One set of new bloggers I should highlight are my nephews and their mom, who now have their own blog.
We can’t forget eager “first day of school” faces like these of my nephews, when carrying the Superman lunchbox or wearing a new t-shirt for the first time is the highlight of the day, as we teach our high school students. We want them all at the end of the day to be able to say, like my nephew after the first day of 3rd grade–” I started off the day happy and came home happy!” A laudable goal for our classrooms.
In honor of Blog Day, I’m asked to share five blogs I’d recommend, so here goes.
Always Learning Kim Cofino’s blog from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as she writes about her elementary library job, after years in middle school
Chalkdust101 Patrick Higgins shares his enthusiasm for all things web 2.0
Journeys Diane Cordell’s blog is beautifully written, and I love the quotes she finds to illustrate each post. Check out her post about “play.”
Beyond School Clay Burrell’s blog is bursting with energy and ideas, and his Global Cooling project is just getting off the ground and looking for participants.
K5 Tech Margie Brown, a campus tech coordinator in our district, is a new blogger that I’d also like to recognize.
WhsCareerTech Another new blogger in our district, Vicky Abney, our business applications teacher, started a new blog last May, and is utilizing hers this year as a daily classroom tool.
And a couple of “old” favorites that I can’t leave out–
Practical Theory Principal Chris Lehmann’s always interesting and insightful takes into school reform. Check out his post on why we teach.
Think: lab Christian Long’s energetic blog often highlights the power of student bloggers. He’s left the world of school design and is teaching this year for the first time in several years, so this looks to be fascinating reading!
Great post today on individualizing our students.
It’s hard to limit it to five, as I also want to mention so many other blogs I read regularly! I want to thank all of the educators who take time to share their experiences so that we can all learn from them.
As I have been doing some reading all summer, my whole notion of research is shifting somewhat. Maybe it is reflecting the shift that many of our students are living, as well.
I’m coming to realize more and more that although in schools we treat research as a somewhat solitary activity, in its true form, research is a very networked activity.
As George Siemens writes, in describing Connectivism, “learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity.” He goes on to point out that learners “remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.” I often think of how scientists or historians conduct research, not in an isolated bubble, but in a network of colleagues, acquaintances, librarians and in the company of information from the past.
Siemens goes on to cite Karen Stephenson, who writes:
“Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge.”
Our students already practice the power of knowledge sharing because they use their social networks not only socially, but in order to help one another….in the olden days, via long phone calls about homework, and now via Facebook or MySpace or IM. But do we ask them to employ those skills DURING the school day, officially, particularly when they are engaged in a research project?
As I read more and think about research projects, and then think about how my own approach to learning has changed the last few years with the increasing ability to network both within and outside of my campus, I am realizing that we need to be addressing those changes in library research programs as well.
What ways can we support students in drawing on the knowledge of both experts and of one another?
Some practical ideas I am considering that would allow students to network more:
Using message boards or forums during research projects so that students can give one another research tips is a way to engage students more actively. We tried this last year during our Vietnam Wall project and it worked well. Students enjoyed giving tips to one another.
Creating collaborative wikis for projects is another way. Again, we tried this on a government policy project, where students collaborated across class periods on a wiki.
Asking a student to explain to the class how they would approach a research problem establishes that students have expertise as well (a fact they already realize, since students often ask other students for help.)
Asking students to “play” librarian for a class and explain how to use the appropriate databases.
Enabling some sort of “chat” during a research period that could be used for research help from one another.
Making sure that students spent time conferencing face to face with one another every couple of days to share good resources with each other (ala the Cha-cha website model).
Employing a “team” of researchers–assign a research project to a team, much as a team of scientists would work on a research dilemma. Allow the teams to conference with other “teams” from other class periods, via blogs, wikis, Skype chats, chatrooms, or face-to-face meetings.
Posting white butcher paper on the wall where students can write requests for help on a topic and others can volunteer to assist them or write suggestions. (It doesn’t always have to be “high tech.”)
Helping students set up a Pageflakes site with feeds from helpful blogs and links to helpful websites to “display” their learning network.
Having students use web-mapping software like Inspiration or Bubbl.us to map out who their information “lifelines” are.
Teaching them how to use the del.icio.us bookmarks of other experts or their friends as a way to broaden their network and find good information.
Asking them to show you how they use social networking to help them with research–What are the sites they use to share information and help one another?
By redefining research in a more “real world” and connected way, I think we can help it become more integral to our campuses and more integral to the way our students learn.
I’d like to hear of other ideas you may have for helping students “network” during a research process. Thanks to Dean Shareski for the links.
Uber librarian Joyce Valenza has created an extremely helpful wiki listing copyright free music and art sites for student projects. Since it’s a wiki, anyone using it can also contribute sites to it, and create as she calls it, an “uberwikipathfinder” for copyright free media. The wiki’s sidebar lists links for music, clipart, and even image creation sites.
Recently one of our teachers asked me in a workshop why I like blogging. This is why–through the power of reading someone’s blog, I discover a tool that I can share with our entire campus and others in our district. The ability to share resources is an amazing multiplier of our efforts as educators.
In this vein of sharing, another ”uber” site that I know of is one from Scott McLeod, at Dangerously Irrelevant, who is asking for contributions to his Moving Forward wiki of tools for schools addressing school change.
And I’ve been working on a wiki site for our campus as well, which I created to introduce various web 2.0 tools to our staff. I’m collecting some of these uber sites on my wiki, so if you know of one you’d like to share, let me know.
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting feature today about various web 2.0 tools like Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Zoho that parents can use to help their children with homework remotely.
It especially caught my attention because the Gregg La Montagne in the article lives in the same household I do and happens to be my husband. ;) (There’s also a nice mention of Steve Hargadon and Vicki Davis.)
On Tuesday night, I attended a service for a family friend and one of our students, Jack Jenkins. A family member read a poem that Jack had written in middle school, and one line resonated with me. “I am an important person and I have something to contribute to this world.”
As we talk about web 2.0, school change, or what each of us can do to create authentic learning experiences for our students, this is what it is all about. Hearing our students. Hearing them as people.
One of Jack’s friends spoke about his passion for changing education. He loved people and loved his teachers and friends, but, his friend said, he wanted to see a place where students could be more engaged and more enthusiastically involved. Many of us walked away from the service as the sun was setting in the park where it was held, vowing to carry on some small service in memory of Jack. My small service is this–not forgetting that there are students that we need to be reaching, students who care greatly and who really want to contribute to our learning community.
It’s hard to begin to know where to change your classroom or teaching practices (or library) or my own. But as a community, we can walk this walk together. And there are many guides for us as well. Due to our unusual teaching schedule this year, we’re going to have time each week to talk to one another and collaborate on rethinking and improving our practices.
Yesterday, in one of our workshops, our principal said, “Sometimes more interesting than the answer is the question itself.” I believe Jack might have agreed with that, from what I heard at the service. She talked a little bit about risk taking, and supporting a culture where people on our campus feel safe to take some risks in the classroom.
Recently, Chris Lehmann, the principal at the innovative SLA, wrote an excellent post about how to create and support a culture of innovation. He points out that innovation needs to be purposeful, that it needs to be supported with room to play and reflect.
I think time to reflect and play particularly get lost in our rush for content and our enthusiasm for our subjects. Do we allow students to just sit quietly and absorb something for a minute? to listen to the things around them? or to just have the release and joy of play, even educational play and experimenting?
In American Libraries magazine yesterday, I read an article more specifically about libraries and innovation, and want to add one point from their list to Chris’s suggestions–Be Kind to Your Risk Takers.
Our students often are risk takers. It’s the nature of adolescence. We need to be kind to them, scaffold them, support their explorations and create an environment where their contributions are valued and enriched by knowing us, just as we are enriched by knowing them.
So how can each one of us consider “shaking it up” so that we never forget that each of our students is an important person who has something to contribute to this world? Let’s keep thinking about that for all of our sons and daughters and for Jack.
I was reading Joyce Valenza’s post this morning about databases and how they are possibly undervalued in the rush for things 2.0.
I also happen to agree with Joyce that databases are vastly underutilized. Lots of reasons for that, from poor design by vendors, to a need for an easier access point, to a lack of understanding of them by school staff, to a lack of “non-library languaged” publicity on our part as librarians–but that is another longer post altogether. But read the comments by students that she posted at the end of the article–really amazing insights on their parts.
One added value I think librarians have in a school is that we know how to search, and have lots of strategies and know when to use which sites, so we help people save time.
I suspect that librarians also like to search.
In fact, I heard someone say once that ‘librarians like to search, but others like to find’….lol. (One of the most interesting books I’ve read the last few months was The Search, which was about Google’s searching technology, so maybe that’s true).
I was pondering all this when I read a post by Christian Long on think:lab, requesting good teaching resources for his new English courses he’ll be teaching this year. I wanted to refer him to a project I’d used from Arapahoe High School last year to inspire our Vietnam project, but I couldn’t recall where on the Fischbowl site to find it or even when it was posted.
Thankfully, Karl Fisch has a search box set up on his blog. (Do you?) So I typed in a variety of keywords until I found what I was looking for.
Here’s the irony–his search tool led to Technorati, which didn’t find the page on Karl’s site, but it did find a page on one of our own campus blogs, where Joel and I had posted about the projects. (A fact which I had totally forgotten). So I ended up back on our own workshop site, where we had a link to the project by Ms. Kakos!
All of this illustrates why we need to teach our students good habits of search. Habits like:
knowing where to look in the first place
knowing what search tools are capable of
knowing when to persist and when to start over
knowing to use alternative keywords (romanticism vs. romantics, for example)
knowing when to follow serendipitous leads
Whether using databases or “googling,” these habits of mind carry through any tool they might be using and make their search more successful.
The point is, if we expect that searching is just some natural skill all students have, then we aren’t giving them all the tools they need to succeed. We need to model how we search, what we do when we meet obstacles, how we regroup if a search isn’t working and what our strategies are. We need to verbalize our thinking as we search so that they can hear our thinking process.
And it’s not just us–we need to create opportunities for students to share their thinking processes with one another as they search. Do we ever ask a student to come up to the presenter station and model how they would find something (the way we’d ask a student to model a math problem on a whiteboard?) Do we ever ask them to discuss various ways they’d go about solving an information problem? Or do we just tell them how to do it? (I have erred too much on the telling side and really want to address that better this year, myself).
Joyce is right in that it is important that students have all the “tools” in their toolbox, and one of them is knowing a lot about search strategies.
Today was great. My day started out with my computer “ringing” me because I was being invited to join a Skypecast workshop that Clay Burrell was conducting from Seoul.
Pretty neat way to be woken up! (I must be turning into a total geek )
Then at school today, I assisted our principal in setting up equipment for a presentation she did with our new teachers, which was forward thinking and enthusiastic. I was thrilled to realize she was using Karl Fisch’s video “Did You Know?” and Darren Draper’s video “Pay Attention” to share her vision of authentic learning with the new staff.
Just as thrilling was seeing our new Chinese teacher nodding in affirmation about creativity in American schools, and then hearing our principal talk about our superintendent’s support of innovative uses of technology in the classroom(including cell phones!)
And even more thrilling was the fact that I could say that I had met the creators of both videos at NECC. It just really brought home to me to power of having a network that I learn from, and how great it is getting to meet people in that network “face to face”.
Later in the afternoon, I got to help our principal try out one of the new iPod nanos we had ordered, and we got to talk about the merits of using iTunes in the classroom and iTunes U, and we talked about how to use the iTalk device we bought to record podcasts straight into the ipod. My guess is she’ll have a video iPod before long.
Then I came home and browsing through my bloglines, I ran across Jeff Utecht’s post about not putting students in a bubble by denying them access during the day to tools they use at home. He writes:
“Do we get it? Does education understand that they are learning without us, that this new world in which our students live is teaching them more than what we can inside the bubble? Inside a textbook that does not hyperlink, does not move, and does not engage. . . .
Truthfully, I don’t think we give our students enough credit. We feel as though we can’t trust them with this free information. We’re afraid of what they might do, watch, or see that they couldn’t do at other times outside of school. Teachers have made the argument, “Well, they do what they want at home as long as they don’t do it as school.” And that’s exactly what’s we’re headed for….students who stay home and learn rather than climb inside the bubble and wait for 8 hours to get out.”
I sit here this evening recalling hearing our principal tell the new teachers that we are a school that expects teachers to use more resources than just a printed textbook.
Today felt like a day where I was working in a place where people are getting it, where the opportunities are available, where innovation is supported and can happen. It was a great day. And if it feels great to me to be starting school, and not moaning about the end of summer–I wonder how it will feel to our students, and if we can continue to make a school that is an engaging and exciting place to be.
that I can’t leave out–
