The Unquiet Librarian

Check out our new Environmental Science Pagecast at Pageflakes! Our Pagecast provides you the latest RSS feeds from our favorite Environmental Science publications and resources! Please take time to check out our Environmental Science Pathfinder page as well!

Panik Science Current Events Research (theunquietlibrary) via kwout

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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.

We are officially five days into our multigenre research paper, and overall, I am really pleased with how my summer school “peeps” are coming along with their work!  On Friday, my students actually asked if they could have extra library time because several were really engaged in their work!  As one student said, “I am on a roll, and I don’t want to stop!”  Thankfully, another class had cancelled, so I was able to buy us another hour. 

The most difficult days were “Day 1 and Day 2″ on Monday and Tuesday—these were the days they were finding information sources and citing those sources in NoodleTools.  Because we were all over the map in our topics and pre-existing skills on how to use NoodleTools/NoodleBib, it was rather frenetic as I helped 20 students.  The students were very patient, though, and I greatly respected how they persevered in finding meaningful information.

As I floated around and helped students during our 2.5 hour library time on Friday, it was gratifying to see the students really “into” their work and realizing the multigenre paper is not as hard or difficult as some first thought.   They will do final reflections next week, but here are their thoughts on their progress and findings on Day 3:  http://project800s.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/10b-multigenre-research-reflections-mini-essay-june-18-2008/ .  Please note while all students composed their reflections in writing, not all have had a chance to post to the blog at this time.

A few observations from my experiences through the “teacher” lens this week…

• Having access to books with a more recent copyright date and accessible reading level are extremely important.  Although I have not mandated a book resource due to the extreme diversity of our topics(three database resources are required) for this project, many sought out books or were extremely receptive to my suggestion they try a book (hooray!).   Many teachers assume kids do not want books, but many still do, and we as librarians need to keep buying books that will speak to our students.  So much great nonfiction is available…we need to encourage our students and teachers to remember the value of this resource.
• While we definitely want to encourage our students to tap into the great information in databases, we also should continue to encourage them to look for QUALITY web resources–in some cases, better information has actually come from websites although most students have found the database articles (reference and periodicals) to be their best sources.
• The majority of students have been quite positive about NoodleBib;  although most had not used the electronic notecard feature before, the students have been really positive about this feature!
• Having a media specialist who knows the collection and how to cite all kinds of sources correctly in NoodleTools is essential, particularly if you are dealing with a larger class and students who need support and scaffolding.
• While allowing students to choose their own topic has made it a little more work for me to support the diverse range of research interests, the kids have been much more engaged and positive.  To see kids focused and engaged in research, especially in the middle of the summer, is a joy! 
• The biggest two obstacles I have faced on this campus are:
  A.  student work for the most part is not mapping to the normal home directory.  As a result, work is getting saved in all kinds of strange places on local hard drives.  We have discovered saving work to a flash drive, using the same workstation (not always feasible), or emailing work (I recommend gmail) have become “musts.”B.  The ability to download photos or to right click for copy and paste is practically non-existent—the students cannot right click on ANYTHING.  I understand restricting the ability to right click for .exe files, but for pictures files?  This obstacle has been a tremendous thorn in our side!  At my home school, Creekview, students have had the ability (at least, they did as of the end of May), to download photos or to copy and paste text.

I will re-upload the link to the actual research assignment on Monday as I just realized it seems to be down this evening.   While I have done research papers and projects with my night school students in recent years, students were given a menu of topics to choose from; this is the first time I have given students carte blanche and let them choose something meaningful to them.  As I stated earlier, it has been a little more work on my end to do this, but I am so glad now that I did.  I cannot wait to see the final products that we will complete on Wednesday! 

p.s.  the student who complained last week about how this project would make him think…well, it has, and he is now my student who is most positive about the project!  He has had nothing except good things to say the last few days about the project and how much he is enjoying it! 

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!

Last summer, I registered for a Twitter account, but drifted away it from it quickly as I thought it was more of a “fun” social networking tool that did not have any real meaningful application.

Was I WRONG!

I reconnected with Twitter last week thanks to my friend Stephen Rahn at the Kennesaw State Ed Tech Center.  In the last week, here is what I have found and/or accomplished thanks to my connections on Twitter:

• I discovered an amazing library blog, http://libpower.blogspot.com/, and connected with a new colleague, Phil Goerner!  Through Phil, I now have great ideas for a “Grab-n-Go” event for our faculty!  Thank you, Phil!
• I am following the Tweets of great leaders in my field like Doug Johnson, Joyce Valenza, “Cool Cat” teacher Vicki Davis, and Will Richardson!  Doug Johnson is now one of my “followers”!  It is something akin to rubbing elbows with Hollywood stars at an Oscar party! 
• Discovered and have been listening to some amazing educational podcasts at http://edtechtalk.com/live, an amazing resource!  I haven’t had a chance yet to listen to a live broadcast although I hope to catch one today at 10:00 A.M.
• Discovered the YALSA Blog (which is TERRIFIC!) through a Tweet from YALSA on Twitter!
• Found and installed Twhirl, a Twitter client.
• Found ChitChatEd through Vicki Davis, “Cool Cat Teacher.”
• Found an excellent blog of an Instructional Technology Specialist, http://kenrodoff.blogspot.com/; Ken Rodoff is the ITS at Joyce Valenza’s school.
• Discovered Ted Talks through a link to a post from Will Richardson on Twitter.  Find out more about TedTalks at http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/5 ; this is a COOL resource!  Here is the RSS feed for TedTalks:  http://feeds.feedburner.com/tedtalks_video.
• Found this blog, http://plethoratech.blogspot.com/,  through a Tweet from becksintex.
• Found this interesting article from a Tweet from becksintex, http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/03/is_web_20_an_en.html.

As you can see, Twitter can be a great resource for networking with other people and sharing resources in real time.   You can Twitter me at http://twitter.com/buffyjhamilton!  Come join in this fun way of learning and networking with others!

In addition, here are some ideas for using Twitter in your library:  http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/twitterlibraryapplications

Well, I did not have time to do my quizlet today—we have been covered up with classes—but I just got the ultimate affirmation from a student in the 7th period class that is researching the Jazz Age today!  After she set up her own del.icio.us account and started bookmarking resources, I heard a student exclaim, “This is the new MySpace!”

You know you have made an impression with a tool if they compare it to MySpace! 

While I am on the “high” of my “Library 2.0″ moments of the week, I want take time to jot down a few thoughts!

Google Scholar, Google Library, Google Books, Del.icio.us

I used a combination of Web 2.0 tools to locate information sources not in our collection as well as to tap into existing information sources we do have as part of our virtual collection.    I then integrated the RSS feeds for these resources into a pathfinder I created for one of our Honors English teachers.

Conversations I’ve had recently with UGA librarian Nadine Cohen and UGA Professor Mary Ann Fitzgerald have had me thinking about how I could harness the power of Google to point students to quality information sources with more ease.  First, I used Google Scholar and Google Books to search for nonfiction texts that we did not have access to through our databases or print collection.  I then created a “My Google Books Library” to create an online collection that the students could access through a RSS feed link. 

If you have not used Google Books, you MUST check it out!  Books are searchable and some can even be downloaded as PDF files; plain text options are also available for viewing.  Students also get “similar books” suggestions available through Google Books, and they also have bibliographic data available at their fingertips for that particular book.  Students can also subscribe to our RSS feed for this feature and keep up with the latest additions to our Google Books!  These tools are powerful because they provide access to materials you might not be able to obtain in print and increase accessibility to these resources to EVERYONE 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

The other tool we have been using as part of our research pathfinders this year is del.icio.us.  Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web 2.0 tool that allows you to bookmark and catalog your favorite web resources with “tags”—think of tags as keywords or subject headings.  You can access these resources from any computer—not just your home computer.  For this assignment, I tagged some articles from our GALE Virtual Reference Library (GALE is the only vendor right now that we can “infomark” directly to articles, but we are hoping more vendors will get on board with this feature). 

I then used Google Scholar to search for scholarly articles related to our research topics.  While we can’t use Google Scholar to interface with our databases in the ways that college libraries can at this point in time, we do have access to JSTOR, a college level database of scholarly research articles covering all disciplines.  Because JSTOR is a vendor partnered with Google Scholar, we can use Google Scholar to search for articles and then “tag” those articles with our del.ici.ous account.  While some would argue doing this takes away the element of students searching for articles on their own, I would counterargue that this method is more of an “entry” into the database that will hopefully entice students to further explore that information source once they have acquired a “comfort zone” by looking at what we have put on the “menu.” 

The teacher was extremely excited about these new tools and felt it was a major improvement on the research pathfinder from last year (we collaborated in 2006 on this same assignment).  The students will be in here tomorrow and Friday, and I think once they have time to get “immersed” in these tools, they too will feel excited and energized about the research project. 

It makes me feel good to know that I can provide our students access to new materials we don’t physically own!  I also am excited that I can use web 2.0 tools to help my students “mine” or find an entry into quality information sources we own but that may be intimidating to students.  I hope that this hybrid of web 2.0 tools will make our database resources and books seem “cooler” and more relevant to our students.

That is today’s Library 2.0 roundup!

“I propose that we listen to the signals that come through the walls of our classrooms from the outside.”

Anne Ruggles Gere 

The value of social networking and its place in 21st century education was the talk of the town at last week’s National School Boards Association’s Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  The association released a report, “Creating and Connecting”, that detailed the findings of a survey conducted by the association in conjunction with research firm Grunswald Associates that examined the use of social networks by school age children and the implications of those findings for public educators.  The study was comprised of three surveys: an online survey of 1,277 nine- to 17-year-old students, an online survey of 1,039 parents and telephone interviews with 250 school district leaders who make decisions on Internet policy.Here are some of the findings from this survey:

·          96% of the students surveyed who online access had reported they had used social networking technologies, which includes chatting, text messaging, blogging, and online communities like Facebook and MySpace.
·          81% of the students surveyed said they had visited a social networking website in the last three months.
·          71% of the students surveyed reported using social networking tools at least once weekly.
·          60% of students reported that they discuss educational topics on their social networks; 50% reported that they specifically discuss homework.

What do students use social networking sites and tools to do?
·          Posting messages
·          Sharing music
·          Sharing videos
·          Sharing photos
·          Building websites or online profiles
·          Blogging (1 in 6 reported adding to blogs they have created weekly); 30% of the survey participants reported having their own blogs.
·          Creating content

Students who identified themselves as nonconformists—students who step outside the rules of online safety and behavior rules—tend to be the ones who are the cutting edge of social networking.  Nonconformists tend to be significantly heavier users of social networking sites than other students. 

How do these facts relate to school district policies regarding access and the use of social networking tools and technologies? 

·          84% of school districts in the survey prohibit online chatting ; 81% prohibit instant messaging on school networks. 
·          62% of school districts in the survey do not allow participation in blogs on campus; 52% of the districts do not permit students to use any social networking sites at school.
·          School district leaders seem to believe that negative experiences with social networking are more  common than students and parents report. For example, more than half of districts (52 percent) say that students providing personal information online has been “a significant problem” in their schools, yet only 3 percent of students say they’ve ever given out their e-mail addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers.      Similar differences occur between districts’ beliefs and students’ and parents’ reported experiences with inappropriate material, cyber bullying and other negative incidents.  While many educators now require their students to use the Internet or have web access for assignments, school policies across the country do not show that administrative decision makers are convinced about the value of social networking technologies as effective educational tools.  However, the survey indicated that attitudes may be shifting; the following results may be hints as that policy changes could be on the horizon:  ·          District leaders say they hope social networking will help students “get outside the box” in some way or another.  However, fewer than one in three (29 percent) believe that social networking could help students improve their reading or writing or express themselves more clearly (28 percent).
·          Large proportions of district leaders say that a strong emphasis on collaborative and planned activities (81 percent), strong tools for students to express themselves (70 percent) and an emphasis on bringing different kinds of students together (69 percent) would be required for them to buy into social networking for school use. But most also would insist on adult monitoring (85 percent) and would continue to prohibit chat and instant messaging (71 percent) as conditions of social networking use in school. 

After reviewing the data in the survey, The National School Boards Association made the following recommendations in their report:
 ·          Explore social networking sites.
·          Consider using social networking for staff communications and professional development.
·          Find ways to harness the educational value of social networking.
·          Ensure equitable access.
·          Pay attention to the nonconformists.
·          Reexamine social networking policies.
·          Encourage social networking companies to increase educational value.  

How might the findings of this study and these recommendations affect our technology use in the Cherokee County School District?  What are ways we can harness the educational value of social networking?  We are already using del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service, as part of our pathfinders here at the Creekview High School Media Center as well as blogs.  We are also considering how we could establish a presence on Facebook and MySpace like many college libraries have already done in order to be more accessible to our patrons.  What do you, as students, teachers, and parents, see as the potential of Web 2.0 tools for learning and true educational value?  Do you feel the current use of Web 2.0 tools by CRHS is helping you learn?