What do our policies say about our beliefs? During a recent district inservice on school culture, speaker Anthony Muhammad (author of The Will to Lead, the Skill to Teach) shared a somewhat disheartening story about child’s school and how the school’s policy actually worked against their desired goal of getting students to read more library books. He asked the teacher audience, bewildered, ‘Isn’t a goal of a library to get students to read more?” That got me thinking. If our goal is to encourage, inspire, […]
Author: futura
I'm a librarian at a large public high school, Westlake High School, in Austin, Texas. I'm excited about the possibilities of all the new Web 2.0 tools and this is a forum for sharing ideas with my faculty.
Slow thinking and research–bridging the gap
Are students “satisficing”? We all, librarians and teachers alike, struggle with how to help our students make more intentional choices when doing research. (I would argue parents also struggle with this). In their presentation at ALA13: “Friction: Teaching Slow Thinking and Intentionality in Online Research,” research gurus Debbie Abilock and Tasha Bergson-Michelson tackled the challenges we face. Abilock spoke about interjecting ‘points of friction’ into the research process in order to help students slow down and think more carefully, in order to build their […]
Enabling Better Collaboration – an ISTE conversation
Part of the ISTE conference that I usually enjoy the most is the Unconference,( which after various name changes is currently known as HackED Con), typically held on the Saturday prior to ISTE at the conference center. If you aren’t familiar with the unconference concept, it is an all day, all voluntary conference organized by the conference attendees, who upon arriving, suggest and vote on sessions for the day. A series of conversations were selected for the Saturday, including personalized learning, makerspaces, global collaborations, etc. […]
Spicing it up for ISTE 2013
San Antonio, this year’s home for the ISTE conference, is one of my favorite Texas places, so here’s some flavor you might enjoy: Things to do beyond ISTE– The McNay Art Institute (in a beautiful Spanish mansion in the Alamo Heights area, beautiful impressionist collection) San Antonio Museum of Art — at the far end of the River Walk, built in an old brewery Pearl Brewery — Another old brewery near downtown converted into a plaza with shops and some excellent restaurants, plus the culinary […]
Gleaned from the conference: TXLA Tidbits
The Texas Library Association conference in Ft. Worth last week hosted some excellent speakers as well as authors galore. Aside from the excellent presentations which I will write about in another post, here are my “discovered” tidbits: On the vendor side: I was reminded that Ebsco’s ebook offerings are something to examine again. They have several different distribution models– single use e-books, three user e-books, or a subscription model similar to Overdrive’s. E-books either embed into the database(which I knew) or can be read […]
iPads in Libraries–TXLA13
Thanks to all who joined for a discussion of iPads and libraries at the Texas Library Association conference in Fort Worth this weekend. iPads in Libraries TXLA 2013 More PowerPoint presentations from C Foote A list of apps I mentioned are here, along with a PDF file for easy downloading to your iPad. And the notes from the Today’s Meet chat room during the session are here. Another resource is the EanesWifi blog that we kept as we went through the pilot process; […]
Internet @ Schools Conference call for proposals
Are you doing cutting edge work in your library? Internet @ Schools needs you! The Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, California (yes, Monterey) hosts a conference within a conference for school librarians each year, Internet @ Schools. I’m fortunate to now be part of the planning for the Internet @ Schools, which focuses particularly on cutting edge internet/technology use for school librarians. If you are interested in being part of the conference, consider submitting a detailed proposal soon! As an attendee you can attend all the […]
Evolving Libraries-Keynote-Computers in Libraries
Daniel Rasmus — Uncertainty and Imagination: Evolving Libraries Who is the library competing with in the “competitive” word? Uncertainty 1: How will we access information? Uncertainty 2: How will books be represented? Uncertainty 3: How Low or High Can we go? Is it going to be personal capacity or cloud capacity? Do we want things to be personal, encrypted and owned or do we want it to reside in cloud. 54% claim never to use cloud, 95% actually do. Uncertainty 4: How will we […]
Open Education Resources and the School Librarian – Internet @ Schools
Heather Braum and Gary Price Why Open Education Matters information and video Wikipedia is an Open Education Resource (plus bibliography at the end of the articles. CNX.org Project Gutenberg (for free online books) Kansas portal Curriki Khan Academy (is it truly ‘open” educational or not?) TED Education (turning TED talks into lessons for the classroom) National Archives and Library of Congress teacher pages Valenza wiki Full Courses iTunes University Coursera (MOOC) How can you use OER in your school district? –can be used for pathfinders […]
Internet @ Schools sessions–Day Two afternoon
The sessions this afternoon include: Common Core Assignment–“Meet the Candidates” Karen Kliegman Connected Life and the Library–Diane Cordell Common Core — Meet the Candidates Library “buzzwords” fill the common core requirements and standards: “collaboration” “skills for formal presentations” “integrate information from variety of sources” “use media and visual displays,” etc. Common Core is like a special “backstage” pass for librarians as teachers struggle to meet the standards–“they validate our importance in the school culture.” Karen Kliegman Jaeger litmus test:(March/April Library Media Connections?) Are you asking […]