The Unquiet Librarian

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Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

Multigenre Research Projects Summer 2008, Buffy Hamilton via kwout

It is a work in progress, and it will have to be moved in a few weeks as our district moves from FrontPage to Sharepoint (boo hoo!), but here is my current resource page on teaching the multigenre paper.

http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/buffyhamilton/multigenre_research_projects_summer2008.htm

Here you will find:

• My handouts in PDF format
• Blog reflections from the students
• Sample papers written by real high school students
• My favorite resources on teaching and learning with multigenre papers

While I have dabbled with this project with short stories, this is the first full scale effort I have completed with a general research topic.  I would like to do a full scale project of this nature with a novel next year…it is just hard sometimes with my night school pumpkins, especially with the EOCT course, because of the time factor.  However, I am really pleased with my efforts this summer, and I already have ideas on what I will do again, and what I will do to make this project even better!

I need a few days to clear my mind, rest, and reflect before I write my final blog post about this research experience.  However, I can say that I highly recommend it!  I will be writing more soon on what I feel that my students and I learned from this research experience.

As most of you know, not only am I a high school librarian by day, but I also still teach 10th and 11th English courses by night for our district evening school during the regular academic school year.  I should probably take more time to write about my observations on students’ information literacy skills and perceptions about research (and perhaps I will during 2008-09), but as many of you can relate, it is hard to find time to stop, reflect, and then actually blog about what is happening “out there” because time seemingly just gets way so quickly.

Today marks the beginning of Week 2 of our three week summer school session.  While many express shock and skepticism about the feasibility of trying to do a 90 day course in 15 days, we do meet four and a half hours per course—the economy of time forces both teachers and students to focus on what really matters! 

On Friday, we began our multigenre research project in my afternoon 10B Literature/Composition course.  This type of research paper can incorporate traditional elements of the “written” research paper (and mine does), but it also calls upon students to interpret and represent key learnings and findings of their research in creative and alternate genres.  For more information, see my links at http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/multigenre .

At first, most students seemed a bit dazed and confused.  What is multigenre?  What are learning artifacts?  You want me to do what?  Present information I’ve learned in an alternative way?  Think?  Huh?  Many vocalized these questions, and for those who didn’t….I only had to look at their faces to read their thoughts!  After we had reviewed the assignment, though, and the students had an opportunity to look at real projects/papers and examples, several began getting excited and were already brainstorming ideas.  My 10A students probably have a slight advantage because we are incorporating a few multigenre elements into our short story project and our Georgia Peach Book project.  I am hopeful the little gurgles and spurts of enthusiasm I saw in some of my students Friday afternoon will become a full blown “gush” this week as we essentially spend about two and half hours in the library each day this week.

One young man looked dismayed and sad during our class break after we had reviewed the assignment and discussed the project.  When I asked him what was wrong, he cried, “I can write a paper no problem and give you the facts, but interpret the information….that is going to be hard!”  I asked him what seemed difficult or challenging about the multigenre artifacts because in my mind, those are the creative and exciting parts of the project. 

With dismay he sputtered, “Because I will have to think and really show what I have learned“!

With a wry smile on my face, I replied, “That is exactly the purpose of this research!”

I thought his response was very telling about what our “NCLB” generation kids are used to doing in the classroom and what they have been trained to do:  regurgitate information and move on.  No synthesis, no analysis, no evaluation of information—just “learn” it and “cover it” for a test.  Of course, we as librarians have seen how the emphasis on standardized testing has killed inquiry and research in our media centers, so his comments were not really surprising.  However, they are troublesome just the same.

I will be interested to see how he and the rest of his classmates evaluate this project in about eight days from now.  In the past, I have done this project as a literature based project, and while students at first looked like deer in the headlights, nearly all became excited and engaged in what they were doing; projects pulling in multigenre elements have gotten high marks from my students in the last two years, but this is the first time I have made the entire research project a multigenre paper.  They are doing topics all over the map, and I honestly can’t wait to see what they do with this….stay tuned!

In a nutshell, Ruth and I had a “moment” this week that honestly caused us to scratch our heads and then consider banging our heads against the wall (thankfully, our wise clerk, Tammy, talked us out of that!). 

Many of you, especially in the 7-12 secondary school scene, will relate to the frustration we felt this week:  the struggle to get all teachers on board with your library program and to “buy” into the great services and resources your program has to offer.  Ruth and I wrote to Joyce Valenza, one of the most forward thinking media specialists out there in Library2.0 Land.  She graciously offered to help us brainstorm with our community of school librarians by writing a post about our plight (and I suspect, the plight of many.) 

We are not afraid to ask for help because we care fiercely about our library program and nurturing it so that we as librarians and a library program truly make a difference in our learning community at our school.   Many may say, “Well, you know that is how it is in high school.”  Well, I don’t care how it HAS been—Ruth and I care about how it COULD be and SHOULD be!

Yes, we definitely have a positive impact on many students and teachers, but Ruth and I know we have the potential to do more.  With a faculty that has increased by over 50 members this year, we are finding we are having difficulty getting as many teachers from all subject areas into our media center this academic year.  We are especially troubled that seasoned teachers as well as rookie teachers are sending their students to the world wide web instead of working with us to develop pathfinders and utilizing library resources first. 

We provide hands on instruction and incorporate balanced resources–books, our virtual books, databases, quality websites; teachers and students seem pleased when we work with them on a research project.  Yet many teachers do not seem interested in our offers of help or fall back into the “send’m to the web” habit after working with us (and seeming very pleased with what we have done!).  Many teachers comment with amazement that they have never had librarians do what we do for them, so effort is definitely not the issue here. 

We are baffled.  I think this challenge goes beyond the frequent explanation that teachers are under pressure to teach in a manner that is geared toward standardized test prep and being sure to “cover” material, a pedagogy that leaves little room for project based learning and inquiry.  We are a Max Thompson “Learning Focused School”—should research, questioning, and inquiry not be vital parts of the way teachers teach and students learn?  While high school has always suffered from the “Lone Ranger” syndrome, neither Ruth nor I have experienced this problem to the degree we are this year.

Joyce has posted some initial ideas and strategies to help everyone who may be looking for ideas to get their teachers to buy into databases, books, and other great web 2.0 resources.  I am happy to report that we are already doing a good bit of this, but of course, there is always room for improvement. 

Here is what Joyce had to say and where we are with the suggested strategy:

• Joyce says: I am surprised that so many young teachers I meet get through their own pre-service research without ever discovering a database.  Some I meet reveal that they Googled through their undergrad research.  That’s okay, I suppose if they used it to discover quality content.  At the beginning of each school year I am lucky to be granted a full day with new teachers to discuss our research culture, our resources, our expectations.  I suspect our administrators are happy that I can fill a day with this stuff.   So are we!  I honestly cannot fathom how you can go through four years of college without using a research database, but that is another discussion for another day.  I agree, though, that teachers’ lack of experience makes them reluctant to use something they feel they don’t know.  If you don’t come to the library, though, how are you going to learn the database and/or skill?  We as teachers should always be open to learning, especially if it is about something that will make us better teachers  and that will help our students.
• Joyce says:  We have an eighth grade unit on evaluation that we’ve placed in the social studies curriculum.  I present this PowerPoint on evaluating sources (I know, it needs a makeover), and I show a bit of the filmI worked on for Schlessinger Video.  While the Georgia Performance Standards are jam packed with many skills and learning standards, very few tie into information literacy at the 9-12 level.  If more media specialists were included on the committees (state and local level) that write these standards, perhaps we then could have a louder voice in making sure information literacy skills are infused more seamlessly across the curriculum in an authentic and relevant manner.
• Joyce says:  I volunteer to assess students’ preliminary works cited pages for major papers and projects.  This takes some of the work and onus off the classroom teacher and promotes my efforts as an instructional partner.  Students know my expectations are high, that they include use of databases, and they are a little afraid of my scrutiny.   While I truly admire this initiative, there is no way Ruth and I would have time to do this.  We are already up to three lunch periods and 1100 students; our other high schools typically deal with 2000+ students and four lunch periods that last an hour.  Ruth and I already work about an hour extra each day, plus we rarely take a lunch and get no planning period.  However, we do provide intensive NoodleTools instruction and hands on assistance with our students to help students make sure they cite their sources correctly.  We have already had positive feedback this year from our English teachers on our efforts in this area.
Joyce says:  We have to work with teachers to ensure their project rubrics include use of quality sources in general. When it makes sense, the rubrics should include use of relevant databases. I agree 110% on this…..but many teachers do not seem to want help or do not seem interested in our suggestion for incorporating criteria about the use of quality information sources.   How can we help our teachers see as a partner who can assist them in the creation of rubrics or as someone who can be sounding board for creating quality rubrics?
Joyce says:  We need to do better database marketing.  My students did a film for me last year and I did a Voicethread I’d love folks to contribute to.  But having seen many new streaming video strategies I want to make a better one this year.  Imagine if we could create some in the far more clever style of CommonCraft.  I still want to create a LibraryTube for us to share our best video efforts.  Again, I agree 100%.  Ruth and I hope that we can do more creative “marketing” as part of our Media 21 classes we are beginning this year—podcasts, videos, tutorials created with Camtasia, VoiceThreads—we are all for tapping into Web 2.0 tools to better promote our goods!
Joyce says:  We need widgets/gadgets so that teachers and students can pull the databases they most need into their iGoogle pages.  Vendors, are you listening?  AMEN!  For us, though, we have to first get our users to actually create iGoogle pages.  We are amazed at how little our patrons actually use web 2.0 tools we take for granted—del.icou.us, blogs, iGoogle, etc.  I do applaud EBSCOhost and GALE, though, for recently adding RSS feeds for searches.  Again, though, we are finding that few of our teachers or students even know what RSS is—again, part of our mission to educate….we hope to be in a position for 2008-09 to provide training for our patrons that will educate and empower them to the power of Web 2.0!
Joyce says:  We need an affordable federated search (to search across all our online resources–search tools, OPAC, databases).  This federated search should not cost as much as a database itself.  It should not force us to make further budget sacrifices.  It should understand the idiosyncratic nature of the many databases we own.  It should make it easier for teachers and students to discover the beauty of databases.  Another loud AMEN from us!  We also need vendors to deliver on their promises when we purchase a federated search….ahem…..GALE/CENGAGE….are you listening?????
Joyce says:  We need to de-crimilalize use of Google in libraries. Sometimes we act like the research Gestapo in our scrutiny of search behavior.  Google works.  Google rocks. And yes, we can all use it better.  We have made steps on this front by tapping into the power of Google Books and creating our own Google Library account that we incorporate into our pathfinders with the Google Library RSS feed.  We also use Google Scholar to tap into JSTOR and make it more user friendly to our high school students.  We would love to do mini-lessons on how to search Google effectively….but teachers don’t feel they can give up the time for it even though they agree it needs to be taught.  A symptom of the fallout from testing and NCLB.
Joyce says:  We need to do a better job describing our resources.  No teacher (or kid) knows what EBSCO is or what individual databases live it its large suite.  Our pathfinders must bust these tools out of their traps and describe them in teacher- and kid-friendly language.  This is an area that we will work on—the link Joyce has provided will be another tool in our “toolbox” that we use to try to take something so abstract and make it concrete for all of our patrons.

Now here are a few musings I have……..

• The key issue is here expectations….it is not enough the media specialists have the expectation that we will be the heart of learning.  Our teachers, administrators, and students also need to have this expectation.  Perhaps if this can be conveyed more overtly by all of us faculty members, then it will become a reality and not just an empty mantra.
• Perhaps NCATE needs to consider incorporating information literacy as a required course or competency type requirement for undergraduate teachers.  As Joyce alluded, it is astonishing at how lacking our new teachers are in this area (and I am not knocking them—it is just a fact). 
• What if Google Scholar made it more affordable for public school libraries to tie in their databases to Google Scholar the way many college libraries do?  This would go a long way in marketing our products. 
• If library programs can become more integral parts of School Improvement Plans, I think teachers, students, and parents are more likely to see the library importance of media centers in student achievement and lifelong learning.  I would be thrilled if our library program could be incorporated as a vital part of our 2008-09 SIP!

At the end of the day, it is our students who suffer when the library program and resources are not a regular part of their instruction and learning activities in ALL subject areas.  I hope that this post will help us all think about additional strategies we can devise to make our programs more effective and for our programs to truly reach all students!

The latest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “Online Activities and Pursuits:  Information Searches That Solve Problems”, revealed some surprising findings that challenge traditional beliefs about who uses libraries; the report also seems to allay fears that libraries may be losing their relevance in the digital age.   The report highlights these key findings: 

• Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in the survey.
• Young adults in the tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30)  led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.
• Young adults are the ones who are the most likely to say they will use libraries in the future when they encounter problems: 40% of Gen Y said they would do that, compared with 20% of those above age 30 who say they would go to a library.

“These findings turn our thinking about libraries upside down. Librarians have been asked whether the Internet makes libraries less relevant. It has not. Internet use seems to create an information hunger and it is information-savvy young people who are the most likely to visit libraries,” noted Leigh Estabrook, Dean and Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, co-author of a report on the results.  She added that Internet users with broadband were much more likely to patronize libraries than those without broadband access to the Internet (61% vs. 28%).

The survey did seem to indicate the problem of the digital divide and traditional issues of equity of literacy (as demonstrated in Deborah’s Brandt’s ground-breaking researching in Literacy in American Lives).  The report summary states:

A major focus of this survey was on those with no access to the Internet (23% of the population) and those with only dial-up access (13% of the population). This “low-access” population is poorer, older, and less well-educated than the cohort with broadband access at home or at work. They are less likely to visit government offices or libraries under any circumstances. And they are more likely to rely on television and radio for help than are high-access users.  

What do you think are the implications of this study for us as media specialists and educators?  How can librarians (school and public) better reach those who are not using the library for information?  How can we bridge the gaps highlighted in this report?
 

One university professor has decided to take Wikipedia and turn it into a teaching tool for her students in her environmental history course at the University of Washington-Bothell.  After perusing Wikipedia, Dr. Martha Groom noticed that the information was lacking in information related to topics she covers in her course.  Consequently, she decided to do away with the end of the term research paper, and instead, students are now required to write a complete entry on a course topic or to do a major edit on an existing topic related to the course syllabus.

Dr. Groom cites several benefits to this assignment:

• For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was “transformative,” and students’ writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.
• Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor’s eyes, helped students reach higher — as did the standards set by the volunteer “Wikipedians” who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone.  The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.
• Most of the articles were well received, but Groom said some students caught heat from Wikipedia editors for doing exactly what college students are trained to do: write an argumentative, critical essay.

Dr. Groom also feels that this assignment presents a wonderful opportunity for students to learn about using quality and authoritative information sources as well as evaluating information.  In addition, she believes her students have a better understanding of how to go the extra mile to do secondary research that goes beyond “surface” level research.  However, Dr. Groom is disappointed that the Wikipedia editors have been sometimes “rude” in their responses to student entries.

You can read more about Dr. Groom’s experiences by checking out these links:

• Yahoo News
• Ars Technica
• CNN Technology

I think that Dr. Groom has had a stroke of instructional genius here!  What do you as teachers think about this assignment?  I have emailed Dr. Groom to see if we can get a copy of her assignment guidelines.  If any of you are interested in collaborating with Ruth or me on this kind of research project for your students, please let us know…this assignment could be incredibly beneficial on many fronts and would definitely cover many of the Georgia Performance Standards that you are required to teach in your courses.

Buffy

I am playing with a cool new Web 2.0 tool for annotating web pages!

Live from Treasure Mountain: My Rant – NeverEndingSearch – Blog on School Library Journal

Thanks to the Teachers First Tech Edge page, I came across this fun tool, Fleck, for annotating web pages.  How, you may ask, does this relate to instructional real world practice?  Here is what the experts at Teachers First had to say:

Summary of Fleck:

Fleck allows you to put sticky notes and other annotations onto existing web pages and share them with others. Now you can tell students exactly what you want them to do on a page, point out instances of bias or unsafe Internet practice, etc. You can put effective reading strategies right ON the text of the page. See an example here. Your students can also “fleck” to each other as they work on group projects, noting how they will use information or categorizing what they find. Fleck uses FLASH and does not work well on TOP of Flash-driven pages. The annotated pages take a few moment to load, even on a quick connection.

Possible Uses:  Professional and Instructional

• Student research projects
• Guided reading of web sites,
• Comprehension questions, guiding questions, annotations for tough vocabulary with younger students or students who may be below grade level reading
• Internet safety lessons, students analyzing sites as part of information literacy lessons
• Art critiques by you or students
• Student collaboration and source-sharing
• Professional notes for your own reading or graduate work, etc.
• Assign students to “Fleck” a site as an assignment in critical thinking and turn it in by sharing with you

Skills Needed/How to Get Started

• Join the site and wait for the confirming email (usually pretty fast).
• While you are waiting, click over to the HOME page and watch the “How this works” animation. Then try the link to “So why don’t you give it a try.” (This trial will NOT be saved!)
• Enter the URL of a page you wish to annotate at the top of the Fleck screen and click GO.
• Use the toolbar that appears with the web page to add notes, etc. and SAVE.
• You can also download an extension for Firefox or bookmarklet for Internet Explorer (to make a Fleck button on your toolbar).
• Be sure to choose public or private for Flecks you make when you SAVE (can be changed).
• Share your Fleck by clicking the Share button and emailing a note to your recipients– or yourself.
• The email actually provides a URL (link) to the annotated page. Unfortunately, sending the email is the only way to get the actual URL. Once you have it, you can copy/paste it to give to students in an assignment, etc.

Safety Notes/Possible Web Safety Issues

• To use Fleck safely, you can have students use your login account to make their own Flecks. If students have their own email, they can also have log-ins, but you have no monitoring over what they do.
• For safety’s sake, you might want to require all student Flecks to be private and shared ONLY with class members.
• Since enforcement is tough, start with the teacher-only account and make Flecks for students to SEE. Once you are comfortable with the tool, allow students to use your account. You will not know WHO made inappropriate Flecks, but you can see and delete them from one place.
• Of course, you will need to test whether Fleck is blocked in your school (we hope not).   NOTE:  I am posting this from home, so I am not sure if this is blocked on our CCSD network.
• IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE: This is a public site, and some of the “recent Flecks” that show on the HOME page are NOT school-appropriate. TeachersFirst has contacted Fleck about this concern, but — until it is resolved– we recommend starting from the member home page we have provided and avoiding Fleck HOME altogether.