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.

Screen Shot 2020-01-28 at 12.37.26

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?

 

 

Resist the list

I am convinced that there are generations of parents (and librarians) who think the main purpose of a librarian is to create age/grade related lists of books for students to read. When parent-teacher conference time comes around, if parents venture into the library and engage – as opposed to using us as a baby-sitting booth / place to drink coffee and wait / information-direction desk the one and only question they seem to have is “do you have a book list for Grade …”

So why don’t I have a book list for Grade …? When they allow me time to explain, and time to discuss their child(ren)’s reading needs – preferably with the child present these are the themes of the conversation:

What are your (their) favourite things in life?

I don’t start off with what books they like, because their parent(s) probably wouldn’t be having a conversation with me if they liked books or reading. But if I can get a feeling for what kind of person they are, I can start to think what kind of books may be an entry point to intersect with their lives.

I’m very much a “there’s a book for that” type of person and my staff always jokes with me that they can’t have a conversation with me without walking away with a “book for that”.  If a student likes gaming, we have gaming books. If they like art and they’re EAL (English as an additional language) I have no problem recommending starting with some of our fabulous wordless books, picture books or graphic novels. And I’m happy to discuss how sharing a (sophisticated or even just funny) picture book together is a way better and more productive use of time than forcing a child to plod through Shakespeare or whatever classic the parent loved when they were young.

Reading, like physical activity and learning, has to leave the person with the desire for more. The feeling that they’d like to keep doing this for a long, long time. Forever in fact. If we make them hate it now, we’re f*’d as a human race.

How much can you read?

This is a little open-ended. It’s a combination of the dreaded “reading level” and how much physical time they have for reading.

We have a lot of EAL students in our school. With very ambitious parents. Who are often well-meaning but misguided. During my 16 years in Asia, I have always been astounded at the high level of education and knowledge my Asian counter-parts have. Newly minted in Asia I had no idea of the classic / foundational texts of their countries / languages / cultures. They knew so much of the western foundational texts – Grimm, Shakespeare, Greek etc. Myths and Legends. I’m always humbled by this. However, they’re not helping their child when they insist that a child with a phase 2 EAL level reads Shakespeare in the original text.

I’ve not got much against Shakespeare (except inasmuch it’s part of the dead white male canon etc. etc.) and I have Shakespeare in my library in every form / format and level. And I’m happy to help these students to start with an abridged version, an illustrated version, a short story version, a graphic novel version. But when what they need is basic foundational functional language so they can survive and thrive in a classroom and canteen, honestly the Plantagenets is not going to help them.

Screen Shot 2019-10-06 at 09.26.20

reading

Having time for reading is another big issue. There is this romantic notion that all school-going children read for 20-30 minutes a day. You know all the charts … the funny thing is they all have exactly the same 1987 source, and it’s not even an accurate representation of what the article said – see * below.

I don’t know what your classrooms or homes look like, and I’m sure there are schools, classrooms and homes doing brilliantly on reading. Sustained reading. Uninterrupted reading. I fear the truth is otherwise. I suspect students spend a lot more time on Youtube for their learning. YouTube publishes some interesting statistics.  Of relevance is “YouTube is technically the second largest search engine in the world.” and “Average Viewing Session – 40 minutes, up 50% year-over-year”. If I had to put some money on what our students are watching most on YouTube, it wouldn’t be much to do with learning but rather they seem to spend a lot of time watching other students engaged in one kind of game or another.

I think if I had to ask a bunch of our middle-schoolers to preference-rank what they like to do, if reading wasn’t on the list, it wouldn’t even be mentioned. If it was on the list, except for maybe 5-10% of the students it would be way down at the bottom.

So this part is a little about whether the student is able and willing to make time in the day to read, and based on the little perceived time they have, what they could read.

I usually tell students that if they truly are reading every day, they should be able to get through at least a book a week. So the converse is also true. What size, format or type of book can I pair with this student that would guarantee they’d actually finish it in a period of time that will allow the book to remain meaningful?

We have this illusion that if only we could find the “right” book, a student will just want to read it non-stop and then will be converted to reading for life. I don’t think that is true. I think we need to find a succession of books that students will be successful with so that they can build up some kind of reading stamina that will result in them being “good enough” readers so they can be successful academically. And if we’re lucky they’ll pick up a book again after they leave school.

What are your friends reading?

The need to belong is second only to the need to breathe for teenagers. There are glorious moments when we can ride on the wave of “it” books (yes, like Harry Potter). Where there is a buzz around a book or an author that makes it possible for us as librarians to just ensure we have enough copies and that we get out of the way of the stampede to the check-out desk. And make sure we have enough read-alike lists.

That, for teenagers may be the critical bit – the herd immunity thing. Having a critical mass of “cool” students who are readers, who then infect the rest.

My only compromise to lists is having students recommend to each other. Before, when I was in primary and could see each class each week, I had a list per grade. Now, I’ve convinced one grade (6) to make a list as a gift to the incoming class.

What is your teacher reading (aloud) to you?

If only, if only. And when a teacher starts a habit of reading aloud to a class I can guarantee that book will become the favourite of just about every child in that class. Bonus points if the book is the first in a series, because they’ll then rush to complete the series independently.

I’m just going to put out a plug again for the Global ReadAloud. I’ve curated the resources for this year’s books in a Libguide. It’s not too late to start.  It’s never too late to start. Just read. Or read and connect. Read now, with the current great list of books. Or read some of the books from previous years. Or read this year’s books now and other books from previous years later. Honestly it doesn’t take much time. I’m reading aloud each morning from Front Desk before school to a small group of students. We have about 10-15 minutes and get through a chapter or two/three depending on the length of the chapter and what else we do / discuss around it.

Screen Shot 2019-10-06 at 10.46.53

And this is where I tell parents that if all else fails they should read to-and-with their student. Even if they’re 14. And I tell them how we still read aloud to our IB-level child who also doesn’t like reading. And they look askance at me. Or they make apologies for their own poor reading – and I tell them that’s exactly why they should be reading with their child. As an empathy building exercise. As a gesture of solidarity and understanding that it is not perhaps easy, but it is important. Important enough that we both spend time on this.

Lists are easy to make. Easy to ignore. Conversations are harder, take more time, but potentially have more value. What do you do in your schools / libraries?

————————————————————————————————————————————

*This is where things get very interesting – I went back to the original article and it says nothing like what the posters say … it’s about vocabulary acquisition and learning new words based on context (nothing about standardised tests!). AND they’re talking about students reading 15 minutes IN SCHOOL, plus out-of-school reading of newspapers, magazines and comic books. So the sum for an “average” 5th grader is:

600,000 words in school; 300,000-600,000 words out of school = +/- 1 million words

I doubt the average fifth-grader is reading anything near that amount in or out of school.

” Though the probability of learning a word from context may seem too
small to be of any practical value, one must consider the volume of reading
that children do to properly assess the contribution of learning from context
while reading to long-term vocabulary growth. How much does the average
child read? According to Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1986), the
median fifth-grade student reads about 300,000 words per year from books
outside of school; the amount of out-of-school reading increases to about
600,000 words per year if other reading material such as newspapers,
magazines, and comic books are included. If a student read 15 minutes a
day in school (see Allington, 1983; Dishaw, 1977; Leinhardt, Zigmond, &
Cooley, 1981) at 200 words per minute, 200 days per year, 600,000 words
of text would be covered. Thus, a rough estimate of the total annual
volume of reading for a typical fifth-grade student is a million words per
year; many children will easily double this figure. Reanalysis of data
collected by Anderson and Freebody (1983), using information on the
frequency of words in children’s reading material from Carroll, Davies,
and Richman (1971), indicates that a child reading a million words per
year probably encounters roughly 16,000 to 24,000 different unknown
words.
How many words per year do children learn from context while reading,
then? Given a .05 chance of learning a word from context, and an average
amount of reading, a child would learn approximately 800-1,200 words
well enough to pass fairly discriminating multiple-choice items.
These numbers are at the low end of the range that we have previously
estimated (Nagy, Herman, & Anderson, 1985; see also Nagy & Anderson,
1984), because of the lower estimate of the probability of learning a word
from context and a more conservative estimate of the number of unknown
words encountered during reading. Yet, the figures suggest that incidental
learning from written context represents about a third of a child’s annual
vocabulary growth, an increase in absolute vocabulary size that has not
even been approached by any program of direct vocabulary instruction.

Nagy, W., Anderson, R.C., & Herman, P. (1987). Learning word meanings from context during normal reading. American Educational Research Journal, 24, 237–270

Content plus

One regularly hears phrases bandied around schools such as “Every teacher is a language teacher”; or “Every class should start with 10 minutes of reading” and you’d be hard pressed to find a teacher who doesn’t agree in theory, that reading is a good thing. But then there is the “reality” of supposed too little time, too much pressure, too much content to cover and the theory of reading becomes such an abstract notion that there isn’t even a consideration of how it could be implemented.

Last week-end, Katie Day and myself gave a 90 minute presentation to around 100 educators at the Neev Literature Festival titled “Books & Beyond”. You can find a copy of the presentation here as well as other resources.

We’re on break now, and when we get back I was asked to present to our HODs for a few minutes on integrating reading into units in the middle school. I’ll probably just show this one slide:

I’d call it “content plus” – it’s from a G8 Earth Science unit that the Science team and I put together at the end of last year and they’re teaching now.

The idea is that you still have the science content as core to the unit – in this case Earth Science and learning about Sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks and the minerals they contain and mining and the  products of mining. But to that you add the environmental and human impact, and the lens of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).  And in order to help build empathy and understanding, add some literature.

Katie also had the brilliant idea, that she’s implemented in her school (and I’m going to be following quickly behind!), of getting good, relevant articles, stripping off the advertising etc (she uses Safari Reader View; I use Mercury Reader) putting them in binders and making them available in the library and classrooms – see slides 42-47).

You can of course choose any minerals, but in this case to make it relevant to G8, we focused on the primary elements of an iPhone.

 

iPhone ingredients

Ideally, and this takes time, some of the science and or math units would be linked to Language & Literature or Individuals & Societies units allowing more time to explore literature.

In the mean time, one of the wonderful ways of adding literature into units is through picture books. In the guide we created for the Neev Festival, we made suggestions around groupings of the SDGs of the Neev shortlisted picture books plus lots of other books. It’s still a work in progress, but over time I’m hoping that for each and every global goal I have 10-20 picture books, (as well as 10-20 fiction books and 10-20 really good nonfiction books) that can easily and quickly be introduced to a class, thereby adding a very special element to learning, and truly making “every teacher a language teacher” and every teacher able to devote a tiny slice of their class to reading.