Tag: technology

Online learning is not new shiny things

I’ll be the first to admit I’m an old boring Cassandra. It possibly / probably has to do with my age. Just to put things into context. Once upon a quarter century plus ago I was an auditor finishing up my articles. It was in the days when “calling” existed. Not the kind of cold-calling or call-centre type of calling, but when every single document that left the accounting firm’s doors would be read by one accountant to another (not secretarial staff, the actual articled clerks with three or four years university behind them) and checked to ensure there were no typos or spelling or number mistakes. This was the 1980’s just at the cusp of personal computers. It was tedious but important work, because the reputation of the firm and profession was at stake – or so we were told.

messengersA podcast episode that made a particularly profound impact on me was Freakanomics’ “In Praise of Maintenance” . Another favourite is Hidden Brain’s The Cassandra Curse which is particularly pertinent at the moment – with the fudging of Corona Virus numbers by a person who shall not be named in a country that should know better. A great book to read on Messengers and Messages is “Messengers” by Stephen Martin – valuable lessons on who gets listened to and why – spoiler – middle aged women are generally not listened to.

What does this have to do with online learning due to school closure in the time of Corona? That doesn’t quite trip off the tongue like “Love in the Time of cholera“… Well basically people are spending a lot of time exchanging tips on what tools to acquire and how to use them. All the tech giants and wanna-be’s are out there touting their wares and offering freebies (but what happens when everyone invests time and effort into content in them and we go back to having to pay???). Twitter and Facebook are awash with what tools to use for communication, teaching, feedback and learning. Padlets and Wakelets abound – that will all be redundant or fall into disuse or no longer be updated before you can blink your eye – because maintenance is well, boring. About one in 100 things I read are about sensible boring matters like setting up procedures, making sure systems are secure, robust and accurate.

And yet probably 99% of my time is spent documenting, testing, and fixing things that go wrong as people rush from the one new shiny thing to the other. It’s the boring maintenance stuff I’d recommend you spend some time on –

  • is all student data up to date in your student information system – we’ve had some poor souls join school during closure!
  • Are all students in the right classes / groups for every tool you’re using?
  • Is there a central entry point that students/parents can find information and get the daily/weekly learning and ask questions / get answers and where attendance can be taken?
  • Is there a place where information and knowledge management / FAQs can be accumulated for Teachers and Students (ours are in libguides)?
  • Are expectations for Teachers and Students clear, unambiguous and enforced (if necessary)?
  • Are there central calendars, preferably by grade where students and parents can check for online classes and meetings and assignment/assessment dates?
  • Are the lines of communication for Edtech / IT support / curriculum support etc. clear and easily found and used.
  • Are we working hard or are we working smart? Witness the overwhelming inboxes of some teachers who don’t make use of central forums for Q&A but still answer individual “same same” questions time after time.

A very valuable (but time consuming) exercise is to pick one student per grade and follow their “expected” path online checking from morning check-in, class to class, tool by tool and including the calendar to see that everything works as expected.

To parody the old saying of “an heir and a spare” – for each teaching and learning outcome you probably only need a pair of tools. One that is your trusty old steed that you preferably already were using before closure and everyone is familiar with (I nearly said “happy” there, but I deleted it, because hardly anyone is ever happy with the familiar old steed, they want the “next thing”) and you can use for 95% of things and the other is the one you have as a back up for when things collapse for one reason or another .

OREO online learning I still like Alison Yang’s graphic that came out waaaay at the start of the closures – about a million years ago (actually only five weeks but it feels much longer). Since not all the tools she recommended were “China Friendly) I used it (with permission) as the basis for the summary of the tools we’re using – each link in the guide leads to a page of explanations and usage tips and recommendations.

There comes a time in online-learning when as a community you have to agree to say “no” more often than “yes” because there is only so much a community can absorb, process and use effectively. You also need to be able to focus on just one thing each week on the back-end and do it properly.

This week was my “week of the calendar”. One could possibly not think of anything more boring and less “sexy”. But I was floundering under the 100s of zoom and team meetings that were popping up everywhere, some clashing with each other, many invisible or rendered invisible by poor naming strategies. I think I’ll change this into a separate post to minimise a TW/DR problem in blogs.

Have a great week – and don’t forget the plumbing.

Addition: 18 March 2020 – this is getting a lot of attention so I thought I’d add the infographic I made yesterday – happy to improve it based on suggestions (please add as a comment in the comments)

EdTech this and this

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Ha, ha, ha bonk

That’s me laughing my head off at my thoughts two weeks ago on this same blog. It’s also me laughing at this article about setting priorities and using the “Urgent / Important” matrix. 

urgent important matrix

So we’ve just finished our first week of online learning and I’ve learnt a heck of a lot. One of the main things being that the only way to get out of box 1 is by working roughly 20 hours a day non-stop so that you can set up systems and structures to move things into normal operational mode.

The problem is that while I’m answering urgent matters with students and teachers I’m not setting up the structures.

What I’ve managed to set up so far:

It’s basically a triage system, but unfortunately it’s hard for people in panic mode to absorb so much information, so a lot of the time we do need to do emergency surgery. I must say that Microsoft Teams has come out the hero here – besides a brief all systems down last week, it’s been pretty robust and reliable.

Now I’m going for a walk, the sun is shining and the moon is full. Everything else is shot. No blogging, no Chinese, little reading of anything substantial, basic diet and way too little sleep, no schedule.

How is everyone else doing?

——————————————————–

Matrix by The Startup on Medium
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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

Advocacy is not enough we need power

Librarians are big on advocacy. Big on helping their peers when they’re not being heard in their communities or schools to build their “advocacy toolkit”. Most librarian courses include at least one module in one course on advocacy. Some academic librarians have built their careers on advocacy. But I’d like to cry foul. This has been going on for long enough.

Looking at advocacy it has a couple of tenants:

“Five Advocacy Tips
At the basic level advocacy is building relationships. The goal is to become a valuable resource for policymakers. No matter who the audience is, you should keep in mind the following:
1. Be confident.
2. Frame your message to answer the question, “So what?”
3. Plan and practice your message.
4. Present a clear and compelling message; less is more.
5. Offer yourself as an expert resource and provide examples from your community; stories are more compelling than statistics” (Advocacy toolkit).

I’d like to posit that the whole concept of advocacy is wrong. It is not advocacy that we need but a seat at the table. But the problem is that no one is going to shift over and make a place for people who are nicely, confidently giving compelling messages from experts. If anything after all these years of advocacy the situation has become worse rather than better. This is global, in all the countries that used to be bastions of (school / public) libraries and librarianship: the UK ; USA; Australia, and Canada.

I’d like to suggest that the decline in school libraries and school librarians is inversely correlated with the rise in EdTech or Digital Tech or Digital Literacy teams and resources. Those same UK schools claiming poverty when it comes to libraries have 900m to spend on edtech? And what I’m noticing is that the heads of these subsections do have a seat at the table, a link on the webpages and a say at every conceivable moment.  And I’m wondering, not saying this is a fact, just wondering out loud, whether it has anything to do with the fact that so many of those leading this corner of the education landscape are male as are most of the leadership in schools?  And while I’m a huge prosumer of tech and use it extensively in my teaching and learning, I’m suspecting it’s not really helping our students’ literacy – even their digital literacy ($129b pound investment by 2020 for students to have “basic” digital literacy and no one’s saying the numbers don’t add up?).

There have been two little discussions on the various librarian network groups I’m on that relate to these questions.

The first was about the merits of becoming Google Educator certified. It’s a push at most schools and apparently something sought after by  recruiters. I’m flabbergasted. Google is so frigging smart. And we’re being conned. And no one is crying foul. I grew up with computers as they burst into the scene in the early 80’s. I could use every iteration of word processing, presentation and spreadsheet tools from the very first most basic google librarytypes. When I say I can use, I REALLY can use. I know how to use templates, make an index, do auto-intext citation, add captions, make data tables, pivot tables, look ups, statistical analysis, import addresses into labels etc etc. And what I don’t know I know how to find out how to do, either online or because I know people who know their S*** around this type of stuff. People of my generation and younger. I also have an Education masters in knowledge networks and digital innovation and follow all sorts of trends and tools and try everything at least once.  I can use basic HTML and CSS and find out how to do anything if I get stuck. I know how to learn and where to learn anything I need to know and I’m prepared to put in the time to do so. This is in a “just-in- time-and-immediate-application-and-use-basis”, rather than a “just-in-case – and-I’ll-forget it-tomorrow-and-probably-never-use-it-basis”. So can you tell my why I would bother wasting my time and money becoming GAFE (or anything else) diploma’ed when the equivalent is for me to go from driving a high powered sports car to getting a tricycle license? I feel the same way about this as I feel about people saying you don’t need libraries now you have google. Well actually I feel stronger about it. It seems like every single for profit educational technology app or company is now convincing educators that the way for them to be taken seriously is to “certify” themselves on their tools, something that involves a couple of hours of mind-numbingly boring and simple video tutorials and/or multiple choice tests with or without a cheapish fee and then to add a row of downloadable certs into their email signatures like so many degree mill qualifications on a quack’s wall. And then these are held in higher regard (it seems) than the double masters degrees it takes to be a librarian??  Not a game I’m prepared to be playing.

Then next question was about an upcoming education conference – I’m not going to name names but it’s a biggie, and  one of my fellow (male) librarians managed to convince the organisers to include a library strand. Bravo for him – he’s obviously got a voice that’s being heard and this is a huge step forward. BUT, as he and I discussed off-line, privately, when I mentioned the word “echo-chamber” we’ll all be sitting at the wrong table. A nice table. An interesting table, a stimulating table, a worthwhile, practical, intelligent table with some wonderful people (librarians really are super people, I wish I’d discovered them a lot earlier), but the wrong table. And even if our “strand” is open to others, we’re in direct timetable competition with some pretty heavy hitters who are in other very enticing and compelling strands that just beg to be explored. Strands that I as a librarian with an M.Ed have covered in my degree with some of these hard hitting thought shapers. But I’ll not be at those tables, because I’ll be in the librarian strand, where we all agree, and where I can guarantee there will be some mutual hand wringing on budgets, staffing, literacy and advocacy issues. And I can almost certainly also guarantee that none of the librarian strand events will be attended by a single education powerbroker who is not a librarian (please prove me wrong – someone – anyone?).

So I’d say we don’t need advocacy we need power. And to get power we need to be political. And librarians, like language teachers are not very good at politics. We don’t like being unpopular, we want to be accepted and needed, but I would argue we no longer can ethically rely on advocacy, children’s literate lives are at stake, we have to enter the fray.

(I’ll add a personal disclaimer here, I work on a campus where my (female) leadership team is incredibly supportive of the library, invites me to leadership meetings and where I do have a seat on (some) tables. I also was highly flattered when one of the teachers rose up to bat for me last week on a visibility issue. But I’m aware that I’m probably in a minority, which is why I wrote this post).

No excuses: Syndetics

It must be an age thing – but as I’m getting further into my 50’s I’m becoming less tolerant of fancy sounding reasons and explanations that are actually just excuses for staving off change. This is the first of a series of posts on things that really annoy me as an international librarian, with a smattering of understanding of technology and a desire to serve ALL students, teachers, parents and administrators in my community as best I can. I have an overdeveloped sense of fairness and justice and I sometimes feel that librarians as a group are just too nice and suck up way too many things.

brazen

I’ll also admit to being emboldened by a FABULOUS new biography on women called “Brazen” (coming out in English next year – thank you Netgalley for the preview copy) You can preorder your copy now – suitable for High School 13+. And in fact this book just highlights what I’m going to write about today. This book originated in French. I’m currently totally inspired by the Guardian’s World library list and wanted to replicate it, adapted for primary school, particularly with a view to Uniting Nations day coming up in November.

bangladeshNow I work really hard at trying to transform my library into one that is representative of my students. I love the fact that my one Bangladeshi student asks me every week if I have any new books about or set in Bangladesh. And that at the beginning of term she came to proudly tell me that she was no longer the one and only but had been joined by another family. And when I showed her our new book about Bangladesh she took time out of her library browsing time to show me all the things the book depicted that were special to her.

I also work hard on my libguides to make sure that my books are showcased graphically and visually to make perusing them interesting for primary level students. So this is when I get really annoyed that Syndetics, the one interface for front covers that just about every system, from OPAC to libguides to LibraryThingsforLibraries uses does NOT seem to recognise that there is a publishing industry outside of the BANA (Britain, Australia, North America) countries – in fact they even struggle with Australia most the time. And don’t let me even consider China – well they cheat a bit – a lot actually – thinking that one ISBN number should suffice for a whole series of books – even if there are 57 books in the series.

This means that my libguide with my books from and about other countries, my catalog and my destiny discover new books respectively looks like this:

 

Spot the problem? And Syndetics actually prides itself in the fact that the covers of the coverless books are now colourful with title and author. NOT GOOD ENOUGH! For my catalog, my library assistants spend hours manually inserting the covers, and for the much touted, over promised under-delivered Destiny discover it’s just a blue boring nothing. So 5 of my 8 most recently purchased books are just blue blobs. So if you’re a librarian trying to diversify AND to make your new purchases appealing the cards are stacked against you.

Before I started writing this post I thought I’d do a bit of research into Syndetics, and the whole cover image thing. And then I thought no damnit. I won’t.  I don’t really care what the reason or excuse is. They’re selling an expensive service. They’re complicit in not improving the marketing of diversity of literature and I’m just going to put it out there and they can do the explaining, and hopefully a bit of soul searching on how they can make this better. What BIG things, what IMPORTANT and sea-change things they, as a big corporation as opposed to me as a little librarian in a little library serving 650 students from 40 nations can achieve.

 

 

 

 

Books I wish would be published

I’ve been asked to be on a panel at the AFCC to chat about “Books Teachers Wish Authors Would Write” from a teacher / librarian perspective. So I put the question out on one of my teacher-librarian networks (an international one) and these were the responses I received:
  • World war 2 in Asia- novel for 8-10 year olds (NF / NNF)
  • big shortage of narrative nonfiction that is NOT about the holocaust, slavery, the American great depression or US civil rights. Also shortage of intra-Asia migration stories not Asia to Europe / north America (NF / NNF)
  • Third culture kids as main characters (CD)
  • More stories about our present/ early future stories that include digital tools and behaviour (D)
  • I’m looking for things like “lego ideas / lego play” but in small manageable books that kids can take out without breaking their backs / the book
  • nonfiction – updated human rights / millennial goals / NGOs / Poverty etc. for G4 level (9 year old) mixed format, good graphic design, mix of narrative and fact (NF)
  • Middle school nonfiction – life in different economic / political systems – communist, socialist, social democracy etc. with a world wide unbiased view of positives and negatives with personal stories and data (NNF)
  • Books on gaming or from the creators of games like Minecraft, Roblox, etc. (D)
  • Conflicts over resources around the world – case studies that are elementary friendly (NF)
  • The next “The Outsiders.” Something to appeal to the teens who fall in love with it in class, and are looking for something like it.
  • Decent Biographies that are at elementary aged level & middle school level without being dumbed down – with more Asian protagonists! (CD / NF)
  • Books purposely written for upper ES that has appropriate content and reading “level” (ELL)
  • More ES novels featuring multicultural characters that are not related to war or historical events (CD)
  • Books about world topics that are appropriate for kinder/g2 (NF)
  • Modern urban indigenous stories – universal experiences in all first nations people. (CD)
  • Easy read stories that are well written & not dumbed down for teens. – yes! especially for our ELL students! And that don’t portray just the…..dark side of life? I feel like when I was purchasing for xxx, the high interest/low level books all were about gang members/drug dealers in the US. (ELL)
  • Science fiction for Elementary kids. (SF)
  • Middle Grade fiction with a Korean protagonist (My Name Was Keoko style) (CD)
  • Books with culturally diverse characters. I still remember teaching a boy could Yousef who threw the book down in disgust and said ‘Why can’t they give them normal names?’……the character was called Joseph. Which really isn’t that out there, unless you’re an Arab boy. Then it’s just weird. (CD)
  • LGBT books for tweens (G)
  • Definitely more emigration/immigration stories that are intra-Asia. There are so many diaspora stories to be told that have nothing to do with Europe or North America. (NF / NNF)
  • Does anyone want war stories set in Asia – like Japanese invasion/ Korean War / American or Vietnam war with perspective from the non-western side – or is that too sensitive? (NF / NNF)
  • My teachers want more World War 1 fiction for grades 6-8 and social justice books for middle schoolers.(NF / NFF)
  • My middle school girls want more heroes that are NOT princesses. (G)
  • My boys want fiction that has video game elements like Minecraft stories.(D)
  • All of my high schoolers want “classics” with better covers.
  • what about this: teachers, school, parents do not compare my score with others, do not give me homework, I want to play. (C)

I’ve tried to code the answers as follows:

  • NF / NNF: narrative nonfiction – 10x
  • CD: cultural diversity – 6x
  • D: digital / gaming element – 3x
  • G: Gender related – 2x
  • ELL: hi lo / books for English Language Learners – 2x
  • SF: Science fiction – 1x
  • C: cultural issue – 1x

Looking at these I think that the theme is a general frustration with a lack of books with an Asian context.  Particularly historical fiction / narrative nonfiction and culturally diverse characters. We all know that the USA dominates publishing, followed by the UK. Australia has some good stuff out but limits itself by its steep pricing, expensive shipping costs and insular publishing industry. China is a late entrant into children’s books and is making great inroads – but mainly in translation into Chinese. What is particularly commendable is that they are not just translating the (North) American staples but many of the brilliant and wonderful European offerings.

Then I did a similar exercise with the BWB (Blokes with Books) yesterday. I asked them to go in groups of 2-4 students and tell me what kind of book they were missing in their lives. Books they wish authors would write.   They were amazing – a couple of groups even started writing the books they wish were written (a nice outcome given the fact that teachers are now complaining that we’ve got them reading but their writing is still poor).

Their suggestions could also be broadly grouped:

  • Two groups wanted Harry Potter extensions or back stories – one wanted the parallel books that focused on the other houses, not just Gryffindor Tower. Another group was fascinated by the horcruxes and wanted a book on that.
  • One group wanted an elaborate Pokemon book that inverted some of the characters with unexpected twists.
  • One group combined the ideas of the three group members into a fantasy / reality mixture involving video games and rugby with a wimpy gaming protagonist being forced to play rugby by an over-zealous parent and learning tricks and manouvers in video games that led him to dominate on the real life rugby pitch.
  • One group wanted (and started outlining the chapters) of a Roblox user manual.
  • Quite a few of them agreed they’d like fiction books with colour pictures inside

I’d like to add a note to the above list – the students are not yet familiar with fan fiction, and I’m not sure they’ve looked into the Harry Potter wikis. In a sense that makes me happy that they’re still at that wonderful age where this type of magical immersive reading stuff is to be found in books rather than online. They are aware that there are user forums on these games and chat rooms etc. BUT THEY WANT TO READ ABOUT IT IN A BOOK. This is a GOOD thing. Whenever they ask for books about Minecraft and Roblox and video games and I tell them we have some of the storybook series, the Minecraft “how to” and “surely you can just ask online” they say “but we want a book”.  There are few Roblox books and they all seem to be eBook editions (publishing haste?). The Minecraft adventure books are not what they’re looking for – remember the colour pictures comment? They want more graphics! I think also as adults we see their online/offline selves as separate, whereas they don’t, and they want to see that new normal reflected in what they read. They’re all avid fantasy readers, and that I think is partially meeting their need for that online/offline fantasy/reality integration.

A caveat to all the comments (and a personal gripe) – above all children want a well written story. They don’t want to be preached to. They’re sophisticated and well- and globally read. And they can spot the fakes. As a teacher-librarian I get immensely frustrated by wanna-be and self-published authors who keep trying to foist their wares on me when it’s immediately apparent that they’re poorly written, even more badly illustrated, not edited and horribly and cheaply published. Writers need to read. They need to read a lot, they need to read widely. They need to research not just their topic but also who else has written about it, tangentially to it, similarly to it. If you want to self-publish, unless you’re a designer, pay someone to do your design for you. Unless you’re an author-illustrator find the best illustrator you can afford. And everyone, join a writing / critique group (like SCWBI) – honestly, other authors are not out to steal your ideas – they’re too busy working on their own passions. And when you think you’re done, get a good and critical editor. All authors need good editors, even great authors. Do yourself a favour and look at the interactive TS Eliot “The Wasteland” and see all the handwritten edits by Ezra Pound.

To come back to the forum and the original question that started all this:

“Creators can step into the shoes of a teacher for one hour and learn what makes a book a treasured find. From beautiful illustrations to didactic language, speakers discuss their views on relevant and useful books children need and love.”

What a huge question. Relevant is not always pedagogically useful. Useful for whom? Relevant to what?  I’d like to end with the most relevant and useful and just plain wonderful book I’ve encountered this year – Stormy seas: stories of young boat refugees. 

31213610 Well done Annick Press (that does a lot of amazing things – particularly in nonfiction) It has become the new gold standard to which I will hold all nonfiction. The elements that make it so special:

  • Great graphics – combination of good design elements with original primary source photos
  • Easy to navigate blocks of text
  • Personal stories
  • Historical facts
  • Timelines
  • Maps

It is not out yet (April 2017) and I got a preview copy through Netgalley (sign up if you’re a teacher / librarian), I showed it to a couple of classes from G3-G6 and all were clamouring for a copy afterwards – something unusual for nonfiction. And when I couldn’t give them I copy I managed to “sell” some of my otherwise untouched narrative nonfiction / historic fiction books on WW2 etc.

Another surprising (but not really because it’s so absolutely wonderful) hit has been Echo. It’s a huge book but every child and adult whose hand I’ve put 22749539it into  has just loved it – depite the fact that it takes a while to get through. Why – I suspect that the range and diversity of the characters and settings is satisfying to my international audience. But it is also great storytelling. And then they go on to read all the other Pam Muñoz Ryan books, which is also an excellent outcome.

 

What would you like to see more of that is “relevant and useful”?

But I was born here!

One of my favourite UOI (Units of inquiry) has started for my G3 students – in our library lesson last week I introduced the theme through reference to (a somewhat dated, but still very clear) video

Now one thing you can be certain about with students is that their responses will not be predictable. So too this time – what happened? They were cheering every-time their own flag appeared – irrespective whether it was to say that their nation was in the “top” for migration to or from – the subtlety of the relative positions totally escaped them.

At the point of the video where there is talk about how visa systems let people in or exclude them, I paused the video and mentioned the fact that actually all of them sitting there were migrants. Shocked silence for a few seconds followed by indignant cries of “but I’ve lived here all my life” or “but I was born here” or “my parents have lived here for 12 years”. I then asked how many of them were Singapore passport holders. In the 4 classes I had that afternoon, none. Yet they were all insistent on their rights not to be called migrants. I suspect they think of migrants as migrant workers in the sense of their helpers or construction workers.  When we got to the “push” and “pull” factors I said perhaps they should go home and ask their parents what were the push and pull reasons for being in Singapore.

How protected a life our students lead. A large number of leaving parents have come to me at the end of last year to have their library records cleared and signed off and told tales of the employment pass holder being made redundant and a home leave Christmas holiday being turned into a “packing up in a hurry and going home to an uncertain future” holiday. Those children leave and the ones left behind have no idea of the realities, are shielded from the realities.  I remember how few children could relate to Eve Buntings “Yard Sale” during the Global Read Aloud last year. They could only tell tales of moving to ever larger houses and getting more possessions rather than scaling down. The offspring of the 1%.

How much should our children know? How much should these sad, difficult and terrible things be made real and relevant to them instead of being images on screen or stories in books?  And if we make it more real, do we build empathy or fear?  I remember my daughter having weeks of nightmares after first learning about 9/11, combined with a trip to the coastal defense museum in HK and jets flying at the level of our apartment in HK. 5 year olds are not good with historical time perspective. Perhaps 8 year olds are not good with financial and living condition perspectives. Tough questions. Is this the right unit for Grade 3s?

You can find my research guide for the unit here, but I’d like to highlight some resources I find particular effective include:

Virtual reality

Clouds over Sidra

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Interactive documentary

Refugee republic

Dynamic flow map

Also only until 2010, but a brilliant piece of interactive mapping of migrant flows too and from countries.

As educators we are expected to present information in a neutral fashion. I can only hope that some of our students are able to take what we present and link the past to the present and the future given the current changes in global politics – particularly with relation to human migration.

If we build it will they come?

In my past “homeless” week I’ve had opportunity to offer PD to my fellow librarians & library staff and to some teachers, and also to go into classrooms for a longer period of time and help with research, and I’ve had time to find, curate and put resources onto our libguides, and I’m hot-desking in the coordinator’s office. Its’ been a very informative time.

What I’ve learnt:

  • Never make assumptions about a basic level of digital literacy – just because you’re comfortable with screenshots, copying and pasting, using short-cuts etc. your audience may not be. Often they only know the very specific applications and programs (and operating systems) that they need for their specific tasks in their job.  You need to be very explicit and slow in explaining things.
  • Many many students do not know the difference between being in a browser window and typing in a URL (even a shortened one) and typing in a search term in a search box since the two have become ubiquitous to them – and Chrome as a Google product has played into that by allowing you to access either a search or an address from either. That’s something I never paused to think about, as a computer child of the 80’s they were very distinct things. This is philosophically interesting and I wonder if it impacts on understanding the nature of search and query?  I see a considerable amount of blurring generally – and if one thinks of aspects of information literacy in terms of threshold concepts I’m wondering if all these developments, while apparently making things easier are actually making them more difficult?

My biggest learning is that I have a poor understanding of how, where, why and when students and teachers access information. I’ve gone for a (at least) three times redundancy concept in providing access to anything –

  • in the OLP (Online Learning Platfrom – both on the homeroom page AND on the library page)
  • on the front page of our OPAC
  • on our Library Guides

In initial library lessons we’ve also had students (and teachers and parents – in our library bytes sessions) bookmark the 3 primary sites – the catalog, the library guides and then library OLP page. But the issues with information seem to be more deep-seated than that. I suspect that there is still confusion about not even knowing why you’d want to access anything – a kind of informational existential issue.

I’m guessing about 10-15% of the students in a class are making full use of the resources we’re providing.  Our school is probably not unique in this. I hear the same lament everywhere.  There is the saying of “meet your customer where they are” (not where you want them to be) and I think we neither really always know where they are – or we suspect they’re just on google, nor are we able to meet them there. AND OUR VENDORS ARE NOT HELPING US!  Let’s take our OPAC / Catalog as an example. Follett has finally woken up to the fact that google, and not our catalog or databases is the first place students look, so they’ve come up with a very nifty chrome extension that allows you to plug in your catalog (and webpath express) as the first search result – like below

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But, it only works with iOS on desktops / laptops. And we’re an iPad school (not an android / chromebook school). So it doesn’t work on iPads. So far so useless actually.

Oh, but there is a Destiny Discover App for iPads… except all it does is try to update every time you access it, and it gets to 31% and then crashes. And you can only set age / Lexile / grade level limiters to books, not databases or online resources, so it’s even more overwhelming than good ole google.

So at our last inter-campus librarian meeting we decided to try and encourage entry and access to our paid resources by making them options on our UOI guide resources page – so we’ve semi-standardised our boxes to have Books (with a link to the catalog via Librarythingsforlibraries book display widget), Videos (since Youtube is the 2nd only to google as the “go to” place for student research) and Resources (including Britannica, Brainpop, Epic Books and other curated links).

screen-shot-2016-12-10-at-10-51-56-am

The thought is, that they then don’t have to leave the page in order to go to a resource, they just click on the picture, and get to say Britannica, and once they’re there, the threshold is lower to then search for something from within there … we’ll see what the reality is.  I’ve also explicitly told them this in their last research lesson. Now to follow up and see if the usage stats change.

So what now? 

I think I need to move to a simpler and more intuitive layout – Following Katie Day’s layout for her research guide, perhaps making it student question related?

screen-shot-2016-12-10-at-11-08-41-am

At a whole different level is the services and guides that happen at Scotch College ….

screen-shot-2016-12-10-at-11-15-54-am

I think I need to sit down with teachers and students and really understand how they use information, how they look for it and where they expect to find it. Customer journey maps – something that I was thinking of as an alternative study avenue before I looked at our Blokes with Books club as my case study. Has anyone looked into that in the library context? I know people have looked at social media in library, but this is different – the physical and digital paths our patrons use to get information (or get frustrated by us). Any pointers?

 

Make-over update

When I tell people we’re getting to renovate and extend our library their first reaction is “wow, that’s amazing, you’re so lucky!”. And yes, prima facie it is so. But right now it’s feeling rather overwhelming. And ironically most of that is not so much to do with the change as the amount of preparation that needs to be done. Speaking of change – you HAVE to get “Bug in a Vacuum”

I am a veteran of moving. 10 countries in 24 years plus countless internal moves in those countries and 3 moves in the last 5 years. I know it pays to be prepared and to clean and clear before the move. And as I remarked in my last post, a lot of that cleaning and clearing happens behind the scene.  Things are slightly more complicated as well due to well, life. Unforeseen circumstances. Like one staff member on maternity and another on hospitalisation leave. And part of my gratitude thoughts each day are for my remaining staff member who is picking up a lot of the slack and the temporary staff member who is happy to learn the ropes and keep things ticking over. And the other temp who has been coming in and the occasional parent or volunteer for their kindness.  But it does slow things down as we adapt and learn.

So, significant but time consuming things that have been done this week – including taking up time in my weekends – those weekends that I thought would be computer and work free now that I’ve finished my M.Ed!

  • Putting patron photos into FollettDestiny  – easy in theory but quite a lot of preparation work – including learning all sorts of new Excel tricks on how to add things before and after text in cells!  And of course 90% goes well, but the 10% that bombs out, takes 90% of your time to trace why an upload didn’t work, what went wrong and how to remedy it.
  • Cleaning up patron data.  After the last patron update I found about nine pages of patron data that just wasn’t right. Parents marked as students or staff, students who had left years ago, staff who had left, incorrect emails etc.  Now bear in mind, when I prepare these lists, I then go into school with a full teaching schedule and it literally took 2 people 2 days to clear it all up in-between their regular tasks of circulation, shelving and THE PREP
  • Yes, the PREP. we have 9 different grades from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 6, and each of those have 4 (Kindergarten) -6 (the rest) UOIs. The library has to be vacated by next Friday. Most UOI’s are changing over on Monday coming. Many UOIs have changed this year. So that means checking the central idea etc. checking previous year’s lists, quickly checking with the lead that my understanding of where the topic /theme / concept is going is the same as theirs, making new lists and then packing up 18 boxes of books and DVDs – 9 for the coming week when we’ll have over 1000 books returned from the last units and 9 for the first weeks of January 2017 – just in case. Because of course our handover of an empty library to the designers / constructors is 1 December and of course their hand-back to us is 1 January. But I am of little faith that things are flawless. So I err on the side of caution.  And bear in mind, we’re still having our 35 classes a week, plus all sorts of meetings that are using the library so we’re configuring and reconfiguring the space and arranging catchup classes…
  • The new books. And the wrongly processed books. I still hold vestiges of anger on our last big book order with Follett that went horribly wrong in every which way it could have gone wrong. They didn’t deliver on time or as arranged, they catalogued incorrectly, spine labels were wrong etc. So we’re still sorting out that mess. And then I put in a couple of other smaller orders, but our cataloguer is off on hospitalisation leave so we’re cataloging on the fly.  Now this is a GOOD thing I keep on telling myself. I’m all for final responsibility for tasks and work flow, but I’m also all for everyone pitching in and helping and knowing all aspects of the process. It’s been a little peeve of mine in the library world that there is so much segregation of duties and these past weeks have just proven that given the chance people can do way more than they or anyone else may have thought. But it is extra work – did I mention what else was going on?
  • The weeding. Saying goodbye is so hard to do!  I must admit having absolutely no problems ditching the disney fairy series that no-one was looking at or borrowing. But then there are other books – Michael Rosen’s “Sad”. I’m sad that no-one seems to have ever borrowed that. And I feel bad that I’ve not marketed it, or allowed it to see the light of day and be nurtured and treasured. Perhaps if I pair it with Bug in a Vacuum?  Weeding is sweet sorrow. It highlights our failings as book pushers. I feel like a neglectful parent when a book that’s been bought doesn’t get the attention it needs. I spend time with each of them and ponder whether putting them on a resource list would help. (No jokes about “will this bring me or someone else joy) Or perhaps asking students and teachers to ponder their fate. And I do both, and some survive for another day.
  • Acquisition plan – my kids ask me “if we’re getting a new library does that mean we’re getting new books?” This is the double edged sword of money and budget. I was talking to some fellow librarians last week – their budgets are double mine. Sometimes less is more. Our students and our teachers probably only have capacity for perhaps one really good reading book a week. Each. What should that book be? And for research / nonfiction? It’s so hard. I try so hard, but this week it has been stingrays and grasshoppers. Boats and jet planes. Last week it was fast cars and how to make your own vegetable garden (try getting one of those for an equatorial climate, suitable for G2 level), dinosaurs are totally out of favour. They want tornados and not hurricanes.  And “Miss where are your Indian books?”  and “there’s nothing on Bangladesh” I’m trying to diversify. They deserve Indian books, and overseas Chinese but not ABC (American born Chinese) books, and Korean protagonists and Japanese heroes. The triplet sister of acquisition and weeding is discoverability. I need to crack that nut in the new library. Does that mean genrefying, through label or location? Does it mean more work on resource lists or libguides or other pathfinders?

The problem with grappling with all these things is that they take up a lot of brainspace and thought space and discussion space. All of which is being take up by doing. I’m looking forward to the library being boxed up and having time to be more strategic, having time to go into classrooms and observe and understand.

 

 

Ever so slightly (very) intimidated

Since this is my M. Ed capstone course of course the bar has been set high for our final project – a case study. I’ve spent the week being intimidated – firstly reading the case-study research of other people, and then the Colloquium with Pip Cleaves – where my brain and my writing hand lost sync with each other as I was in awe with what she’s doing in her classroom and school.

I think my main takeaway is that I need to take baby steps and to limit, limit, limit my ambitions as to what is possible in a few week’s case study.  One of the most interesting case studies, and one that was exemplified by Pip’s talk was by Hofer & Swan (2006) – primarily because they unravelled the strands of technological, pedagogical and content knowledge that teachers need to bring to bear when attempting to introduce technology in the classroom.

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_pedagogical_content_knowledge
Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_pedagogical_content_knowledge

Back to the case study. As long term readers will be aware, I’m really interested in language, bilingualism and maintaining and sustaining mother tongue. Ideally I’d like to do something along those lines, but the area is just so huge I’m going to have to be very specific. One of the things I was considering was the information seeking behaviour of ELL families. There is so much information inherent and implicit in a school / schooling system, and how do students and their families tap into the explicit and implicit information where the dominant language is weak or absent?  Most international schools are adamant in not translating materials (erroneously in my opinion) – is there any way to prove this one way or another? What specific interventions or availability of information and in what form would make a difference? And how to realise this?

 

Another alternative would be about reading.  Early in my first position as Teacher-Librarian I quickly realised that we were just not meeting the needs of a whole segment of ‘reluctant’ readers. Unravelling reluctance is worth of tomes of research – is it a skill issue, an identification of suitable books issue, a time issue or a combination of them all or something else entirely? In response, with the excellent assistance of a very cool young male teacher, we formed a “blokes with books” club.  The uptake has been great with a core of around 10-15 boys attending the weekly meetings. They’ve invited their friends and it’s a rowdy, exuberant crowd who now feel much more at home in the library.  Together we agreed on a rough program of highlighting various genres, different authors and types of books in the hope they’d find “the magic key”. But did it make a difference really, or just anecdotally? How would we go about finding out the efficacy of the program generally and which aspects if any are particularly efficacious?

 

Other things that have caught my fancy recently is the concept of the “customer journey maps” in the library (perhaps linked to the information seeking idea) and the use of virtual badges for teaching information literacy – (teacher? student?)

 

Those are my thoughts that need refining and consideration at the moment. I have another 2 weeks to investigate and consider more!

 

 

Hofer, M., & Swan, K. O. (2008). Technological pedagogical content knowledge in action: A case study of a middle school digital documentary project. Journal of Research on Technology in Education (International Society for Technology in Education), 41(2), 179–200.