Tag: blogging challenge

#1 Digital resources

In an attempt to blog more regularly, I’ve signed up for a challenge – so these posts will be in amongst all the other stuff I may be blogging.

#FutureReadyLibs 10-Week #BlogChallenge Challenge #1: How did you get involved in the Future Ready Schools/Future Ready Librarians initiative? Are you involved in the district strategic planning process? What is your vision for a future ready school? What makes you a Future Ready Librarian?

How I got involved

Well I guess it was just a result of being added or adding myself to a Facebook group that looked interesting. Sometimes things just happen that way.  Also since I’ve just finished my MIS and M Ed degrees I’m still vaguely interested in this type of thing, in order to keep my learning up to date.

frlblogchallenge1I think our school, as an IB PYP school is pretty future-ready in many aspects, in fact sometimes I think the cost of being “future ready” is that you occasionally need to go “back to basics” and check up on the 3 R’s and make sure you stay sober and self-critical.

Am I future ready as a librarian? Looking at the little graphic on the left, I can tick most of those boxes, or slices, inasmuch as things are in my power at least. And where not, I’m constantly nudging for change.

I’m not entirely sure if I’m on the right topic for this week – I’d note “digital resources” so I’ll write a little about that.

Curates digital resources and tools:

When I started my job at my current school I’d come from working part time in a secondary library where a large part of my time was spent creating library guides for the Middle & High School (including the IB).  I was lucky to have Katie Day as my mentor, and we had many many discussions on how to curate resources so that students had easy access to them from their laptops (they’re a one-on-one macbook school in secondary). The idea was to have digital resources in the form of videos, curated Flipboard articles and database access, but at the same time make our physical resources digitally visual and “clickable” for later borrowing as necessary.

Screen Shot 2017-03-28 at 4.55.31 PMSo, a few weeks into my new job I discovered we had an unused library guide subscription, and I immediately put it to work. Of course curating for primary is a somewhat different proposition. Immense more thought and care needs to be put into ensuring things are age appropriate – in content, in level and in access.  And I was a newbie … so it was a case of building things and hoping they would come. It’s taken a while. After the first year, a couple of teachers were on board, and now more and more are coming to expect and use the resources. My main objective is to move away from letting kids “just google it” to an idea of just like we don’t throw a bookshelf full of books into their UOI (unit of inquiry) boxes, but make sure they’re appropriate for the grade level, for the central idea, for the lines of inquiry, and may even evolve as they go through a unit, so too we can have digital resources that are similarly curated.

A few things have been a huge boon in this respect.  In the first instance I cannot express my admiration for Epic books enough. They are an absolute game changer.  In terms of depth and breadth of their books they far surpass the incumbents such as Tumblebooks. I do have some librarian type quibbles with a few of their set-up methodologies, but that’s small fish compared to what they’re achieving.

Secondly, Springshare – the owners of Libguides are just phenomenal in their ability to constantly evolve and develop their platform. I love the fact that the libguide community are so amazing in their ability to creatively curate, to combine physical and digital and particularly the fact that they demonstrate CREATION and SHARING, which is absolutely what a future ready community should be about.  Also, my desire to make good looking guides has pushed me to learning some (very basic) HTML which never ceases to impress the fine young gentlemen and ladies in my library who then realise I’m not just an old library lady!

Thirdly LibraryThings for Libraries through their book display widgets they bridge the gap between a lovely visual interface (libguides) and an old stodgy very unfriendly catalog (Follett Destiny).

As far as tools are concerned. I try to keep introducing appropriate tools to my students and to fellow teachers – but only if they are meaningful. It’s a balance. Our students are “over tech-ed” and we’re getting a lot of pushback from both parents AND students about the amount of time they spend in front of a screen. So where it saves time, hassle, helps make things neat and well spelt, sure. Otherwise it’s back to the physical.

Empowering Students as creators

I’m very fortunate to be in a school environment where there is an EdTech coach and a STEAM coach. So wild ideas for physical or digital creation can be co-shared with them. We’ve had students create book trailers, book recommendations, book spine poetry, book covers, their own books, display work pieces in the library etc.  I don’t think any of that is particularly special though – most librarians do that kind of thing in conjunction with their students and teachers – it sure makes displays easier!

Builds instructional partnerships

That part is definitely a work in progress. It’s tricky. I could blame a whole host of things – fitting in 35 classes a week on a fixed schedule, a yet to be approved information literacy scope and sequence that’s embedded in the curriculum, running, managing and keeping up to date (and renovating) a facility, curating digital resources in library guides … but instructional partnerships is a ball I’ve dropped. Or actually never really properly had in the air. It works piecemeal, depending more on relationships and invitations than being structural. I’m working on it with my fellow librarians from our other campus, the head of curriculum etc. It takes time is all I can say. And I don’t think I’m the only one saying it judging from the comments of my fellow teacher-librarians.  I beat myself up about it a LOT in my first year. To the point of tears. This year I’ve been distracted a bit by the renovation and staff medical issues. But we’re inching there.  Watch this space.

Day 5: Book Talk

As I go through this list I’m realising that not a lot of it is relevant to where I am in the librarianship process or what I do (or sometimes even what I’m thinking about and consumed with).

I looked at this and I was thinking book talk.  What a quaint term.  I’m wondering if we should change it to “resource talk”?  Or “idea talk”?  Because when I think in terms of the conversations I’m having with my kids (at home) and teachers and students (at school) and friends it’s really more about concepts and ideas and resources.  At school one of my colleagues is making these giant posters for different age groups and reading levels and “if you liked this …. then …” I guess the humanities teachers are probably doing some book talking.

But I want to talk about resource talking.  And idea talking.  I’m beginning to think of the research process – and in essence all reading is research.  Even if you’re reading a novel you’re learning something and it’s doing something wonderful to your brain.  For me the research process comprises three distinct types of activities, each with their own resource needs:

1. The hygiene factors
(Remember Herzberg from psycho 101?).  I’d say that these are the things that need to be present before any real thought or creativity or research can be done.  These are also the tedious boring bits that “have” to be done and done properly otherwise everything else falls apart.   These are the things that we need to automate and make as easy and “no brainer” as possible with easy to use tools and resources.  I’m talking about:

* collecting resources so that they can easily be found back
* citations
* references
* bibliography
* formatting according to requirements
* Checking spelling and grammar
* curating and sharing resources easily
* finding resources easily

So to sort this out for our budding researchers, we need to do a “tool talk“. And we’re living in a WONDERFUL time for all of this.  Between Easybib, Zotero, Diigo, and Evernote etal (I’m just mentioning the one’s I use not the ones in existence) this type of thing is almost the equivalent of having a full time housekeeper, cleaning up after you as you go along.

The catch?  You have to set these things up in advance, be familiar with how they work and be annal and consistent in their use.

2.  The process
Our grade 11’s have just been through a “process talk” with our librarian before the break.  Actually research is probably a couple of sub-processes that come together.  Getting a “big idea”, whittling that down to a “research question”, getting resources and writing it all up.   This is where a bit of meta-cognition comes into the play.  One the one hand a process is just that – a process or a series of steps for getting from point A to B.  On the other, awareness of the process in the sense of the cognitive and psychological process gives a student a greater sense of control over their emotions while going through the process.
Ms. Katie did this really well, talking about information gathering to the point that it all felt overwhelming and out of control and then knowing this was the point where you had to stop and narrow, narrow, narrow – see the slide below from her talk:

3.  The “so what”?
I don’t think we ever really get to this point. At least not as a talk. But some of our students do, and do so admirably.  They do their research on eco-toursim and become an activist.  They take things beyond the realm of ideas and concepts and apply them to their lives and the lives of others.  Joyce Valenza speaks wonderfully about this in her “see Sally research” talk.

I think as librarians we can be happy if our students are able to sort out the hygiene factors and apply them consistently, go through the research process and deliver an acceptable end result.  And it’s a feather in the cap of the school, teachers and librarians if they go beyond the ivory tower and create meaning in their lives and those of others.  And sometimes that meaning may “just” be finding their passion and knowing what they want to be or do when they leave school.

Day 4: Technology in the library – how has it affected your role

I’d say that it’s thanks to technology that I have a role in the library.  Just before doing my work placement I got involved with creating a pathfinder for my course in information services, which was quite well received.  On the back of that, during my work placement I had the wonderful task of creating lots more pathfinders – all using Libguides.

Here are a few of them:
Psychology
Music
Mathematics
Science
Economics
Drama & Theatre

One of the wonderful things about technology in the library is that it means that we can curate information for all types of learners in all types of formats, catering to the way students best absorb information and learn.

Today I saw a really cool infographic on videos, personally I HATE getting information via video, but it’s the best way for my son to learn.   And – newly learnt from that infographic – youtube has become the second biggest search engine on the internet after google …

The good thing about a pathfinder like libguides is that I can incorporate videos and pictures and podcasts and links to books.  I can make it very visual.  I can make it current with links to RSS feeds from the news, and design-like with my click-through to the various flipboards we’ve made for each subject.

Not every librarian has the time or inclination to make libguides, or likes making them, or enjoys sniffing around the internet for just the right video or picture or podcast or blog, but I love doing that.  I’ve got all sorts of ideas for pathfinders for lots of different things, not just academic subjects – like one for parents of special learning needs kids – everyone needs resources and it’s so much easier if you have a starting point, not just the whole wide web shooting it out at you.

Day 3: Website I can’t live without

That’s a hard question, as there is no particular website I can’t live without – i.e. most have substitutes in one form or another.  However I don’t think I could live without the web.  Possibly google search along with google scholar and google images are the sites I use ALL the time.  I’ve book-marked duckduckgo after reading an article about the lack of privacy that google affords, but must admit to having only used it once or twice since bookmarking it ….  habits die hard. And now I’m trying to find the article, and discover I didn’t diigo it – diigo is slowly becoming a habit, but not as quickly as it needs to.

So here are a few of the articles I’ve just googled about duckduckgo (haha, isn’t that ironical!)
PCWorld – who explain how it works and why it takes longer
SearchEngineland – who rightly point out that people probably don’t care much about privacy
and EtherRag – who discriminate between privacy from advertisers and from the NSA.

On the other hand there are websites that I think that I’m overly active on – like Facebook that I could be a lot more discriminate about – I like the newsfeeds from all my friends and ex-collegues and ex- & current classmates around the world.  But as a (future) librarian I HATE the non-searchability and non-curateability of it all (if those are words, which my online spelling check says they aren’t – but a spelling check is one of those love to hate tools, especially when writing in multiple languages).

Back to google – I think lack of privacy may the price we pay for “free” search.  And since enough of us are making that trade-off – consciously or unconsciously, it’s got a big enough platform for it to work. And that’s the alpha and omega of it all.  And since we don’t live in north Korea, and do have capitalism and do have the internet, someone’s going to make a buck off it.  C’est la vie, says the cynic in me.

Day 2: ebooks & audiobooks

This is a tough one.  The library I’m with at school hasn’t jumped on board.  And all for very good reasons.  Personally though, in my home library I’ve been embracing audio books ever since my kids were very small – (about 10 years ago) when we were living in Spain and I had a long commute to take them to and from kindergarten every day.  We started off with Peter Pan, and we’ve never stopped since then.  Even now when we drive from Netherlands to Switzerland in the summer – a good 8 hour trip we’ll arrive at the destination and they’ll clamour to stay in the car until the chapter is over.  It’s always been Naxos audio-books, as they have such wonderful voice artists, and we must have the CD of just about everything they’ve ever published (and if I ever have to listen to Professor Branestawn which has been on repeat mode for about 1 million time … again ….).  I also listen to the adult ones, and “A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters” must be one of my all time favourites – it almost demands to be read aloud.   We had a subscription to the Naxos spoken word library – and that was wonderful – the kids used to dip in and out of books every evening before going to bed – particularly the children’s poetry – again something that is wonderful to hear rather than to read.

eBooks – I was an early kindle adopter, and I’m slowly but surely replacing all my old mouldy and yellowing classics with the online versions.  I love it for holiday.  I also have “overdrive” on my ipad, where I borrow books non-stop from the NLB, particularly when I’m travelling.  They also have audio-books for kids and my kids had great fun listening to the “Just William” books.

As a consumer therefore, yes, but as a librarian I know there are all sorts of issues with rights and ownership, not even to mention needing to train staff to train clients on the use thereof.  So that concludes day 2 of the challenge.

And if anyone knows how to get Gutenberg books into your Follett Destiny Catalogue – I’m all ears!

Day 1: Tech tip

The first on the challenge was to share a Tech tip.  Mine would be incorporating a library with a federated search into your google scholar through library links.

This was a tip shared by the NLB while I was on the study tour last year.

Here is a step by step guide:

1. Go to google scholar

 

2. On settings choose “library links”

 

3. In “library links” you add the library (up to five) where you have access to a journal database. In this case you can see I’ve added Charles Sturt University where I’m a student.

4. When you do a search, on the RHS you will see links to your library where you can directly (after putting in your password and ID) go to the article via your libraries database.

Challenge …

Going to try and rise to the occasion and blog every day for 20 days (may be easier than any fitness or diet resolutions …) following the lead of “Where Books and Technology meet” where Jennifer Brower has set out a nice little scheme to follow.  So here goes …