reality awhile ago.

And Facebook. I check in quite a bit and use this for professional as as well as personal connections. Awhile ago a library colleague from central Massachusetts recommended a friend. I had never met this person but over Facebook we developed a lively friendship based on similar humor and a mutual (slightly manic) addiction to quizzes. This online friendship resulted in Anita (hi, Anita!) spending professional days observing in the CCHS Library and we will be attending the ALA Mid-Winter conference in Boston together.

There is always something new to try, to play with, to learn. I am connected to smart people who care passionately about learning and generously share this wealth. Our students and staff are the beneficiaries.

Now, about Brecht and anti-colonialism...

Planting Seeds: How to Create Sustainable Technology Professional Development

MassCue Session 2 – 11:15 – 12:10
III. Planting Seeds: How to Create Sustainable Technology Professional Development
John Doherty, Asst. Superintendent, Reading PS

(PD= Professional Development)

Students and teachers are the same – now more stuff is free.

Why the change? Quick pace of technology change. Teachers are freaking out. Reading is in a time of transformational change right now.
Global changes in world or work, information, increased impact of media.
MEDIA CENTERS HAVE CHANGED and are hearts of technology and training for LMS – kids go to libraries first to look for something.

Voluntary 6 credit class:
Expanding the Boundaries of Teaching and Learning
Teachers who take this get tech infusion and laptop. Started the “buzz” in Reading. Initiated culture change because people are developing new language, staff are reading the same books.

Lots of blogging for staff and students to share thoughts. Info in new books being disseiminated and talked about.

Partnership for 21st century skills – keeps learning standards as always but incorporates new unique skills.
Wagner’s 7 Survival Skills – what works best for kids?
Keep PD central when considering learning needs of students.

What is at stake?
• Future of our economy
• Strength of our democracy
• Health of planets ecosystem
• Is it sustainable?

Kaplan University / Talent - good inspirational video advocating for educational change

How do we reach these new learners?
Transformational Leadership
(need energy, accept risks, don’t stop student learning)
• Realize the vision at all costs
• Organization is a moral system
• Reflects core values
• Leaders must walk the walk
• Action consistent with vision
• Risk taking encouraged and welcomed
• Symbolic communication important
• Leaders actions are beyond normal and outside the rules of self interest
• Look at educational change systemically
• Lot of work to organize path forward

Setting directions
• Vision
• Goals
• Practices
• Expectations

Developing people
• Intellectual stimulation
• Individualize support
• Modeling professional practices
• Values

Redesigning Organization
• Developing collaborative culture
• Creating structures to foster participation in school decisions
• Creating productive community relationships
• Get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus
o The wrong people are the ones you need to actively watch

Reading is under-staffed, like everyone else. Moving forward the best way possible, keeping positive, and support as much as possible.
Collaborative culture is helping save time and moving training forward.

Maintenance costs very high so keep reserves to keep tools available for teachers.
Reading has 5 year plan of growth and success to validate their plan.

The key is changing the culture – it won’t happen overnight. Talk about technology all the time. Keep up the mantra. Talk about positives to highlight and keep from getting bogged down in the problems, important to culture.

1. Work with community to develop/change mission and vision – these may/will change.

• i. Develop the process, working with stakeholders – ongoing evaluation and course correction.

2. Develop and maintain infrastructure – budgets make this tough. Might have to choose spending on network above other instructional tools (ex textbooks) but the network gave more bang for the buck.
3. Identify tech gurus in district and develop a plan. Make your plan a working document. Don’t print it and put it on the shelf. Use Google doc.
4. Identify resources to upgrade and maintain.

• Outreach to parents/community highlighting student work.

• http://donorschoose.org/

5. Put tech tools in hands of right people (Concord already did this for everybody)
6. Provide access outside of school time

• Community/Parents – classes for community

• Teachers

• Students

7. District leaders model use of technology – the whole shebang. Use it anticipating that it will always be changing. Need to learn new apps all the time, teach the skills/conventions that are portable.

• Use tech in admin meetings

• Start discussion of 1:1 computing in school

• See how other districts are using technology

8. Get Administration on board – Already on board in Concord!

• Run admin only trainings

• Run admin book group

• Visit districts that use tech effectively

What should learning look like?
Change the classroom – Alan November – build teams