23 Things: So Far, So Fun

This week is the kick off for our 23 Things program. 23 Things is an online professional development training course about web 2.0 tools. The 3 librarians and 3 educational technologists from our k-12 school teamed up to create a 10 week 23 Things course that we tailored to our community and the online resources we use at our school as well as other free resources worth playing with. So far we have 52 people signed up - teachers, administrators, staff, and maintenance workers. This week is dedicated to getting everyone into our Schoology (our classroom management system)  course and introducing themselves. People are making friends and connections already by commenting on each others' short introductions which include our roles at the schools, a fun fact, and favorite cookie. I have learned a lot just by the favorite cookie answers, which was a surprise!
Our school is on two campuses so sometimes we don't know many of our colleagues. I am hoping that this course, along with teaching new skills and giving time to play on line, will also bring our community closer together.

The six leaders of the 23 Things course have been collaborating for several months while we decided what 23 Things to teach, who wanted to take which things and write those lessons, and now how to organize looking after, or mentoring, a surprising 52 participants. We have decided to randomly split up the list, each taking 8-9 participants to shepherd through the course. We will check in on them, make sure they are completing the courses, and give them comments on their blogs.

One of the fun ideas that came up in a planning meeting in June was to style each short lesson as a dinner party. So, each lesson has a particular format:

SET THE TABLE: This is where you get a background for a Thing.

MAIN COURSE: Thing lesson.

 SIDE DISHES : A few links and more information related to the Thing. 

BRING YOUR DISH TO THE TABLE: A detailed activity for you to do, so you get experience with the Thing (often involving creating an account or making a blog post).

KICK IT UP A NOTCH: This is like extra credit for go getters. If you want to do more with the Thing, do this optional activity. 

DESSERT: Reflection, usually a discussion in Schoology (this will be located in a discussion thread that is in the same week's folder as the Thing).

Week One, Thing One, is making a Blogger blog to be used as a platform for many of our exercises. I am going to use this blog as my 23 Things Blog, so I can comment on our lessons and reflect on how the course is going. So, if you are instituting something like this at your school, stay tuned! I will write about many of the things and do the lesson exercises here, while also reflecting on the process of leading this type of professional development.

During this time I will also continue with the Maker Break program we are doing. We have Legos out this week, and some upper schoolers seemed interested but nothing too fabulous has happened so far. We had more success with origami, where we had specific things for them to make. See pictures and notes on twitter or instagram (bwslibrary).

Have you run or participated in a 23 Things course? Have any tips for us? Thanks!

NoodleTools - in the Parent Newsletter

I am trying to make our library more visible by writing semi-regularly for the school's K-12 online newsletter, which is sent out by email blast every Friday. I figure if parents read about the library maybe once per month, they might come to define the library as we do, as an active teaching and learning space enriched by collaboration, technology, and information in all formats, not just a warehouse of books.  This article I co-wrote with Yapha Mason, our Lower School Librarian, and it came out in today's newsletter, immediately after the lead story.

NoodleTools: It's Not About Pasta
by Elisabeth Abarbanel and Yapha Mason, Librarians

Changes in the research process in the past decade might make what your child is doing look foreign to you. For instance, almost every 3rd to 12th Grade research project has a NoodleTools element. What is NoodleTools, you ask? It is online software that supports all aspects of the research project, from organizing sources to note-taking to a final bibliography or works cited. The librarians have worked with the teachers to integrate this online tool to make the process collaborative and much easier than when we were all in school.
In the Lower Division, our students start to cite their sources using NoodleTools in 3rd Grade. They learn the basics of citation with one book from their ocean animal report. In 4th through 6th Grade they are expected to cite all of their sources, and they learn the different pieces of information needed when it is a book, encyclopedia, web site, interview, or even an iPad app. Ms. Mason works with the students on how valuable it is to keep track of the sources used, and the best ways to accomplish this. We teach the MLA format for citing at Brentwood School, preparing the Lower Division students for their research on the East Campus.


On the East Campus, all 7th graders receive an introduction to citing using NoodleTools. They can then start taking notes using the online notecard feature, which is required in 8th and 9th Grade. Imagine typing your notecards and storing them in “the cloud” where they can’t be lost or left at home by mistake, and are never too messy to read. Students invite their teachers to access their work cited lists and notecards, and the teachers can comment online to offer help and dialog about the process. When working on group projects, students can also collaborate with each other in NoodleTools.

As the research process gets more complex, students learn more and more citing and note-taking tips. Have you ever had to cite a YouTube video or a Tweet? Brentwood students graduate feeling confident they can cite any piece of information, regardless of the format. The students don’t have to worry about the particular punctuation or format of the work cited list (NoodleTools does it for you), and can use their time instead to think critically about the research. Already a scholar’s dream, NoodleTools is going through an update this summer and it should be even easier to keep track of sources and information in the fall.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact Elisabeth Abarbanel (East Campus) or Yapha Mason (West Campus) or look at our NoodleTools online help here: http://bwscampus.libguides.com/NoodleTools

Collaborative Group Work: Thoughts

Just a quick post -
I keep thinking about this opinion piece from last week's New York Times. It's important to remember introverts, or even just kids who are a bit shy or quiet, when assigning group work. Of course, it is important for students to learn how to work with others and have their voices heard. But it also important for them to have the chance to work alone and create, without pushy classmates stifling their ideas.

 And, on a related note,  I have to remember that the library study carrels are needed. Our students use the 40 library study carrels all day. I have to do a better job at keeping other students quiet while near them. Will we have a backlash about our libraries that are getting louder and louder with collaboration? Are we focusing too much on the kids who enjoy collaboration while not paying enough to those who enjoy quiet and solitary work? In our big one-room library this might be the case. I wonder how I can please everyone.

LibGuides: Collaborative Aspects

So many of us now use LibGuides and love the ease, consistency, and clarity of them. But are we really using them to their potential as collaborative information sources? Most of the ones I have seen are being used as information dissemination portals, using the LibGuide as a platform for links to databases, books, and even videos. So much better than our paper or web pathfinders of earlier decades, but they are still a one-sided educational tool.

Are we really using LibGuides to their greatest "2.0" capabilities? Easy to use boxes can be added that allow for not only user ratings of links, but interactive polls, feedback boxes, and, most interesting and least used (as far as I can tell) user link submissions.

Some libraries use these boxes, but how can we get kids to participate?

Our 7th graders research the people and cultures of Middle Eastern countries in order to write a first person creative piece. Over the past few years we have built a Google Custom Search Engine for this project (I wrote about it before), and put it on the LibGuide.

I ask the students to participate in this endeavor by submitting links to the LibGuide for their friends to use. This has been relatively successful, and by that I mean maybe eight kids have submitted links this year so far. I might ask the teachers to make submitting links mandatory next year, to help us build a good database in the Google Custom Search Engine, but also to show the kids that we want to collaborate, that they often find great sites to use for research, and that their research is worth sharing.

When the students submit links, they are asked for their name and email as well as the title of the link and the url. I tell kids to only put their first name (privacy), and that the email address doesn't get posted. Then I receive an email telling me I can preview the link before I either reject or post it. This is helpful, so kids take it seriously and really only post worthy sites. It also lets me look at the sites they are finding so I can potentially help them if I see they are somewhere they might not really want to be. After I post the link, at a later date, I add the link to our custom search engine, to be used by others in later years. 















On other LibGuides, we ask the kids how they like the LibGuide, or which database is most useful via polls, but the voting is minimal.

 

I poked around a bit in LibGuides and I found that Juliet Kerico, librarian at Southern Illinois University's LoveJoy Library, has had some success with this type of collaboration with students.

Home - Biology - LibGuides at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville via kwout

Have you had any interesting collaboration experiences with students using these features? If so, how did you entice students to vote and participate?

Blog Post about Using a Blog to Teach about Blogging. Wait, what?

Monday at the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) 2010 Southern Regional Meeting at Campbell Hall School, I presented about blogging using Blogger with Joon Kim, one of the educational technologists and computer science teacher at my school.

 After working together for over a decade, Joon and I started experimenting  with using tools for expression and collaboration with the students. Along with co-teaching a wiki enhanced research project to our 8th graders, we teach blogging to most of the tenth graders, and we co-sponsor a student life blog. It felt like a natural decision to do a presentation for CAIS together.

The presentation and hands-on session was called Blogging Inside and Outside the Classroom, and we presented from a fairly simple blog. Joon had the great idea of using pre-prepared articles which we posted onto the blog as we started talking about the topics, just to show how it all worked. We traded off speaking, and then co-taught the hands-on part so the approximately 25 attendees could have lots of individual instruction. The students can return to the blog to revisit the lesson.

Although we could have used another half-hour (it was already 90 minutes!), and I started rushing near the end and neglected one small part completely,  I think we got people off to a thoughtful and productive start. I enjoyed the way Joon and I collaborated, and I think it made us an even stronger team in the classroom for our students.  Presenting about blogging also prompted us to us reflect about our blogs and our teaching, which I suppose is one reason schools like teachers to present at conferences.
All in all, it was a great experience in collaboration, reflection, teaching, and blogging.  If you haven't yet tried presenting at a conference, try it out at a local conference to see if you like it. You may surprise yourself at what you learn.