How backed-up are you?

I honestly didn’t want to make this about tech, but here we go again.  Many of our staff and students are either stranded somewhere not wanting to come back or have decided wait things out somewhere.

So the questions about online learning start. Now let’s make it clear. Most people go into online learning voluntarily and well prepared. They sign up to an online learning course. They get instructions on how to use it. They have their technology with them and fully loaded. This is not the case currently.

People have called me paranoid. I’m as untidy on my laptop as I am in my life. Piles of files on my desk and on my desktop both home and work. In fact there are probably more files in my download folder than anywhere else. But one thing I’m careful with is weekly backups. And because I’ve had back-up discs fail on me, I have 5 x 2TB backup discs. Four where I’m living that I back up my laptop to on a revolving basis every Sunday, and one remotely in our Swiss flat. And they go into a fire/flood proof safe when we’re away. And I don’t trust my personal stuff on the cloud. Especially not photos.

It should be absolutely no problem for any member of our school community to get online and have access to their files from anywhere as most of our systems (Moodle, O365, Libguides, Oliver, databases, Overdrive etc) are cloud-based. Plus every student and teacher has access to OneDrive and teachers have access to Sharepoint.

Access doesn’t mean the same as usage

For all sorts of reasons some people don’t use OneDrive / Sharepoint or not consistently or not enough. Heck I’ve just told you I don’t put personal stuff on the cloud. But I do it for work – generally – possibly mainly because I believe I need to set a positive example. I could kick myself. In the last week of school before the CNY break we spent a lot of time creating closure tabs in our Moodle and setting up contingency plans for possible online learning. But like I always say “it’s not about systems, it’s about people”. Probably what we should have said to everyone is – take your laptops with you where-ever you go. Or if you don’t, make sure you’ve backup everything to OneDrive – now – let me help you.

Hindsight is 20-20. 

But in the meantime – as one of my friends said to me – “as long as you have books to read you’re ok.”

And I’m working through a huge list at the moment – see my Goodreads tab on the side, and the current book is “Animal Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver.

animal.jpg

Featured image:
Photo by Soonios Pro from Pexels

Making your bed and other stuff

There literally is a book about the importance of making your bed each day. Personally I don’t put much store by that type of advice – particularly as it’s written by a male military type. But I do think it helps to have a reason to get out of bed in the first place. That’s way more important.

Luckily today the pollution had settled down to the red zone so I could go out for a walk along the river with my high duty pollution mask – the blue sky is deceptive – the AQI was still over 150 – but I was not the only one lured outside – the river bank was full of fishermen probably suffering from the same cabin fever as I was.

Our local grocery had luckily stocked up again and some delicious strawberries were available which I could take to my lunch date with some fellow librarians where we had a great book chat. That way I could tick off two things that I think are incredibly important for sanity in this period – time exercising and time with other people.

Now just like the war that would be over by Christmas, I’m wondering if this closure may last longer? I did a little SARS research last night and found out that Hong Kong schools were closed for 7 weeks. Depending when you start the clock ticking (from the start or end of the CNY break) that could take us to the end of March. That means an extended period of not only online teaching but also home-schooling. It also means different things depending on the age of your child(ren) / students.

Possibly the worst hit are our final year IB students – things are really tight between now and 23 May when they graduate. So while 2 weeks isn’t much in the grand scheme of things for most people, it results in a bit of a train smash for their mock exams, finalising projects, doing things that would have helped them create a portfolio if they’re applying to creative tertiary study etc. etc. For all the talk of online and blended learning there’s still a heck of a lot that requires physicality of self and material. And many related activities (sports fixtures, APEC drama etc. have also been cancelled).

Further down the food-chain I can assure you there are good reasons why most of us don’t homeschool – infanticide being one thing that comes to my mind. Beijing Kids had an article on this last year – but that was in a situation where you could do the socialising and gyms and sports facilities were open. Many families are hunkering down and some won’t let their children out of the house or receive guests (not moi).

My husband is still working in Nanjing, I cut my holiday there short on Sunday, so I’m getting the updates from there as well. It seems it has the facilities to take care of patients, and hotels have also been requested to be available for R&R of medical staff. According to him it’s pretty much a ghost town still and more and more areas are shut down. You can follow the live construction of the hospital in Wuhan as well.

Here our compounds multiple entries are shut down and everyone is flowing through one central gate where non-resident ID’s and temperatures can be checked.

And now for some book suggestions. I’ll start with G7 as it is in the middle of middle school and we had a rather cool unit just before the break looking at young adult literature over time – “Changing Times Changing Voices“.  Students read either “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” or “The Outsiders” (or both for some) and were encouraged to explore some of the Time 100 best Young Adult Books which we had on permanent display/borrowing plus the current and last year’s Kids’ Read 100 titles.  So – there you have a list of 300 books suitable for teens if you’re short of inspiration!

A side note on the Kid’s Read titles …. last night on twitter there was a post on reading challenges including “reading hard” with Book Riot’s “Read Harder Challenge” * I had a look through the challenge (well worth considering in this time) and realised that our chosen titles covered all the ground amply!

 

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Kids Read 2020 books

* The Challenge – I have some ideas for these – what are yours?

  • Read a YA nonfiction book
  • Read a retelling of a classic of the canon, fairytale, or myth by an author of color
  • Read a mystery where the victim(s) is not a woman
  • Read a graphic memoir
  • Read a book about a natural disaster
  • Read a play by an author of color and/or queer author
  • Read a historical fiction novel not set in WWII
  • Read an audiobook of poetry
  • Read the LAST book in a series
  • Read a book that takes place in a rural setting
  • Read a debut novel by a queer author
  • Read a memoir by someone from a religious tradition (or lack of religious tradition) that is not your own
  • Read a food book about a cuisine you’ve never tried before
  • Read a romance starring a single parent
  • Read a book about climate change
  • Read a doorstopper (over 500 pages) published after 1950, written by a woman
  • Read a sci-fi/fantasy novella (under 120 pages)
  • Read a picture book with a human main character from a marginalized community
  • Read a book by or about a refugee
  • Read a middle grade book that doesn’t take place in the U.S. or the UK
  • Read a book with a main character or protagonist with a disability (fiction or non)
  • Read a horror book published by an indie press
  • Read an edition of a literary magazine (digital or physical)
  • Read a book in any genre by a Native, First Nations, or Indigenous author

Preparing for closure – don’t make it about Tech

By now the nCOV potential pandemic is world news and international schools over China are in (full) preparation mode on how to continue teaching and learning via online modalities. As part of my preparation, I’m planning to blog daily. Because it’s not about the tech. It’s about mental and psychological preparation to sit this out, continue to learn and teach (what I put up for our community).

If I were to gift every student, teacher, administrator and parent one thing, it would be a copy of Anne Frank’s diary. The new graphic novel version is particularly good. And a blank lined notebook and a pen.

Funnily enough, it struck me that if it weren’t for my librarian/tech integration hybrid role, I wouldn’t even be involved in these discussions. I’m always astounded how far down the list of people thought about, librarians lie, and education twitter folk must be tired of me answering every question on collaboration and curation and resourcing with “have you asked your teacher librarian”.

Whatever. I’ll write this from the point of view of a librarian who happens to be techie and cynical about tech, but passionate about learning and maintaining learning.

What have we put in place so far for school closure

In the days before the spring break, we created a “closure” tab in our Moodle Learning Management system in middle and high school. [We’ve been looking for an alternative for years now, but between our innovations in student learning and agency and the “China” factor, haven’t managed to move forward in that.] Within the tab we have a learning forum where students and teachers can interact asynchronously with each other. The expectation is that teachers will post a lesson each day that a lesson would have taken place (i.e. 5 times per 9 day cycle) and students check in and respond and do the assigned work. Elementary school will continue to use blogs.

What else do we have?

Regulars to this blog will know I’m a huge libguide fan and I have an extensively curated set of resources for our middle school (students, teachers and parents) that can be accessed through our main library page.  Unfortunately our 16,000 book collection is inaccessible, however we do have Overdrive/Sora, and a range of Kindle/audible books for students who borrowed the devices before the break. There are also extensive collections of books on Epic, (available during school hours) so I’ll spend a little time curating some suitable titles for each grade level to share out to students and parents.

We recently purchased a (very expensive) subscription to Newsela, that should prove a boon to students wanting to improve their nonfiction text comprehension / vocabulary and general / specific content knowledge.

Our language department has been using Education Perfect for a while now with considerable success, and we recently started a trial with their Science modules.

For our budding writers, it would be a great opportunity for them to try out things like Wattpad and other interactive writing tools.

We’ve also been experimenting with Microsoft Teams for Education, and while it’s a very promising tool, it’s a business tool that’s being adapted for Education, and there are some substantial things that don’t (yet) make it suitable to take over as an LMS. It’s moving pretty rapidly and has some really nifty bits, and if they listen carefully to their educational users it has potential to wipe a lot of things out in its wake. James Rong from Guangzhou International School is the China expert on that and worth following. Here’s his guide to setting up Teams for learning. 

Personal

The first thing I had to do was tell myself that vacation or no vacation I have to start getting a rhythm going and some good habits. During term time I’m good at habit stacking, up at 5am, gym clothes ready to put on, work clothes & breakfast/lunch packed to go, 5.30 taxi – doing my Chinese Memrise flashcards on the way to work; 6-6.50 gym; at my desk by 7.15am. Now I have the issue that my husband is at work in Nanjing, my son is with his girlfriend. There’s nothing stopping me from doing nothing but watch Netflix or twitter/FB updates. The pollution outside is diabolical (unusually bad for a period when all the factories are closed) – so while I’d usually be up and going for a walk/run along the river, that’s not really an option.

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Once my online meeting is done I’ll set myself some personal goals as well.

So status update:

Currently: D5/10 of the Chinese New Year vacation
Schools closed until: 17 February 2020

Overview of government site

Beijing status 1 pm.

Screen Shot 2020-01-28 at 13.01.18

 

 

Dyslexia – don’t make it about you

I had lunch with an old friend of mine yesterday. We’ve kept in touch over the last 20+ years when we did an MBA together. She’s had a successful career in finance while I’ve had a liquorice all-sorts type of constantly changing occupational therapy for a mind that can’t stay at rest too long.

Anyway, she of the child-free existence still dotes on the children of others and takes a keen interest in how the offspring of her friends are doing, and, knowing both my current librarian / teaching situation and the background of the fact that I have a SEN (ADHD) teen asked me about the potential dyslexia of the son of a close friend. The issue was typical and one that I come across often enough that I could be quite wealthy if I got a dollar each time I encountered it, or a variant in any area of educational need.

Child has an undefined issue with reading / spelling / learning. Otherwise bright. Mom / school / teacher thinks that he should be tested. Dad is totally against it. Because he doesn’t want the “label”. Because he’s going to take it upon himself to teach his 8 year old to read.

My friend stressed this was a father who truly loved his son. Who had the means, financial and otherwise to get the best help for his son if it was needed. As long as it didn’t involved testing and a diagnosis. She was asking me of the ways to make sure the son got what he needed.

I gave her the usual. The positive messages. You wouldn’t prevent a child from having an eye-test and getting glasses if they couldn’t see properly. The earlier you understand what is going on the better in terms of interventions, help, accommodations etc. We know so much more about the reading brain than we ever did before, that it’s not a calamity. I also mentioned that I’d just been through some of Microsoft Education’s Educator courses on inclusive and assistive technology and that he may want to have a look at the interventions available.

And then I hit hard with the real issues. At 8 years old, you have a compliant child, willing to please the adults around him. You have a surrounding where children are all over the shop still with reading. But you have the beginning of the big academic sorting. Between those who are learning to read and those who are reading to learn. And that divide just keeps on widening. And kids know it and are acutely aware of where they stand in this sorting. I saw those kids in primary when I was teaching there and now I see them in middle school. They’re no longer 8, they’re 14. And they know every trick in the book to deflect attention from the fact that they (still) can’t read (well). They are the class clowns, the exasperating kids who are still falling off their chairs, annoying the teacher and the rest of the class. They will do anything to not appear stupid. They are not stupid. But in their minds they equate the reading issue with intelligence. They may or may not be talking to their parents, let alone being compliant with any reading intervention. They’re frustrated and angry, not hopeful any more.

There is so much that can be done when you have an 8 year old. Of course you can help anyone at any age, but why let your own darn ego get in the way and not do things earlier?

There’s another very important piece to all of this. Children, even “your” children, are not yours. They need to know themselves and their learning. They need to become their own advocates. To know what they need and have the strength to stand up for it. For all the wonderful teachers and administrators out there, there also are a lot of very harmful people. So even if you have a diagnosis, and interventions and recommendations, there are enough people who will take the attitude that “it’s not an excuse” and that the child is “lazy” or “naughty” or “bad”. I speak from very bitter experience in that respect.

teacher GIF

via GIPHY

 

She asked me for an article, anything to give to him. I asked how much the father would be prepared to read. I scrolled through my Evernote. I have 238 articles / notes on dyslexia. The one I consider to be the bench mark one is “Rapid automatized naming (RAN) and reading fluency: implications for understanding and treatment of reading disabilities.” but that weighs in at over 30 pages, so we settled on the KQED article “Understanding Dyslexia and the Reading Brain in Kids“; the name Maryanne Wolf as an expert, and the one home intervention I know of that apparently has some research backing (in case dad was still going to teach his kid in 100 days … face palm).

fozzie bear facepalm GIF

via GIPHY

The last presumption makes my blood boil. People spend a life-time specialising in teaching children (and adults) to read, with or without dyslexia. People like the reading guru Pernille Ripp whose daughter has issues reading  do not deign to come up with easy platitudes in this area. If you’ve ever read the first few chapters of “Reader, come Home” you’ll be in awe of how anyone ever learns to read. And yet this parent, this father who professes to love his child is prepared to squander another 100 days to muddle around, just so that he can save face or something.

How do you, my readers, deal with this type of question? Are there other resources out there that are “parent” friendly? Are there better ways of broaching these conversations?

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Header Photo by Akshar Dave from Pexels

Pretending to learn

One of the hidden advantages of learning Chinese is that I often catch myself pretending to learn and it gives me an acute insight and experience into the nature of real vs. faux learning. I’m doing a lot of “busy” work today on trying to get my document together for my ISTE certification (faux learning) so this will be brief.

Real learning literally makes your brain hurt. Sometimes I feel like my brain is creaking when I’m concentrating hard. It’s hard to keep up for very long and you tend to need physical breaks. Some of the things that I’d include in real learning is when you’re not just trying to remember characters but when you’re using them to make sentences – and incorporating previously learnt characters and sentence structure. That’s hard work. Memorising and reproducing a list of characters is easy. It’s also easy to use apps to go through lists of words and pick the right word / sound / character combination from 4 or 6 options. That’s my “pretend I’m learning Chinese in the taxi on the way to work” learning. Funnily enough if I do the same at home at my desk with a pen and paper, and look up the etymology of the words as I go along and write the sentence examples from my dictionary it’s coming closer to real learning. Similar actions but a twist that enhances.

Something similar happens when you’re practising music. Playing a piece through is great fun. But just focusing on one part that’s tricky and repeating that until it’s fluid, and even perhaps breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits – that’s real learning. Anton Nel in his DSS talk at WAB hinted at this. Others have also talked about it in the “10,000 hour debate” that morphs into the “deliberate practice” discussion.

Real learning takes place when you do the things that you like to avoid by doing other things – like fill in the blank sentences and worksheet versus reading an authentic text. I really do understand why so many students avoid reading a book. Because it’s hard work. Really really hard work. Especially in another language. You’re recognising characters, thinking about the meaning, flipping sentence around in mental gymnastics so it makes sense in your mother tongue grammatical structures. Looking words up. Looking pronunciation/pinyin up.

I’m reading “The List” with my group of early morning read-aloud students. It describes a dystopian world where one has only 500 words to use. When we started the book I joked with my crew that that was my Chinese language reality. I also recently finished “All Rights Reserved” where each spoken word and gesture is billed to you. Imagine how reality and potential is limited in these scenarios. Now have a look at this site – this is mind blowing and what a fabulous way of joining research, art, reality and literature by Dr Pip Thornton. Her piece NEWSPEAK shows the whole text of Orwell’s 1984 as a stock market ticker-tape, with the word prices fluctuating according to live data from Google Ads.

NEWSPEAK 2019 from Pip on Vimeo.

I’ve recently subscribed to “The Syllabus” of Evgeny Morozov – the best description of how this came about is in a Dutch podcast (with the worst cover art I’ve ever see outside a primary classroom). It is the epitome of going against the easy consumption of media and information through human and algorithmic curation of a weekly reading list within various fields. Which is how I stumbled on the whole art around the above discussion.

Keep those brains creaking everyone!

 

A little on learning Chinese

One of the fun things about the FOEN19 (Future of Education Now) was meeting up with two librarians who I greatly admire and in-between sessions geeking out with them. One of the great things (and possibly why I like them so much) is that they’re both keen students of Chinese, the three of us are all at various points of our Chinese journey.

There is of course the big “WHY” of learning a language – and besides a million other reasons it’s an excellent humbling experience that results in a lot of empathy for our EAL students.

The post below is almost literally taken from an email I’ve just composed on a few of the tools I’ve found useful in my journey.

1. Hacking chinese blog is definitely the best there is – they’ve got tons and tons in their archives and regularly do fun challenges. I’ve learnt so much from them about learning to learn etc.
2. Outlier Chinese – they’re newer on the scene. I did their Chinese Character Masterclass, It’s a tough one, I think it’s better to have a year or so of characters under your belt before you do it – or at least a couple of 100 characters, I think they say you should start with it. I found it hard to keep up with the course and then I’d binge on it and then lose momentum. In the end over the summer I put another thrust into finishing it. It’s good content but not very well presented and as a teacher (and design conscious person) I’d lay out things a lot differently.
Their supplement to the Pleco dictionary is definitely worth the extra $$ as it helps with the etymology and breaking down of components of complex characters.
3. Chinese Character books / Grammar books etc.
There are a variety of these, some I like more than others. Many have been supplanted by apps but they’re still good to use. As you can see from the photos, some are old and some are out of print, but if you’re working at a school are almost certainly still floating around the Chinese Department or text book store. I’m sure there are other new books, most of these are still around from when I first started learning 10 years ago. Happy to hear of better alternatives.
  • Easy way to learn Chinese Characters – possibly my favourite, but you’ll have to get it second hand as I don’t think it’s in print anymore.  It’s a workbook that builds things up very logically and possibly has been supplanted by other books since I used it – happy to hear about alternatives
  • Graded Chinese Reader – I’m on the 500 words one, I’m finding that that best way to read via the abridged short stories. I’ve tried other stuff including picture books, kids books, text books, but there’s nothing like authentic texts. There’s plenty of room for growth with 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500 and 3000 words.
  • Tuttle Learning Chinese Characters an nice visual way of learning uses various memory techniques to remember the tone and the structure of the character – of course the outlier folks would argue you shouldn’t be relying on this type of memorisation and that etymology is a better way. Worth looking at in conjunction with Outlier, to see what best suits your style.
  • Chinese Characters – starts easy and gets very complicated. Similar build up to “Easy way to learn Chinese Characters”
  • Rapid Literacy – this one literally does what it says. Great for a kick start to reading. There’s a CD you can listen to, plus the work book and it has you reading the most common characters in context in I think 10 lessons. It’s also great for listening practice.
  • On Learning Chinese is a more academic tome. It’s for people like me who really wanted to understand Chinese from a top down 10,000 feet perspective as well as from the daily character grind.
  • Teaching and Learning Chinese as a foreign language  again for the nerds or the former language teachers. It’s really a worth while book because it gives you all the grammar you need plus all the stuff you need to know about interference of L1 (English in my case).
  • iMandarin is possibly my favourite Chinese language institute and this 900 Sentence book is an absolute gem. Just what it claims to be – the 900 most common sentences you need as a beginner. With a CD to keep listening and repeating. I think you need to be a student there to get the book.
  • Just for the LULZ – Chinese character fast finder – if you like dictionaries and browsing through books of words this is great. It’s a throwback to the days when you didn’t have electronic dictionaries and had to find words by counting strokes and knowing radicals; and Peng’s Chinese Radicals – available widely in Singapore – nice when you want to flip through and learn some stuff without trying too hard.
I spent 2 years full time study of chinese (2009-2010) and never got the tones. Then I found this recently and went through the drills and by the end I absolutely got it. Suddenly I could hear all the different tones…
Absolutely worth a couple of weeks work (it’s short and intensive but you need time between the paired drills)
Your school probably has a subscription to this via the Chinese Department – if not it’s pretty cheap and great for creating writing worksheets with stroke order, creating (manual) flashcards etc.
6. Apps
A lot of the books mentioned in (3) above have been supplanted by apps. But I still prefer books and writing by hand. But these are great for stolen moments in taxi’s or while waiting and because they’re smart and can do the spaced repetition thing for you.
  • Pleco – dictionary with lots of add ons – the flashcards and outlier dictionary are well worth it. The getting words into lists and importing and sharing lists can be a real pain, I have to go back to the instructions every time I change text books but once they’re set up you’re good to go for a while.
  • Memrise – good for spaced repetition. The Chinese 1 course is particularly good for colloquial Chinese but then it gets more grindy and by Chinese 3 it becomes long and boring (too many words before you go up a level). The first 500 character one also takes a LONG time. I wish creators of these apps would allow for smaller chunks and more levels – even adults like feeling like they’re accomplishing something. Some language institutes have made their own courses within Memrise – this can be a good and bad thing depending on the recordings and care they take (some are riddled with errors and loud / soft / irritating recordings).
  • Skritter – in two minds about this one. Works best on an iPad, it can be very picky about your writing and I actually prefer pen and paper so I’ve stopped using it as much as I used to. It’s also relatively expensive, and you sometimes need to do your lists on a laptop and then import them, but using a track pad on a laptop is clunky, so then and iPad is better, so I’m not getting what I need out of this app.

There are a gajillion apps out there and I’ve tried a lot of them but those are the three left on my phone now.

7. Podcasts
I’m a bit back and forwards on this one. I used to listen to some and then I got a bit tired of them, and stopped listening because I could only really get benefit if I was sitting and taking note, and not if it was just background stuff going on. Again I’d love some good recommendations. The only one that I found consistently good was Melnyks Chinese. It’s free to listen but you pay for the lesson pdfs.

8. Videos
When I was lazy and wanted to pretend that I was learning but was actually just passive, I used to watch a fun set of YouTube videos in a sitcom like setting called “Happy Chinese”

9. Role models
There are some people who are doing fantastic things. Jeremy Howard is an example of someone I’m in total awe of. Well worth reading about his approach.

Jeremy Howard – Language Acquisition Performance from Gary Wolf on Vimeo.

 

 

 

 

Picture books as a panacea?

maia and what mattersI’ve always been a huge fan of picture books. I’m the librarian that will read “Maia and what Matters” to a group of Middle School teachers and struggle to continue through tears. I spend a reasonable chunk of my budget on picture books (or as some librarians like to refer to the “sophisticated picture books (SPB)” I’ve never see a book deal with anxiety with as much compassion and understanding as Mel Tregonning’s “Small Things”. I maintain a libguide for Social Emotional Learning (SEL) that relies heavily on the work of Dr. Myra Bacsal and her SEL booklists. 

So what is the problem? I’m worried that publishers are becoming complacent about plugging the gaps in information / knowledge / awareness of really big and worrisome things by having a picture book in that space. A case in point is my (and most librarians) quest to curate books related to the Sustainable Development Goals. And I’m afraid even the UN with it’s SDG book club plays into this.

It is easy enough to find a picture book about Wangari Maathai, about the plastic bags of Gambia. It is way harder to get a good (recent) nonfiction book geared at 11-14 year olds on deforestation or plastic bags for example. It seems the nonfiction publishing cycle is around 8-10 years (I found plenty from 2009-2011) between updates whereas the actual issues are accelerating faster.

Follow Your stuff

As mentioned in my previous blog – a big change has occurred in the presentation and design of nonfiction books, so it is important not only from an “up to date facts” point of view that we have these books, but also from an “enticing to read” point of view. When new books exist in a space (trees in this instance) they are truly fantastic. Like “Can you Hear the Trees Talking” by Peter Wohlleben – the young reader version of “The Hidden Life of Trees”. But that’s not really about deforestation, just a very positive reminder of why trees are so awesome and special and worth saving. Or Annick Press (one of my favourites) with Kevin Sylvester’s “Follow your Stuff” an exceptional book for the humanities tracing common items including T-shirts; Medications; Technology; books through geography, production, labour and economics.

The last thing I was looking for included something on sustainable cities and homes. The books in my collection were from 2007 and sorely needed updating. As is the case when a book is older than the students reading it. It’s a fascinating area. It’s something that most major cities in the world are pouring money and resources in. But you can find lofty tomes, heavy text books, coffee-table photo books and very little else. A fellow librarian pointed me to “No small Plans” which looks amazing, but very specific to Chicago, and not so easy to get to China.

Rebecca Sjonger has written a new series of books around the UN Sustainable Development Goals which combines goals and is an overview. I’d argue that’s a good beginning, but actually each goal merits a well researched, curated and presented book for each of the different levels of education. Our world in Crisis is another recent series that covers pollution, poverty, health & disease, civil war & genocide, immigration and terrorism in an age appropriate but informative way.

Our world in Crisis

So there is a huge amount of hope and great steps in the right direction. But if we want to keep middle graders curious and inquiring beyond the hook of picture books, we need to keep feeding them nonfiction of this high calibre in all and any direction they want to research further.

I want it to be that the picture books are the appetiser and a couple of Youtube videos are the amuse bouche but that excellent nonfiction books are the main course, supplemented by databases (for context) and news (for the latest updated information).

What are your favourite books to support understanding the SDGs in Middle School?

Unlikely new nonfiction

Our G6 Language & Literature classes have just started a unit on “Unlikely Heroes” and I must admit I’ve been having an amazing time finding some fantastic new biographies and memoirs to entice them into reading this genre and keeping an interest in the lives of people who may not always make the headlines, or who they may not be aware of, or who they only have an inkling of.

Two very interesting stories from the sporting realm are those of Jesselyn Silva with “My Corner of the Ring” (boxing) and Ibtihaj Muhammad with “Proud: living my American dream” (fencing). These are a double win to my mind featuring both lesser written about sports for middle grade students AND featuring young girls from non-traditional backgrounds in those sport – I have a daughter who fences and I know exactly how expensive (and sometimes snobby/exclusive) we’ve found it. There’s also the recent cliffhanger with young football players in Thailand, excellently written about by Marc Aronson in “Rising Water : The Story of the Thai Cave Rescue”.

Through my privileged connection with the Neev Children’s book awards, I’m able to encounter books that I wouldn’t otherwise be aware of such as “Like A Girl: Real Stories for Tough Kids” by Aparna Jain that showcases the lives of 56 Indian ladies, who may not be familiar to our students. Another book worth mentioning is the hybrid graphic novel / biography Indira by Devapriya Roy and Priya Kuriyan (Illustrator). What makes that book special is the way it weaves in how writing research is conducted in present day with the historical facts.

Our students are also living through history making by people in the here and now such as Autumn Peltier and Greta Thunberg (We Are All Greta: Be Inspired to Save the World by Valentina Giannella, Manuela Marazzi (Illustrator)). And our school is extremely lucky to have had a long-standing relationship with Jane Goodall who will be attending our FOEN conference next week (Hope for animals and their world. Unfortunately I wonder if that message of hope still stands ten years later).

Finally we’re also seeing more books either featuring LGBTQ+ heroes or where they are part of the narrative of other history. In a fairly conservative International environment there is always the question of how (not whether) one brings this up. I find that someone like Alan Turing is a wonderful segue into the area. (Alan Turing by Jim Eldridge; The imitation game : Alan Turing decoded written by Jim Ottaviani; Genius inventions : the stories behind history’s greatest technological breakthroughs by Jack Challoner; Stories for boys who dare to be different : true tales of amazing boys who changed the world without killing dragons by Ben Brooks ; illustrated by Quinton Winter and Queer heroes by Arabelle Sicardi ; illustrated by Sarah Tanat-Jones.)

The last three books, are ones where he is part of an anthology. One thing that we’ve started doing as part of this unit, is where there are a number of “heroes” in one book, we’ve added all the names in the table of contents to our cataloging record. That helps students to find different perspectives, formats, lengths of explanation and viewpoints of the same person. We’re hoping that some students will start with one of our many combined biographies, for example the great series of “Forgotten Women” by Zing Tsjeng or the “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls; or The Good Guys or Stories for Boys; or Stories for Kids; or “A History of the world with the women put back in” by Kerstin Lücker & Ute Daenschel and end up further researching one particular person who catches their interest.

An amazing thing has happened to nonfiction since around 2016. The visuals, design and layout has improved to no end, so books have become so much more enticing. I’m also loving the fact that biographies of women are no longer so ugly and we’re finding out about other amazing women such as Didda the ruler of Kashmir from 958 CE to 1003 CE (Queen of Ice by Devika Rangachari).

More of the wonderful books and how we categorised the various types of heroes around this unit can be found on our library guide. The revolving book lists (created with LibraryThing for Libraries) on each section lead back to our catalogue where students can see if the book is available and if necessary put the book on hold.

Next time I hope to write about some more fabulous nonfiction recent finds related to other curriculum units.

Digital onboarding

The other “half” of my role currently is technology integrator. I say “half” with irony as it seems I can only ever do 100% of one or the other at any one time.

I’m not sure how the digital onboarding process goes in your educational community. I’m talking about the students moving up into middle school and having laptops of their own for the first time. One thing is for sure, the idea of “digital natives” is definitely a myth. Yes, most kids take to computers / iPads with a fluency that appears to be amazing, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s a very superficial fluency. Something like the apparent language fluency of BICS (Basic interpersonal communication skills) vs. CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). So our G6 teachers had been asking for a tech session to make students were upskilled and ready for learning in the things that would help them succeed in the classroom (as opposed to MMO and YouTube watching competency).

Last Thursday only the G6 students were on campus as the other two grades were on trips, and it coincided with a Day 9 (off timetable day) – so the ideal time to do something. The thing is how to make something like this engaging enough for the really competent students while upskilling the rest. In the end I decided on two sessions of 70 minutes, dividing the group into two sets of 65 students each and alternating with a “getting to know MYP” session with our MYP coordinator Stephen.

For the Tech-Spectacular session we had 6 stations of 12-15 minutes each. Each station was worth a potential 100 points and had around 10-12 students at a time, and there were prizes for the top 5 students in each session.  The prizes were given after a Kahoot slamdown in the theatre (station 6) with the top 5 in each session pitted against each other with the rest of the students competing in groups of three.

In order to set up the stations I had conversations with different G6 teachers and the counsellors and watched a few students in action in the classroom. Common issues were disorganisation; not saving files; too many tabs / applications open; messy desktops; not knowing how to create and save a document; not knowing good email etiquette; not able to find files; not able to quickly go to school sites; not using an online or offline calendar/agenda etc. fairly basic things that were getting in the way of learning optimally and taking up a lot of classroom time and energy.

Taking all that I decided to have a few stations with each dealing with an aspect of the issue. The intention was to get an initial status for the student and then help them to be better organised in that area. After the sessions, students with additional needs were identified from their score cards and teacher feedback and they’ll be helped in one-on-one sessions.

This is how the stations were set up:

Station 1: Laptop Maths

Calculate your points as follows:

  • Add laptop battery %
  • Minus – Number of files not in folders on desktop x 10
  • Minus – Number of desktops open x 10
  • Minus – Number of tabs open x 5
  • Minus – Number of apps open x 5

Station 2: Microsoft Word & communication etiquette

  • Open Word
  • Create a document of a book you enjoyed following the format shown (30)
  • Save it as “Yourname D9 Book Enjoyed” (10)
  • Open Email
  • Send an email to xxxx@wab.edu telling me that you’ve attached a file of what book you have enjoyed from the Middle school library. Remember to have a subject, to politely address me, use full sentences and to sign off your email. (30)
  • Attached the Word document to the email (20)
  • Send the email (10)

Station 3: Calendars and schedule

  • Open outlook Calendar
  • Add MS Calendar (20)
  • Add G6Assessment Calendar (20)
  • Bookmark Calendar (20)
  • Open Powerschool (20)
  • Find your schedule (20)

Station 4: Folders and OneDrive

Folders are a way of keeping your work organised
OneDrive makes sure all your files are backed up

  • Create the following folders in your OneDrive:
    I&S; Design; PHE; Maths; L&L; Arts; Language; Sciences (50)
  • Put any stray files from your desktop into the right folder (50)

Station 5: Bookmarks

Collect 10 points for each item you have bookmarked

  • WAB email
  • WAB calendar
  • MS Moodle
  • MS Blogs
  • MS Library Guide
  • MS Library Catalog
  • MyTime
  • Noodletools
  • Yammer
  • MyWAB

Station 6: Kahoot

An overview of the main points of the day in a quiz format to check for understanding using a Kahoot.

In each case the station was manned by one or two middle school teachers who were familiar with and comfortable explaining the necessary tool / functionality. In some cases this also created the opportunity for a mini-teacher PD to get them up to speed. We also had our two IT people on hand to deal with any technical problems.

 

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Reflection on the activity

The good:

We have some great teachers who helped to run this, and the new upstairs learning lab is a wonderful space to break out into different groups with different goals. Students were generally motivated and keen to do the activities. Most said they’d learnt new things.

When I looked through the ISTE Educator standards I was a little concerned that this was a rather basic activity setting up some fairly foundational skills that didn’t involve very much creativity, or design thinking on the part of students. Then when I related it back to the ATL skills framework I realised that one has to start somewhere fairly basic in order to have something for students to build on in order to success for the more sophisticated use of technology.

Can be improved:

For most of the students the 5 stations during the sessions was too much for 70 minutes. Students take a while to get from station to station, settle down and be ready for instructions. Teachers reported back there was not always enough time to get across both the “why” and the “how” of the activity.

The idea of saving and backing up to OneDrive is still under-utilized in the learning community and students were concerned that their files were “gone”. The way to get around that is through putting the “alias” on their desktop to reassure them it wasn’t missing. Just teaching files, folders, saving, renaming and storing of files in itself was probably enough for a whole session.

ISTE Standards for Educators

7. Analyst
Educators understand and use data to drive their instruction and support students in achieving their learning goals. Educators:
a. Provide alternative ways for students to demonstrate competency and reflect on their learning using technology.
b. Use technology to design and implement a variety of formative and summative assessments that accommodate learner needs, provide timely feedback to students and inform instruction.

ISTE Standards for Students

6. Creative Communicator
Students communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats and digital media appropriate to their goals. Students:
d. publish or present content that customizes the message and medium for their intended audiences.

ATL Skills

Self Management:

III. Managing time and tasks effectively

  • Plan short- and long-term assignments; meet deadlines
  • Keep and use a weekly planner for assignments
  • Bring necessary equipment and supplies to class
  • Keep an organized and logical system of information files/notebooks
  • Use appropriate strategies for organizing complex information
  • Select and use technology effectively and productively

Research

VI. Information Literacy

  • Evaluate and select information sources and digital tools based on their appropriateness to specific tasks
  • Understand and use technology systems

Enough windows – where are the mirrors?

I was prompted to think about this again with the publication of the White Ravens 2019 list at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The issue of increasing diversity in an international school setting is a complex one, and something I’ve written about at length in the past.

In English

There’s the linguistic diversity bit – collections of books in “Languages other than English” (LOTE) (that post is getting a bit long in the tooth and probably needs updating) a more up to date article featuring Jeremy Willette can be found here.  Though I do object to the phrase “mother tongue” the reality of many of our dual language students is that the language other than English medium at school could be that of either parent, but is often that of the father. So I prefer to refer to “home language”. In 2014/15 I went through somewhat an obsession on language, researching it to death, you can find some of the posts on that here. The one thing I would definitely add to this conversation is that unless the LOTE collection is updated regularly and championed by teachers and parents or a language based club, they often don’t earn back the investment in purchasing and the real-estate they occupy. So if you want to invest in a linguistically diverse collection you also have to invest in a mindset of pride in home language and a sense of ownership over the collection and its maintenance within that linguistic community.

The hardest part internationally is that issue of “not our diversity“ . If you have a moment, please read that post. Students who are in international education often defy the traditional (North American) definitions of diversity. They are not poor, black, hispanic, urban, immigrants. That is not to say that it’s unimportant for our students to be exposed to stories of all these groups of people and more. In fact their privilege demands that they access poverty, racism, immigration and need through the windows of literature. But those versions of diversity are not mirrors for them. With a great budget we have no shortage of windows. It’s the mirrors we lack.

And again, when we have these diverse books, we still need teachers and librarians and students and parents who will read them and champion them. Students who will dare to take a book with a cover of someone who doesn’t look like them and read it. Families and languages

The thing with international students is their lack of homogeneity – something I encountered when looking at linguistic diversity. This table (from my 2015 research) speaks to some of the many variations. (Yes, in those days I also referred to MT /Mother Tongue). So one of the most important sources of mirrors for our students often is books in translation. Particularly for the “globetrotter” subsection of our students. Looking at the White Ravens list above doesn’t give me that much comfort I’m afraid.  The issue I have is that most of the books in 2019 are BANA originated (Britain, Australia/NZ & North America) with the exception of one from the Philippines and one from India.  2018 was a bit better (one from Romania, India, Ghana and Korea). The list is unwieldy, you can’t search by age group. And you can’t get a print out.

Some more sources of inspiration include the various IBBY organisations. Including USBBY – even though the criteria for inclusion on the list is includes:  Books that help American children see the world from other points of view; Books that provide a perspective or address a topic otherwise missing from children’s literature in the U.S; and Books that are accessible to American readers (where accessible can mean a multitude of things). Again, painfully it’s hard to get a simple list to down load – no I don’t want a pptx, or a bookmark, I just want a list to print out to buy from.  And IBBY UK. Their latest publication: Children’s Literature in a Multiliterate World looks to be particularly interesting. One lives in hope.

One of the many things that concerns me with all of this, is the emphasis on picture books. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE fan of picture books. But the over-reliance on translating picture books? It just adds a PB to the five F’s (food, fashion, festivals, folklore, and flags) of pretending we’re oh-so-international and inclusive.

The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative is more cause for hope. Particularly as they reach out and co-opt people in-situ to aid with their uncovering of local treasures.

In this diversity quest, one is often more of a sleuth than anything else. For example needing to have a look at awards like the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and then looking at names of authors and illustrators and seeing if any of their works are translated and available. And how sad it is that many of those authors and illustrators don’t even have a web presence? Isn’t that one way in which IBBY could assist them? Just like publishers have a page on their site for each of their authors couldn’t these nominated people each have some kind of a presence. And many of the links don’t even work.

The “and available” thing. Holy hannah publishers. Get with the global world please. Honestly it’s hard enough just getting to know about Australian and New Zealand and Canadian books, not even to mention anything that is not from USA or Britain. What ever happened to the whole “print on demand” movement. I could possibly understand why it’s hard to find picture books, but middle grade / young adult / junior fiction? Surely that’s not an issue?

How are the rest of you doing with your diversity collection? What “sells” to your students what do you need to work on promoting? Do your teachers gravitate to them / read them or do they need to be pushed?