21st (2)

Cha...cha..cha..changes!

Well, isn't that the life of a teacher librarian? We are constantly changing what we do and how we do it.

This summer I moved every book in my library and discarded some very old non-essential materials and made lists to replace them with 21st century materials. I also dumped all of my VHS tapes. Yes, you read this correctly. ALL VHS tapes are gone.

There are two reasons for dumping the technology. First, it is ancient technology in schools today when we have laptops instead of DVD players, LCD projectors, and electronic whiteboards. None of the teachers have VHS players in their rooms. None of the teachers have TVs in their rooms. We have one TV in the entire building located in the lobby and it is not to be used for TV shows.

Second, like most people we download, we subscribe, we stream, or we play from a DVD in our laptops. We may be replacing student laptops with Chromebooks so we will only have teacher laptops left in our building. So, out with the VHS tapes. I have spent a lot of time ridding the library of ancient tech and I think I am almost at the end. Baby steps but steps indeed.

Third, I needed the space for my students. I teach in a PK - 4th grade school where very few children reach my shoulder before 4th grade. Due to lack of space my books were shelved on 72" shelves where many students could not reach them and certainly did not maintain the integrity of the shelf once a book was removed. I spread out the books by reclaiming four three-foot 72" tall units and so could lower books for my shorter students, raise individual shelf height to accommodate tall books and make the library look much neater.

I shifted my non-fiction materials, weeded a few I went, to take back those shelves. By doing so I was able to shift my biographies into the non-fiction section and put them at a better height as well. I also reorganized my picture book section by AR level. Our school enjoys using AR and I wanted to make the sections more distinct. I spent a great deal of time color coding levels and reshelving. Books without AR quizzes are shelved at the end of the section to be revisited and enjoyed.

I finished reorganizing the fiction section of the library by genre. My students loved that I did this last year as it made the sections easier to access and when students asked where the fiction sports books were shelved, I could point to a section. I also removed a computer table and two chairs in order to make way for two recycled seating benches. I want my kids to enjoy sitting and reading on days where we are free to just read.

My next goal is to replace some of the old furnishings in the library. I have a GoFundMe account set up so if you are interested in see what has been done and want to help out, go here:

http://www.gofundme.com/SESLibrary

Thanks and enjoy!

Shawn

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Banned Websites Awareness Day


Cross-posted from the AASL blog

On Tuesday, August 9th, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) published a press release designating September 28th, 2011 as Banned Websites Awareness Day. Embedded in ALA’s long-standing censorship awareness campaign, Banned Books Week (September 24 - October 1), this new initiative formally directs national attention to a percolating conversation about the impact of Internet filtering on teaching and learning in K-12 education.

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Art: Kalan Lysenko, NCHS Class of 2013
AASL is to be commended for taking the lead on this intellectual freedom issue. It is becoming increasingly evident that access to participatory media is essential to teaching the frameworks set forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, and more specifically for librarians, AASL’s Learning for Life (L4L) standards. Yet, these resources – those that create opportunities for students to contribute and publish online – are often blocked in schools.

Internet censorship is most often fueled by fear. Costly litigation, online predators, network security, privacy breeches are commonly cited as justification for aggressive filtering practices. While these concerns are legitimate, denying teachers and students a chance to experience online participatory learning together is professionally irresponsible. When schools, which presumably exist to prepare students for 21st century citizenship, fail to teach students how to learn and publish on the World Wide Web, they deny students fundamental instruction that is necessary for success in today’s world, and even more so in tomorrow’s.

Students are entitled to guidance and supervision by vetted, certified professionals when learning to navigate the participatory web. This is how they learn responsible use. School should be the training ground for online interaction, the place where digital citizenship instruction is embedded across disciplines – not the place where students are sequestered from the real world. In most cases, students have access to what is blocked in school once they leave the school building, and students in censored schools have to learn how to negotiate this unregulated landscape unsupervised and on their own. Educators have an obligation to correct that, even if it seems frightening to do so.

I teach in a free-range media school. We use a wide array of platforms for instruction, including an online course management system, a library management system, blogs, microblogs and social networks. Digital citizenship is part of our school culture. We trust teachers and students, and with trust comes responsibility. We refuse to penalize everyone for the potential transgressions of a handful of offenders.

In 2007, we incorporated Facebook into the academic program. Students had found a way around our proxy server to access it, and rather than trying to force students into compliance, we opened access. We kept waiting for the fallout, but it never happened. It is now a staple resource for student-student and teacher-student communication.

We use Facebook to teach communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity – not because we can’t do it elsewhere, but because students are already accustomed to contributing there, and it helps us get to our teaching objectives faster. Most of our students are adept at reading, writing, evaluating, providing feedback, expanding conversations, contributing knowledge and content on Facebook for social purposes. If our aim is to develop and apply those abilities toward learning and productivity, it saves students the cognitive process of transferring those skills to a restricted, less familiar platform. It helps them focus on improving the quality of their interactions rather than navigation. These are assessed proficiencies, and students learn from each other when they see interactions among all participating learners. While they could do this on any forum, they spend more time on this one, and are thus drawn back into the conversation more frequently. For better or worse, time, space, and clear divisions between work and play have become muddled in the 21st century. This experience teaches students to blend productivity and learning into their every day life, which sets them on the course toward becoming lifelong learners.

This is not about Facebook. What we taught on Facebook last year, we might teach on Google+ next year. The point is to deliver instruction as simply and conveniently as possible. If the instructional objective involves learning to navigate a wide range of interfaces, then by all means, take students out of the familiar realm. But if the objective is already an embedded part of student’s experience in a specific medium, and our goal is to build on that prior knowledge and apply it to a new purpose, then start in a familiar place – wherever that is. It is a simple instructional strategy to build engagement, and teachers have relied on it for years. The only difference is that many educational policy makers are not comfortable with what is familiar to students, and allowing students to use platforms educators don’t understand seems scary. Scary or not, we must empower students to collaborate with, learn from and produce for the public. It is an expectation of 21st century citizens, and they should be afforded the opportunity to have educators guide them in the process. In the current environment, many children are left to fend for themselves online without direction or supervision. It sets a great example when teachers learn in partnership with students, and that may be a sound solution to bridging the aptitude gap between teachers and students when it comes to participatory media. But it would be a societal blunder to allow students to learn without teachers.

So kudos to AASL for jump starting the conversation about Internet censorship and intellectual freedom! Ideally, this will prompt policy makers to refocus their filtering practices toward student learning rather than institutional protection.
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