Intellectual Freedom Bib

Lamb, Annette. "Everyone Does It: Teaching Ethical Use of Social Technology." Knowledge Quest 39.1 (2010): 62-65. Print.

The ethical development of children and teens is traced and discussed within the parameters of social networking online. The author suggests that attempts be made to help students practice decision-making in a safe forum such as through debates, role-playing, or discussion activities.

Storts-Brinks, Karen. "Censorship Online: One School Librarian's Journey to Provide Access to LGBT Resources." Knowledge Quest 31.1 (2010): 22-28. Print.

The story of a school librarian in Knoxville, TN who, alongside the ACLU, took on her local board of education in order to provide online access to LGBT information. Initially school computers were prohibited from visiting pro-LGBT sites which were endorsed by the National Education Association but were not blocked from anti-LGBT sites. The librarian won the lawsuit and the prohibited measures were lifted from the sites.

Week Eleven Reading

This week's reading from Coatney focused on being a leader for intellectual freedom within schools.  Issues were addressed such as self-censorship in selection, challenges to library materials, and educating students and teachers regarding intellectual freedom.

I personally tend to get less jazzed up about intellectual freedoms than many librarians.  I think that there is a level of appropriateness that needs to be maintained within schools and that those boundaries are really fuzzy.  I'd like to think that I would be able to handle challenges to materials gracefully and to work around blocked sites on school computers without complaining.  It's one of the challenges that you accept by working in schools, and I think that the opposite of this challenge could be just as problematic.  Providing internet access to minors without any parameters isn't just dangerous but I also think that it can subject kids to things that they aren't developmentally ready to be exposed to.  That can be really uncomfortable and embarrassing for children and even teens.

At the same time, I really liked Rachel (from Burns Park)'s approach: let kids use a more open search tool, but first teach kids how to respond to content that offends them.  Promote positive coping skills instead of sheltering them completely.  I think that there is a balance between providing appropriate parameters for internet use in schools and also teaching mechanisms for dealing with the inevitable questionable materials.

Week Ten Class

Last week, we visited Burns Park Elementary to observe the school media center and discuss professional development.  During this observation, we were allowed to interact with the students during their lesson, which included image searching on two sites that were new to me:  pics for learning and kid pics.  I was really unimpressed by both search engines.  One of the students I worked with unintentionally searched google images for her first picture of an eye and instantly found a million results that she wanted to use.  However, after her classmates and I reminded her that the assignment called for students to use another search engine, she tried the prescribed sites and could not find anything relevant and unique.  There were even a significant number of questionably appropriate images that were totally unrelated to the search term.  It made me wonder why those search engines were chosen over google.

Overall, it was really nice to visit such a long-standing school media program.  Rachel has obviously developed a program that is important to Burns Park Elementary and also had a lot of advice to share with us as well during our conversations.

Speaking of our conversations, I am really glad that we were able to air out all of our questions and concerns regarding professional development and the state of the profession as a whole.

MAME Conference

This weekend, we had the pleasure to attend the MAME Conference, held here at UofM.  I was really inspired by Barry Fishman's talk on making education a more gameful experience.  I like to think that the badges movement which I've been following and trying to get involved in, could be a step in the right direction towards solving the problem of meaningless quantifiable outcomes for learning.  Grades seem arbitrary, but, while they might be a consistent way to represent student achievement, badges show exactly what the student has accomplished and are able to point back to the work that a student did to achieve it.  I also like the fact that badges can be used to represent learning that occurs beyond a classroom, which finally connects what we have considered two separate spheres of education- formal and informal- and privileges them both alongside each other.  Have I mentioned how much I love badges?

At MAME, I also witnessed, for the first time, the collective sense of impending doom that we have alluded to  throughout this class.  School librarians are a scared, desperate group of people.  I have thought it before, but never really felt it until now.  Are we a dying breed or is a new kind of librarianship just starting to grow?  Thoughts?

Week Ten Reading

It is professional development week in 638!  When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was sort of cast into a position as the teacher trainer for my school district the second that I arrived at my site.  The idea was that I grew up in an educational system that worked, so I must be able to reflect on my own education enough to bring about new ideas in an isolated community.  I had to get really comfortable teaching people who had a significant amount of prior knowledge regarding teaching, were really set in their ways, and had preconceived notions about who I was based on my race and cultural background.  But in the midst of that, I made it work and even loved it-- some of my best experiences in the Philippines were when I was teaching teachers.

This week's reading looked at the role of lesson study in developing professional learning communities in schools.  I shared an office with three teachers with varying degrees of experience and different subject matter to cover.  My counterpart and I taught English, and the other teachers taught Math and Ethics.  We often took our breaks together and bounced ideas off of one another for classes.  It was an really enriching activity that was completely facilitated by our shared personal spaces.  That is something that a lot of teachers don't really have, but I think the library can provide.  I think that it should be the place where teachers want to spend their breaks.  It should be the place where people bump into each other who might seem to have very little in common.

But that is a more implicit way to support PLCs.  I think that librarians can also be more explicit about providing forums for teacher feedback and support.  Another article that we looked at discussed staff development workshops.  One point that really resonated with me was to call on other educators within your community to lead workshops.  It is important to see your school as a community of experts and to tap that wealth of knowledge and experience to support the greater community.  It doesn't always have to be the Librarian's job, and frankly, it probably shouldn't always be our job-- we will never be qualified enough for that.

Week Nine Class

This week's class started with an overview of MAME logistics.  I am really excited for the speakers this year, which include Barry Fishman (an Ed School favorite of SI) and my classmates presenting on using cell phones for education.  I am really excited by these opportunities, because I think that there are a lot of interesting applications in developing countries.  When I was in the Philippines, all of my students had cell phones.  Even if you lived in a grass hut with a dirt floor, you had a cell phone and probably a gold-plated karaoke machine. Some other Peace Corps Volunteers utilized mobile technology to start an underground sex education campaign for Filipino youth.  By texting a certain number, kids could receive a menu of topics that they wanted to learn more about, and depending on the number they texted back, they would get multiple texts about topics ranging from STDs to pregnancy prevention.  This was all information that was not discussed in schools or in homes, so it was an accessible and private format for youth to get the information they needed to make informed decisions about their sexuality.

This week, we also held class in the Brandon Center-- which is the bomb.  Seriously, the color scheme was energizing without being agressive, the layout was flexible, and free drinks!  Who would have thought that free drinks would make such a difference, but I will now have free drinks in my library and that's all there is to it.

It made a difference in that school in Texas that was able to become a place that students embraced because it became the kind of place that students wanted to be in.  It reminded me of the user-centered design that Peg talked about during last class-- completely made to support student learning.

Speaking of supporting learning, Technology and learning was our big discussion topic of the week, and we came to the conclusion that technology must transform teaching and learning processes, or else it is just an expensive substitution which is paid for through job cuts and rising classroom sizes.  We checked out a bunch of examples of digital student work online, and what we saw was completely outrageous.  Multiple glogsters that we saw dumbed down the learning process to the point where absolutely no usable knowledge was being transferred.  The big question that I now have is, how do you approach a learning community that thinks that this is an excellent example of student learning, without sounding patronizing and belittling teachers?

I liked the idea of stripping down the example to its analog elements to prove actual student engagement.  Technology looks flashy, but the flash does not signify learning or actual skills (unless the student has programmed everything themselves).

Lastly, we gawked over Raspberry Pi.  Since class, I've been mulling over the idea of having a DIY Computing Closet that just includes lots of pieces like Raspberry Pi's, SD Cards, Plugs, DVD drives, projectors, etc. and teachers or students would have to pick up all everything they need and piece it together themselves.  I think that even kindergarteners have the spatial intelligence to understand the organization of these things.  This could lead to greater self-confidence and self-sufficiency regarding computers.  One of the reasons that librarians become the go-to techies is because a lot of people just don't feel confident enough to mess around with the plugs or open something up and look at the insides.  Just a thought.  How would you use Raspberry Pi's in you schools?

School Library Elevator Speech

Inspired by the essay "Putting the Teacher in Teacher-Librarian" by Hersey & Zane from School Libraries: What's Now, What's Next, What's Yet to Come

I know that you might think that I'm just a support staff member, but that's only a part of my job.  Since I arrived here, it has been my main goal to directly support student learning as a visible teacher in the school.  My expertise in technology integration and instructional techniques to foster student inquiry alongside my professional skills in library management have increased the value of my role, which many might still see as only a librarian.  I hope that you can see that I am a Teacher-Librarian and that I have a personal stake every aspect of our curriculum here-- transforming education to become more individualized, more interest-focused, and more interactive than teachers can accomplish on their own.

Week Nine Reading

I am becoming an EdTech nerd.  I can't go to a bar without showing people pictures of Raspberry Pi on my phone or trying to start a debate about the 4th R.  FreeTech4Teachers is a goldmine of resources to satisfy my latest obsession, although I agree that the blog format might not be the best for the content.  EdSurge, a weekly newsletter targeted at EdTech entrepreneurs (but awesome for school librarians), just came out with a beta version of their attempt at a similar idea: help teachers get their hands on good ways to apply technology to enhance their instruction.  I love reading through my EdSurge newsletter every week, so I am sure that their site will be full of great resources in an easy-to-search format, but I wonder what will be lost from the FreeTech4Teachers spirit without having a teacher run it by himself with no proprietary agenda.

After reading the NETS for Students and Teachers (you know, just another batch of standards we need to keep our eyes on) and the other readings that really helped illuminate the NETS, I was struck by a few things:
1) For the most part, I love the ranked order that the student standards are in.  It shows where our educational values come from.  Innovation is first, followed by collaboration.  I would put critical thinking/problem solving next, and I would put digital citizenship last.  Those would be my only changes, because
2) I believe that critical thinking is necessary for "information fluency" and
3) because digital citizenship is still a rather undefined concept.  I also have trouble understanding how we don't really talk about ethics in the real world in schools, but it's totally fine to talk about ethics in a pseudo-world that still isn't fully formed.  I think my main problem with this is that ethics has to be a part of the greater educative process, not just noted in terms of technology.
4) In terms of the teacher standards, I think the aspect that I would have the most trouble with at this point in my career preparation is the modeling of digital age work.  I still have a lot to learn about new web tools.  I want so badly to code elegantly in python (never in my life did I think I would type those words).  I should probably get real software and own a real computer one of these days.  In other words, I have a long way to go.

Professional Book Review Project

I read Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classrooms by Michael Klentschy.  It was a great, quick read that I would highly recommend for anyone looking to better understand how to support your school's science program.  Check it out here!

Week Eight Class

During this class, we were able to video conference with Peg regarding physical library spaces.  We discussed the importance of user-centered design instead of librarian-centered design, and all of the important considerations one must take in to account when planning out a library space.

One of my favorite parts from this class was sharing our dream libraries with each other.  I think that this exercise was very telling of the way that my classmates view the function of libraries and their function within libraries, and that was really neat to see.  So many people came up with ideas that I never would have thought about, so this was like pure inspiration for me!

In other news, Raspberry Pi has just been released: the $25 computer that's the size of a credit card.  Check it out!  I am interested to hear thoughts from you guys about how computers like this would change your library design.  Would you include a hub of monitors for kids to plug themselves into?  Would you have classroom sets of Raspberry Pi's?  Would you check out keyboards and mouses?  Would you ignore it completely?