What’s new here?

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Dear Bloggiverse,

Sorry I’ve been such a poor correspondent – I keep meaning to put fingers to keyboard but never quite get there.

What have I been doing of interest to the teacher-librarian community? Well, let me tell you…

Earlier this year we set up a Skype session to talk with a Kinder class in Wisconsin, with whom I had collaborated last year. This required a bit of time-zone juggling – we came in early and they stayed late! The Kinder children read stories to us that they had written in response to the book Throw Your Tooth on the Roof by S Beeler and G Karas. We read them an Australian classic, Possum Magic by Mem Fox.

In a separate Read Around the Planet activity, a Year 4 class connected with some Y4 students in an after-school program at a primary school in California. We ran a Reader’s Theatre activity, where the Californian students recited One Fish, Two Fish by Dr Seuss, and we replied with Oh the Places You’ll Go. This was a lot of fun, and our boys really enjoyed the activity. I have kept the contact details for their coordinator and we hope to do something collaborative again! Sadly a second session with a different school fell through, so I still owe my other Year 4 class a chance to do Skype Reader’s Theatre. I will have to find someone else to work with later this year.

I highly recommend participating in these kinds of projects – it is a great place to start collaborating with schools in faraway places, and around a theme of great relevance to our work with children and books. Later this year the Global Read Aloud project will be happening again, so I am going to add that to my plans for connecting my classes to a wider world through shared experience of a great story.

Making Connections

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Long time no blog – which is all the more reason to pull some ideas together.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapolab/5270342294/in/photostream/

BRAIN HUE Collection by Emilio Garcia 2010; CC licence BY-NC 2.0

It is now Term 4 of 2013, and there is very little left of the Australian school year. This has been a busy year for me, settling back into my school in Hobart, getting up to speed with developments in the Australian National Curriculum, the Australian National Teacher Standards, catching up on developments within my school library: WorldCat, LibGuides, ebooks, and attending plenty of Professional Development.

Professional Development is one of those tricky things, reminds me of a New Year’s Resolution  – you dive in, go hard for two weeks, but then life happens and the Big Plan dribbles away to a faintly guilty stain on your To Do list.

 

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At the end of last month Hobart played host to the ASLA XXIII Biennial National Conference, 3 days of school library-focused ideas and discussions and presentations. I love going to events like this where I can be immersed in information that is so completely relevant to what I do, and meet people who work in the same field and have wonderful experiences to share. I always feel energised and excited and motivated – but then it is all over, and real life returns… My question is how do I make sure that the end of the conference is not the end of my learning? Lately I find myself dropping into social media (like blogs, Twitter, Google+ or Facebook) once or twice a week and just cruising through the links and ideas, seeing what is out there.

Following links has led me to the Global Read Aloud, which has given me a way to connect my two Prep classes with classes on the other side of the world to talk about books by Eric Carle.

Following links this morning led me to a report on how new library spaces were designed, built and are being used in seven Queensland schools – food for thought as I look at how my limited library space is used, and what else I could do to support our library uses.

Following links led me to a blog post about explaining Twitter to others, which had this fabulous video at the end:

This video really prompted me to stop thinking about blogging and get on with it! I have some more ideas to share in the near future…

And then I read a blog post by George Couros about connecting to others, and I really like the way he reframes the basic premise: the goal is not so much to be ‘connected’, (which I think sounds a bit like being permanently plugged into an electrical socket) but to be someone who connects – and as George pointed out, this is a verb, a conscious action on our part. It doesn’t really matter whether we are using a particular social media tool (ahem – this is a blog, is it not?) or going to conferences or speaking up in whole school staff meetings to talk about something happening in our classroom. It is the educational objective that matters, not the tool we use to get there.

By reaching out to connect with others we stretch ourselves.

 

 

Thinking about reading…

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I came across this post a few weeks ago, and it has been sitting open in a tab of my browser ever since, while I’ve wondered what I wanted to say about it.

The author, Paige Jaeger, is advocating the rights of children to choose their own reading materials, rather than educators getting hung up on giving children texts that support particular curricular outcomes. Whilst Ms Jaeger is looking at the US context and their Common Core Standards, her points are equally applicable here.

In the classroom, the teacher’s job is to help children make sense of the rules of language, digging deep into grammar, text types, writing styles, vocabulary, and all the other elements that going into developing the knowledge and skills necessary to be literate.

When those children step into the Library, what the Teacher Librarian really wants is to see those children dive joyfully into a wide variety of books and come back up grinning with delight at the treasures they found inside.

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Picture taken from the poster of Rights of the Reader

Perhaps this week the theme is to challenge themselves to explore two new genres – the TL will remind the students how to search the catalogue by subject, and suggest more titles that might intrigue them.

Other students are looking for information on their favourite animal, or tv show, or arguing about the status of Pluto – the TL will steer them towards the tools they need to find what they want.

Sometimes though it is a bit trickier – what about the child who at 9 years is still reading like a 6 year old? He needs simple but interesting books that don’t look babyish, because he’s ashamed of how far behind he is and is worried about being teased. Or the child who at 10 years can decode just about any book you put in front of him – he isn’t old enough for the themes in most YA fiction, but the majority of books written for his age group are too easy to engage his attention.

This is where TLs and classroom teachers work together, talking about the needs of their students and looking for books that will help both the struggling and the exceptional students become confident, eager readers who see books as a source of entertainment and delight.

Finally, I think it is fitting to include The Rights of the Reader, a beautiful book by Daniel Pennac, with an equally delightful poster illustrated by Quentin Blake.

The right of the individual to decide how to be a reader – that’s the whole point, really.

Rate of [Cyber] Change

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Today I attended an ACMA Cybersafety training day, with another Teacher Librarian from my school, and two other teachers from local schools. I had been to one of these days a few years ago, and we use the Cybersmart
Shame on the Internet -Magic City Fake Screenshot- by =thayCVB on deviantART

I should have known better – the technology evolves so quickly, and with it user behaviours, so naturally there has been a great deal of change in online activities since the last time I really spent any time considering it deeply.

Key points:

  • The ages at which children have access to the Internet gets younger and younger
  • Internet-enabled devices are being given to children at a much younger age – partly the hand-me-down effect
  • Stand-alone lessons do not stick
  • Need to embed safe attitudes and behaviours in all relevant lessons – just-in-time and explicit commentary. Example: when posting to a class blog, remind students no photos and first names only; bringing up current headlines and discussing what students could have/should have done; reminding students not to click on flashing ads or accept emails from people they don’t know.
  • Cookies tracking your search habits and geolocation services – be aware of what they mean for you
  • Social media – evolution of sites and apps – young people migration to more instant, more photo oriented tools
  • Targeting bystander behaviour is key to combating cyber bullying
  • Preventative measures – building resilience and self-managing behaviours
  • Involve students in developing their own resources around Cybersafety

    • Follow-up
    I will be looking at what I am doing to teach safe behaviours to years 3&4, and review the use of stand-alone lessons. I think that with these younger kids, it is still important to spend time establishing a good understanding of key concepts such as privacy of information, so that thereafter we can refer back to those understandings in relation to other activities.

    I think that my colleague and I should also look for some time to talk to staff about what we learned – if we were startled by some of the statistics, it is likely that they will be too!

    Lastly I want to ensure that we run a technology use survey once again, as we have done in the past, to get up-to-date data on what our students are doing with technology. This would be really valuable to complete before we hold some Cybersafety sessions for students, staff and parents later this year.

    So, to sum up – Cybersafety is an attitude and awareness, not a static list of facts about bad websites. The only way to help children and ourselves is to develop the necessary skills and mindset to be critical, sceptical and ethical users of technology

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