We’ve been on summer break for just over a week now and I’m feeling sufficiently rested to sit down and write again.
Book returns
The end of the school year is always a busy time for librarians with the dual task of getting overdue books back and making sure that students have enough of the right books in their hands to entice them to do some reading over the summer. It really is a dichotomy – the students who most need to read more are the ones who have the hardest time keeping track of books – probably because they just borrow because they’re being told to do so and then promptly put the books somewhere never to be found again. And then of course when they become overdue it’s a fuss and bother and they are even less inclined to borrow.
Inventory
The big tasks include doing inventory – something we’ve turned more into a continual process so by the end of the year it’s more just following up on missing items – often they return – from students (or more often returned by nannies or parents) who consider going past the circulation desk as being optional. Unfortunately being in the middle east certain types of books also just disappear depending on the heat of current rhetoric – or in the case of this year actual bombing going on.
Core Collection
With our ELA (English Language Arts) department I’ve been very busy creating our new “Core Library Books” for the coming year (Grade 6; Grade 7; Grade 8)
And, continuing the tradition started last year, promoting them first with our middle school faculty. I’ll do a separate blog on the result of the core collection this year.
Summer reading
This also feeds into our Summer Reading Libguide which we try to promote as much as possible with students and parents. A few of the ELA classes had their students explore the guide and the various reading lists in detail and then make their own reading goals based on the lists and then email their parents with their reading plans and either borrow the books or request parents purchased them for the summer. I was also on hand with Sora Marketplace open to purchase the eBook or Audiobook for the students who wanted a digital copy. Our summer reading borrowing guideline is “as many books as you need and know you can take care of and return after the break“
Annual Report
The most arduous task at the end of the year, and one which it seems many international school librarians have more or less given up on, is creating the annual report. I can see why people stop doing this. With declining borrowing / reading it can be quite a depressing exercise. It’s also remarkably difficult to get good data our of our systems. Follett Destiny is a dreadful platform to get good data from – in contrast with other systems. I was reading Rutger Bregman’s “Moral Ambition” (see video below) around the same time, and came across the concept of vanity metrics – basically just putting together data that makes you look good. With that at the back of my mind, putting the report together (Annual Report 2024-25) became this exercise in trying to show both that the situation with reading is not great while trying to show that as librarians and teachers we’re doing our darnest to turn the tide and hopefully all is not lost. And even when we lose in reading perhaps we’re making inroads in research. Much as I hated studying business / accounting and was glad to escape being financial person it did put me in good stead for being able to work with data.
I’m planning on doing a bit more blogging this break, so keep coming back! Comment on any topics you’d like to see covered.
International Mother Tongue Day is next week Friday, but my students and I will be embarking on their annual Week Without Walls trip so I’m a week early with this post – hopefully it will be of some use to those of you planning on celebrating it in the library. I will be upfront about my objection to it being called Mother Tongue Day – as it denies all the families where the language of other significant family members are spoken at home. I prefer the term “home language”. This year is the silver jubilee of the event. Despite all efforts, languages are becoming extinct at an ever increasing rate, and unfortunately this doesn’t attract quite as much attention as pictures of cute or not so cute animal. Schools and other educational institutions are complicit in this – something I’ve been banging on about for years, the lack of multiple-lingual home and heritage language education I still see as a failure of imagination rather than a failure of resources in this day and age. Ok, off my soap box and back to the practical.
These lists started with a casual conversation with KD as to what I had planned for the day, as my passion for language is well known. Which led to a discussion on which books one would consider and then, as usual things got a little out of hand and now I have 9 pages of posters of books that feature language. Language in all its glorious and inglorious forms. Learning language, struggling with a language, speaking or not speaking. Sign language. Heritage language. Language and thought, language and power or control. Selective mutism. Denial of language, erasure and extinction of language.
As for what to do – if I were here, these are the things I would do.
Have big sheets of paper our where the community could write down the languages they speak / read / write. The languages they’re learning. The languages of their fathers, mothers, grandparents.
I’d have them make a language family tree. Have a poster with a QR code that led to this quirky test on Language.
As usual here is the link to the template / books used. In return I’d love some comments on the books you recognise and the link to language! And any displays or activities you’re planning. And of course if you have suggestions of books I’ve missed I’d appreciate you adding them in a comment.
At times people will write to me and ask about things in library-land where they assume that somehow I or the (highly regarded) school I’m at have managed to “get it right” and they, poor normal human shouldn’t be struggling as there is a magic formula or secret sauce that could help. Alas we’re all human and all schools are the same in having struggles, perhaps the only difference being in what they struggle with and how good their marketing and communications departments are in convincing that it is otherwise.
A couple of weeks ago someone asked me about implementing NoodleTools as a citation tool in a school and how to do it. I promised a blog article as I said it wasn’t a simple thing. Ironically just yesterday I had to sincerely offer my apologies to a colleague as I had put zeal in front of our relationship around just that topic. So this is as much a “how to” as a “proceed with caution.
In the information literacy landscape, citations are a sub-topic of academic integrity. Any student who has passed through my hands in the last in the last 10 years will tell you I use the “brushing teeth” analogy with citations. As in – “you don’t just brush your teeth before you go to the dentist” you need to brush them regularly / daily. And I tell them about when I was grading Masters’ students at university how many had an absolute crisis just before submission as they didn’t have a works cited list. Heck I’ve known adult PhD students in a similar situation (and even out of perhaps misplaced righteousness refused to be paid to do it for them). It’s a nice analogy – especially when you add the idea of decayed teeth! It’s also a nice analogy because citations are what Herzberg (1959) would refer to as “hygiene factors” – ie. related to ‘the need to avoid unpleasantness’.
Now to take this a step further – parents and caregivers generally start helping very young children brush their teeth before they even have teeth, with special rubber gadgets they put on their fingers, and it’s even suggested to start early visits to the dentist to acclimatise kids to the idea of having dental checkups. Bear with me. Citations are not just a sub-topic of academic integrity, they’re part of the threshold concept in information literacy of “scholarly discourse”. Now in many areas of life, we learn how to “do” before we learn or understand “why” we do. When my kids were in Chinese Bilingual school aged 6-8 years, they learnt the San Zi Jing (三字經) and some of the three hundred Tang dynasty poems by heart without any comprehension of what they really meant – occasionally to my horror when I saw the translations of filial and patriarchal piety. Not being the kind of person or parent who ever takes things for granted I spent a lot of time trying to understand the mechanisms and reasons for this “learning by heart” and the best I could conclude was just like the English “Grammar” stage of the “Trivium” the ideas is that memorisation is best done at an early age so that logic and rhetoric (analysis and synthesis) can happen later.
So to bring this back to citations – the idea is to initially use a citation tool with pre-selected types and qualities of resources, and the students learn the steps of citing correctly and at a certain point this is expanded to understand what how these resources were selected, what scholarly discourse means along with the other threshold concepts.
Our school has chosen NoodleTools as the citation tool – you can see a set of slides I made on “5 reasons why to use it) including the ability to create inboxes for teachers to follow the process and it’s pedagogical merits of guiding students to make sure they have all the bits and pieces of a good citation. Now do all teachers and students love using it. No. Definitely not. There are a lot of things in education that are absolutely no fun initially but still somehow need to occur. The “hygiene” stuff I’d posit we want to create friction around initially so that they avoid the “unpleasantness” later. Under that heading I’d place things like times-tables, handwriting, spelling, vocabulary, learning facts etc. Now a funny thing about these things is that students will always grumble and grouse about them, but when they master the skills they are so disproportionally happy and proud of it. I notice that in the corridor talk. When in G6 they first encounter citations and NoodleTools they’re all jokey and will call me “Ms NoodleTools” in the hallway. After a couple of times, if teachers consistently use it in their research projects and I’m in the lessons refining and reminding – or rather getting them to do that – they’ll stop me – particularly the boys – and say “Ms, I did it, right? I could tell everyone in the class how to put a book/video/ website into NoodleTools!”
Why is NoodleTools suboptimal so much for so many people? Well, it’s what I’d call an MS-DOS tool. The UX (user experience) is just not what our typical Generation Alpha students or Millennial teachers are used to (or deserve). 12 point font and having to find the right box to click and bits hidden behind drop down menus are not the rizz. PalmPilot back in the 90’s already knew that users didn’t want to have to click several times in order to get to where they wanted to go.
Compare MyBib.com interface and adding a book below – two steps, both visible:
to NoodleTools – twelve steps in 7 consecutive screens (is it any wonder my kids are so proud of remembering it all and getting it right!) – see more here:
Of course there are a myriad of other citation tools, but these are the two more common ones in the secondary school landscape that are not predatory / try to sell you an essay along with your citations or steal your data / information?
So why not go for my.bib – and rather choose Noodletools IMHO? Well:
it’s not great with identify the Author and Date of sources – all these tools scrape the metadata from the sites you’re using and lazy webmasters and programmers won’t necessarily bother putting these in, or won’t identify them correctly with the correct tags.
It doesn’t play nice with databases, you need to export the citation in RIS or BibTex format and import it into your MyBib bibliography – where as NoodleTools have managed to integrate themselves into most of the common databases we use, including Credo, Gale, Infobase, JSTOR etc.
It doesn’t have the same level of pedagogical step-by-step guidance and error identification (for example capitalisation which is very easy to get wrong)
Teachers can’t follow the research process through a shared “inbox” (and the great thing is in trans-disciplinary assignments the same project can be shared with two different teachers with different class groupings.
It doesn’t have a notecard / outline function
It doesn’t have the collaborative features of NoodleTools where you can also see exactly which student contributed which citations / notecards to a project – a great feature when it comes to the “not fair” arguments on work division
It doesn’t have the “history” feature which allows teachers to see the unfolding of the research and the instances of “immaculate conception” of perfect research papers and notecards
Although my.bib is free, NoodleTools is only a couple of hundred dollars for nearly 1,000 students i.e incredibly cheap for the extra features
You actually WANT to create friction in the research process – a source needs to be relevant and credible to merit inclusion in the research and if there are speed-bumps in putting the source in students may be less inclined to go down the WWW (world wild web) route of random googling and more inclined to use our databases and sources in our Libguides.
So how to implement / “sell” the system
Basically it’s a push-me pull-you gig. It helps to have it as part of your information literacy scope and sequence as “the only tool recognised”. If we are student centred it is important that adults set aside some of their preferences and independence so that one system is used and students can become competent and not be confused.
Some of it is persuading departments to adopt it for the above-mentioned reasons, despite it’s ugly UX and multi-step process. Offering to set up inboxes for teachers for research projects helps. As does creating project templates with outlines and tailored notecard headings.
Students need to be taught step by step how to use the tool, and it has to be re-iterated for each assignment and the librarian needs to be prepared to be on hand to help out as there is a very long tail of students becoming competent in its use. And simultaneous to the “doing” skill, the work in the “understanding” has to begin. Why does it matter if something has n.d (no date) or n.a (no author)? How does that correlate to credibility and reliability?
So there was the very long answer to what may have seemed like a simple question. It’s great for Grade 5 to Grade 12. And what do I use personally? Well, if I’m doing an academic paper or helping an adult (or Extended Essay student) sort out their research life I still go for Zotero. I pay for the extra storage even now I’m not a student anymore and I love the integration of in-text citations and Bibliography/Works Cited in Word and GoogleDocs.
I’m super late in sharing this presentation I gave the the L2L (Librarian to Librarian) workshop that I co-organised in Dubai in 2023.
Having worked in the Middle East for the first time, and with a predominantly muslim demographic meant I needed to get up to speed on what ensuring our collection mirrored our students would mean. Here are some suggestions – I’m no expert and have suggested links to people who are and whose guidance in this area was invaluable.
Here is the slideshow with some suggestions of books to add to a collection.
When my kids were very little, we lived in Spain, and since there wasn’t a local kindergarten, we’d drive about 30 minutes to the closest (Spanish) kindergarten and during that drive I’d have them listen to the wonderful Naxos collections. Besides learning about famous composers, great scientists and a bunch of other stories like Professor Branestawm who they could never get enough of, they also got a diet of Fairytales from Grimm, Andersen and Myths and Legends including Greek, Norse and Heroes and Heroines from Classic Tales. Neither of them remember much about living in Spain, and my daughter swears high and low she can’t speak a word of Spanish (despite 2 years immersion in it) but they remember the stories. And I still have the CDs. Perhaps as we continued to play them in the car on holidays and in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Today I’ve been making a poster of fractured fairytales in the fantasy genre. In a multi-cultural environment you can’t take for granted that students would have been exposed to some or even any of the tales that their educators grew up on, and I also did a bit of research on the types of (Western) fairytale collectors, editors and scribes and found this great little blog on some I was not aware of, or vaguely knew. When you look at the poster you can see the prolific Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm feature a lot (with over 200 tales and 10 children’s legends) as well as Hans Cristian Andersen’s 156 stories and Charles Perrault with his 8 Mother Goose tales punches above his weight in terms of retellings (thanks to Disney).
One of the most fantastic retellings ever of Little Red Riding Hood has to be the book “Picture this by Molly Bang” where she explains elements of Design using the tale. It’s one of the first books I buy in every library I work, if it’s not already on the shelves. Even if you ignore every other book in this post – that’s one to make sure you have in your collection!
As a parting note, as I was saying these are definitely a “western” view of fairy tales, when I was working at UWCSEA East with Katie Day and Maya Thiagarajan one of the amazing things they worked on was helping students recognise the “foundational texts” of their cultures. These are the texts that shape the culture and literature of that culture and that if you’ve not had the opportunity to access that text you may find it hard to read other works from that region because you’re not aware of the references, directly or indirectly. So for Western European culture it would be Aesop, Grimm and Anderson’s fairy tales, the Bible, Shakespeare, Austin etc. In India it would be the The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, in China it would be Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West. Students were tasked with researching their cultural legacies and this is the libguide (thanks to webarchive) that was co-created with their IB literature class. But that’s a poster and discussion for another time.
Like most school libraries I have a bunch of students who really like fantasy. But that’s a bit like saying they like chocolate. Chocolate is a blanket term that can mean different things to different people and tastes they do vary. Like my poster series for Dystopian fiction – I’m embarking slowly on a number of side projects to demystify other genres in the library so students can find the sub-genre they like most. These things take an enormous amount of time and thought and originally I wanted to present a “fait accompli” in my blog but decided as it would mean I wouldn’t be posting anything for just about forever, to do it page by page.
So the path I’m taking is, as usual being guided by my students and what they’re reading and asking for – which is why I started with “Fantastical Beasts – Dragons” because that’s what someone wanted today. Once I have a bunch of posters I’ll try and find a way to link them in some kind of flowchart / decision tree.
I’ve distinguished between YA and Middle Grade, as things can get quite spicy in the fantasy / romantasy etc realm – (you’ll notice my list doesn’t include the Fourth Wing (The Empyrean, #1) by Rebecca Yarros – yet). Usually I indicate whether a book is part of a series in my posters – however one of the great things about fantasy is that nearly all books are part of a series (I’ve generally chosen either the first in the series for my image or the most dragony title). Books is a series is the library equivalent of “all you can eat buffet” as with a little bit of luck the minute they’ve had a taste of the first book they just keep going.
So far, based on my collection and student interest I’ve identified the following areas, romantasy, dystopian, high/low fantasy, magic realism, paranormal, fracture fairytales, mythology, alt. history, animals / fantastical beasts, schools of magic.
Our Grade 7 students do a dystopian unit in their English Language Arts (ELA) class, and I came across this nifty categorisation in a poster by Jeri Hurd (sans the sub-pages / images). Since I find our students are increasingly stimulated by imagery, rather than just text, I adapted the poster to include 7 sub-posters combining the books in our collection to the suggestions.
It’s not always easy to find middle grade appropriate science fiction, so this collection includes some YA works – particularly in the “Zombie apocalypse” section.
During a recent library visit after the students had completed their bookclubs with their chosen books, we had tables set out with the posters and the related books so they could further explore the various sub-sets of the genre.
If you are really interested in Utopian / dystopian literature and have quite a few hours to spare (like in the upcoming Spring break) I’d highly recommend Pamela Bedore’s “Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature” from The Great Courses.
The cliche is totally true – a picture is worth a thousand words – but picture books with a few words – well they allow all the thoughts and emotions and sometimes the words to flow. Even in older students – perhaps especially in older students.
I’ve spent a lot of time and effort in curating and expanding our picture book collection in the middle/high school and I’m happy to say we now have over 500 books in that section. Today’s poster is picture books to make you think, and some of them still bring me to tears when I read them.
I was just passing our picture book shelf and decided the nonfiction picture books need a bit of love and attention. Here are a few I love for their amazing illustrations and beautiful messages written all within a couple of handfuls of pages.
Picture books are so like poetry – so much can be said with so few choice words. Which reminds me of a beautiful piece I read recently about poetry by Larson Langston
In English, we say: “I miss you.” But in poetry, we say: “I trace the shape of your absence in the spaces where your laughter used to linger, and let the echoes of you fill the hollow hours.”
In English, we say: “I don’t know how to let go.” But in poetry, we say: “I carry you in my chest like a stone— heavy, unyielding, and carved with the sharp edges of what once was.”
In English, we say: “I feel lost.” But in poetry, we say: “The compass of my heart spins wildly now, its needle drawn to places it can no longer call home.”
In English, we say: “I wish it were different.” But in poetry, we say: “I water the garden of could-have-beens with tears, waiting for flowers that refuse to bloom.”
In English, we say: “I hope you’re happy.” But in poetry, we say: “May the sun that warms your days be as kind to you as the first kiss of dew on the dawning light upon the leaves of the laurel that we once made love under”
In English, we say: “You hurt me.” But in poetry, we say: “You planted thorns in my chest with hands I once trusted, and now every breath feels like an apology I shouldn’t owe.”
In English, we say: “I wanted to stay.” But in poetry, we say: “I lingered at the edge of your world, a star burning quietly, unnoticed in your vast, indifferent sky.”
In English, we say: “I’m trying to move on.” But in poetry, we say: “I untangle your name from my veins each morning, only to find it woven into my dreams again at night.”
In English, we say: “I’ll be okay.” But in poetry, we say: “I gather the shattered pieces of myself like broken glass, knowing someday, even scars can catch the light.”
With poetry I write paths through gardens of grace with words in ways my body dare not go as a whole.
I am thinking a LOT about AI. My participation in thinking and reading as a factor of my actual usage would be something in the realm of 1 million to 1 at the moment. Save for some tedious bits and pieces like analysing surveys and the occasional laziness in making very short book summaries (which I then have to correct extensively anyway) I’m just not feeling the joy. Please do not construe in any way that I am therefore “feeling the fear”. No. I’m just spending a lot of time exploring and thinking about it. And what it means. And in particular what it means for the current generation of students / young people.
I started blogging in 2003, and blogged about losing my identity as a person while I spent time being a SAHM, holding the threads of my existence together through bringing up children internationally, nuturing bilingual and multi-cultural beings. I then deleted that blog as it had become too personal, too well known and I had become too identifiable and my children had become adolescents and had a right to their own privacy and thoughts and being. Then I started studying to become an educator and librarian and spent four years in academic pursuit, where for many of my courses, blogging was a course requirement. It was a really good thing to make reflections on learning via blogs a course requirement. At WAB (my previous school) elementary students also blogged and I think there can be nothing as wonderful as seeing the thoughts, words and intellectual development of young people developing and maturing and growing over time. Nothing makes better writers than doing a lot of writing. And through writing, one does tend to become a better writer and find your “writers voice”.
Last week our school shut Grammarly off for students. It’s a tool that has always personally irritated me, as I still grew up with the luxury of uninterrupted schooling where we went to school for our lessons, did all our sports and activities after school at school, had no internet, and government controlled TV that only came in after I turned 12. It was a plain vanilla, no frills government school and there wasn’t even enough money for an arts programme. Yes, huge deficits in my education but I did get grammar. The old fashioned way. Swings and roundabouts.
What did Grammarly do? Well, the new update allows students to highlight a paragraph and request Grammarly to rephrase or improve their writing three times a day for free using AI. And teachers were being given work that didn’t reflect the thoughts, intents, abilities or voice of their students. Teachers care. They care deeply that tools can be used to aid the students that need it the most. They also care that tools don’t get in the way of intellectual and skill development. Writing well takes a LOT of practice and also a LOT of reading and if there are any short cuts I’m not aware of them.
The word of the year in 2023 was “Enshittification“, a termed coined by Cory Doctrow and explains the process of platforms first being good for their users, then abusing the users so businesses can make money off the users, then abusing the businesses go get a piece of the pie and then dying. It is the first two parts of the equation that are of most interest to me viz a viz education and AI.
“Being good for their users” needs a modifier – “appearing to be good for their users”. In his long form article Andrew Nikiforuk touches on “whole foods are being replaced by ultra-processed stuff” which was exactly the analogy I was thinking of while reading NYTimes wellness challenge of this week – the article talking about “Are ultraprocessed foods really that delicious?” and asking readers to compare an ultraprocessed product to its natural equivalent. Unfortunately for many young people when they compare their complex pubescent self to what media is telling them is “the real thing” they feel like they come up short, not the artificial reality. One of the disturbing trends with young people is their anxiety and obsession with being perfect (and not just academic – look at the beauty / makeup thing – talk about a distraction) – some of which is parent / adult driven through a failure to understand or recognise that young people are not hatched with perfect writing, grammar, thought, and research skills. That is the whole point of being at school. We’re seeing a bunch of ultra-processed writing and assignments and research at the moment and I’m not sure that it’s leading to better learning.
I’m currently reading “We do not welcome our 10-year-old Overlord by Garth Nix” – it’s a great middle grade version of this process of something external to humanity trying to take over under the auspices of “being good and doing good”. What I see, even with the most simple of all tools – a spelling check – is that students will type without any attention to spelling or capitalisation and expect the computer to mop up after them. And the next time the word / phrase is used they will continue to use it incorrectly and have auto-correct sort it out. The question then is whether there is any learning happening. And the meta question whether that learning needs to occur or not? Do we enter dangerous territory when we start deciding which students need to know things or not, develop skills in certain areas or not? We do not know what we don’t know and they definitely don’t. It would be way to easy to decide that perhaps some students don’t need to develop a writing voice and that it’s all so hard for them that it’s OK for AI or other tools to just take care of writing and editing what that tool thinks it is that the student is trying to express. Can you see where this is going? Because if we are not exposed to many ideas and thoughts and schools of thought and philosophies and histories how can we have enough information and knowledge under our belts to know what it is that we want to express? How can we know what OUR thoughts and feelings are when we’re in a feedback loop echo-chamber?
Back a little to the blogging thing – if students reflect on blogs that are open to the community it is so much easier to see what is normal and appropriate for each age group. Now we have writing that is largely hidden except to the teacher and their peers if they do comparative grading, and perhaps the adults in the lives of some of the students who will judge it by their adult standards AND whatever tools that are on student computers that again will transform the writing to some external adult standard. I’m also fascinated with, within the context of the apparent need for grading and scoring the work of students how granularity has decreased to the absurd point of students getting a score out of 4 for their efforts. Really? While packing up my life yet again for the move from China to Dubai I came across my old school reports. Everything was graded from 0-100 and there was plenty of room to improve from say a 69 to a 75 or an 89 to a 95 and no one ever ever ever got 100%. There was nuance. A lot of nuance. In the IB system scoring is to 8 and now in the American system it’s to 4. Talk about a blunt tool with which to sculpt learning!
I was just listening to Maggie Appleton (whose writings, as a cultural anthropologist turned Tech person on AI I really appreciate – particularly this one on the dark forest and generative AI) on the HanselMinutes podcast and I love her ideas about using AI for rubberducking – not just for IT debugging but for debugging your ideas and thoughts – although as she says it’s not really built for that as it’s more inclined to “yes AND” than to be a critical partner. I’m so long in the tooth that I remember when blogging was the medium for rubberducking your thoughts and every post got good handfuls of thoughtful comments by real people who would challenge or corroborate on your thinking. I made a lot of IRL friends off the back of blogging back in the day!
I’m fascinated about what other people think about student writing and student voice in writing as opposed to all that is being written about adult voice being taken over by AI – it is terrible, but how fortunate we have been to be allowed to develop a voice in the first place. Are we denying that to this generation of potential writers? Here is a link to one article in Writer’s Digest – of interest are all the other related articles at the bottom including some on maintaining voice as a comedian.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 