Summer Professional Development Part One: NAMLE

I had two great new professional development experiences this summer, so in chronological order..

Instead of going to ALA or ISTE this summer, I joined NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education, and attended their  conference in Torrance, California. I thought it looked interesting, and it was only a 25 minute drive from home, so why not go?
I am glad I tried something new because I learned so much about a diverse group of people who care about media literacy, why they care, and what they are doing about it. NAMLE is a very helpful organization with a ton of quality resources. It was a small conference all in one hotel, and it was packed with interactive sessions, conversations, keynotes, and connections. Attendees were college professors and students of media literacy, producers of systems of teaching media literacy, makers of media in a variety of formats, teachers, researchers, and more.  I was a bit disappointed that I didn't find very many librarians there, because I think we really care quite a lot about media literacy, but I did meet a few (including Rutgers assistant professor Rebecca Reynolds and fabulous high-tech children's librarian Cen Campbell).  Aren't we school librarians often the ones on campus teaching elements of media literacy? Don't you teach (or at least try to get in the curriculum!) about copyright, evaluating information, visual literacy, digital citizenship, and how to be skeptical about information in all formats?
Here is an overview of my conference experience:

Keynote #1:
I have a new Jewish heroine and she is Tiffany Shlain. She spoke about how she makes cloud movies, how to make change through film, how she is helping nonprofits make videos, and she shared her family's unplugged Shabbats, even though this is her medium for her work and creativity! Her site is letitripple.org. Here is her keynote presentation:



Keynote #2:
Jim Berk, CEO of Participant Media, was the other keynote, and he was also inspiring and full of information I can bring back to school.  I am very excited about pivot.tv  in particular. And I love the movies made by Participant Media so I am glad to know more about the company.




The sessions I attended were interesting and worth while as well. Here is a sampling:

I heard about three fabulous girl-led activism organizations involved with media, from Dana Edell, Executive Director of SPARK Movement, Jennifer Berger, Executive Director of About Face
and Dana Hernandez from the  Training Institute for Hardy Girls Healthy Women. These women and their organizations will be great resources for me to inspire the girls I work with and with a new class I am teaching second semester about using social media for social good.

I learned from Chris Sperry about Project LookSharp and how to use constructivist media decoding in classes. This type of conversation with a group of students takes practice, and I hope to start practicing in the fall!

Bonnie Nishihara (technology director) and Joe Harvey (head of school) from Saint Mark's School, an independent school in California, and Cyndy Scheibe (from Project LookSharp)  gave a great overview of how they made media literacy a priority and have integrated it into their K-8 curriculum purposefully and successfully.

Near the closing of the conference, Renee Hobbs led us in an exercise to define what the term media literacy means to all of us. Using brainstorming, collaborating, and hundreds of post it notes, the group came up with lots of ideas. I would love to try to re-create this exercise with school librarians someday.

I think the next NAMLE conference will be in the Spring of 2015 - I hope to see you there! School librarians need to attend this conference to show what we are teaching about media literacy, and to learn what others outside of librarianship are doing. Web/information evaluation, digital citizenship, decoding images, copyright and Creative Commons - it is all a part of it.

Independent School Magazine: The New School Library

The New School Library via kwout

So many people, even at our own schools, don't really know what we do. In this article we tried to help non-librarians at Independent schools form more current views of school librarianship and understand how librarianship and school libraries have evolved into the school centers they are today.

Pondering E-books, Memory, and Moonwalking

Image: 'The Labyrinth of memory' 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36263437@N08/5285629858

Found on flickrcc.net

I am fascinated by the recent articles about relating current brain research and reading e-books, like this article from Scientific American by Ferris Jabr, who writes the following:

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text. 

The article is much longer and points to other areas where e-reading is often less desirable than reading the printed page, but this area stuck me the most.
During Thanksgiving weekend of 2011, I read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. I often marvel at those people with fabulous memories and I wonder how they do it. How do you memorize so many numbers of Pi? How do you memorize cards during card tricks and gambling? One technique that Foer shares from the centuries of memory masters  (he calls contemporary ones mental athletes) is that they visualize a home or a building they know really well and place their memories in locations in the house (or memory palace). Then, they can tour through the house and have this mental map, which gives context to the details they are memorizing. Sometimes instead of a home, mental athletes will image something else, a streetmap they know well, or the human body, "so long as there is some sense of order that links one locus to the next, and so long as they are intimately familiar" (97). One person could have many memory palaces, one for each thing being remembered.

This type of memorization technique must be somehow related to the "mental maps" above that Jabr writes about in Scientific American. Perhaps the physical space of a book naturally helps our brains remember the stories better. Thinking of a book as a structure, or memory palace, and knowing where events happen, and what details occur on what page, probably helps with remembering and context. I wonder if the memory masters Foer writes about prefer e-books or print books for learning.

Teaching Citing: The Importance of Individual Attention

This month I spent a lot of time assessing some of what I teach the kids. I haven't done a lot of this in the past, and I am seeing the the fruits of my labor now. Believe me, it has been a lot of new work. But it is so worth it! Here is an overview:

 A teacher asked me to grade some of her works cited sheets from her seniors, and while grading I realized we were failing in how we were trying to teach them how to cite using NoodleTools. Maybe failing is too strong a word.. Some students did well, some didn't, either because they didn't put in the effort, or they didn't know how. They also didn't know I'd be grading it, so senioritis could be part of the problem.

In response, I changed tactics this year with how I teach citing to 9th graders. It is now much more individual in approach. As we embarked on our third project of the year, I did show them briefly how to cite reprinted articles - the last new piece of citing we do as a group. But instead of spending a lot of time on it, I made some quick citing videos: What is a Reprint and How to Cite it, and How to Cite from Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Then, as I did in two other projects this year, I gave them individual feedback online in NoodleTools to their working bibliographies.  I told them if their sites weren't academic, I told them if they didn't understand how to cite the items. I gave them feedback online, and met with several individually either on their free time or in class "workshops" where they could work at their own pace and ask either me or their teacher for help. Then I had them turn in a paper works cited to me and I graded the 120 works cited lists using a rubric which included citing skills from our few years together.

The kids enjoyed this new approach and individualized instruction. Who wants to listen to a lesson about citing or do citations in the abstract? They need to know it when they need it, and I need to be there for them. They have to know when to ask for help - and what to ask. I got to know many of them much better, and I feel like they trust me and know I care about them. They know citing is not exciting, but they also know it is one of my responsibilities to help them understand why and how  to do it. I am excited to see how their skills last as they continue in the upper school. Will their lists of Works Cited be as dismal as the ones I graded from our seniors? Or will this new "worshop" approach work better for them?

I am also in the midst of grading 10th grade blogs. Each 10th grader made blogs during a UN Simulation activity, and I am part of the grading team. I just make sure they are citing quality sources and using proper Creative Commons images on their blogs, with appropriate captions. The tenth graders with more research and Creative Commons experience are doing better than the others, demonstrating that practicing information literacy and digital ethics helps you over time.
 

An interesting side observation:
The most important part of citing is knowing what you are looking at and trying to cite. For the first time this year I had several students think they had the paper copy of a newspaper article for example, because they had printed it out. So they chose print, when actually they were citing a database newspaper article. Interesting.. I long for the day when none of this will matter anymore.

Library Sleepover!

A recent Friday night was our 11th annual Upper School Library Sleepover. Originally started by students, I was ready to let this tradition retire with the previous librarian, who retired last year and chaperoned and organized this event for a decade. The students who thought of it as a Brentwood School tradition, however, demanded we do it again, and I am so glad we did! As soon as I advertised the event one time at assembly, it was full, with over 20 students wanting to attend. Members of the Student Library Advisory Council (SLAC-ers) decided we would read Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and watch the BBC Sherlock version of the Sherlock Holmes novella. One senior created a role-play mystery game for us to solve, which we did at 1:00 AM. She creatively invented characters related to the novella, and gave us each clues on paper made to look old, complete with  wax seals. A tenth grader shared that the “library overnight was a great way to bond and meet new people ... My favorite part was when some people summarized the first half of the book by performing an interpretive dance version. Overall, I had a ton of fun, and I'm definitely excited for next year.” We set up our sleeping bags in front of the TV at around 1:30 AM and most of us were asleep by 3:00. It was a night of laughter, acting, books, mystery, and new friends,  and we are glad to keep the tradition going for another decade.

So many of our kids excel at sports or drama, where they get to have parties - end of season parties or cast parties - with their peers who have similar interests. I was honored to have a party for the students who love to celebrate stories, and I was happy to bring them together. Our foreign exchange student from China came too, and it was so fun for her to enjoy the craziness of the teens being up most of the night. Next year I think we are going to read excerpts from Pride and Prejudice and watch the Lizzie Bennet Diaries - we supported the Kickstarter project and bought the DVD already!

9th Graders Prefer Print Books

I work in a 1:1 iPad environment. All of our 9-12 grade students have iPads. I have slowly been collecting a fiction and pleasure reading e-book library with Baker and Taylor's Axis 360. Currently my Magic Wall has about 120 books.

This semester's 9th grade students in Human Development class  have a reading assignment.  They are going to read a fiction young adult novel of their choice, as long as it has a human development-y theme (identity, sexuality, divorce, family issues, drugs, addiction, cutting, romance, teen pregnancy, etc). In a month or two we are going to have a book party with refreshments, where they will present creative interpretations of the books - slide shows, playlists, collage, painting, monologue - whatever they want to do to celebrate and share the book.

This week I have seen this as an opportunity to teach Axis360. I show them e-books in our collection to read  by Chris Crutcher,  David Levithan, and other important authors. I also have print books for the students to check out. Can you guess how many students decided to use the e-books? Answer: about three out of sixty.

The students use their iPads for so much: e-textbooks, assignments, games, everything. I thought this was a great opportunity to teach how to access our e-books, and the students checked out print books. With e-books nobody can see what you are reading, there are no real scary due dates, you won't lose the book, you can read it in the dark (on the iPad).

The teacher thought maybe they like having a print book because it becomes almost like a transitional object when they are getting really into the book. Was she comparing it to a comfort blanket? I think so, and I love the comparison! The kids are attached to the book. They don't want the book for fun to be attached to their other stressful school work, perhaps. I understand that too. 

Providing e-books for this population isn't really taking off the way I had expected. But I am a bit delighted with their attachment to the print book. 

Coming up next: The Library Overnight - will the 20 students attending want to read the free e-book book on their iPads, or do they want the print book? Find out in the next post! 

6 Word Story Contest

I have been looking for ways to make the library a hub for a growing community of writers at Brentwood School, so on the heels of NaNoWriMo, and before the yearly spring short story contest, I was ready for another writing incentive.


The idea for this contest came from Kate Hammond, librarian at Perkiomen School, who sent out her idea for a multi-school 6 word story contest via the listserv for AISL, the Association of Independent School Librarians. I responded, and the 6 Word Story Contest was born. Brentwood School community members competed against each other, with 223 entries, submitted via a Google form embedded on the library blog. A committee from Perkiomen School judged our entries as we judged theirs. The students who participated eagerly awaited the results.


The winners from both schools were announced on twitter a couple of weeks ago. The librarians enjoyed slowly tweeting out all the winners, @bwslibrary tweeted the Perkiomen School winners, and @perklibrarian tweeted the Brentwood School winners.


We had 3 faculty winners, 3 middle school winners, and 5 upper school winners from each school. The results were tweeted (see the twitter stream here). I look forward to holding this contest again next year!