The Inspiration I got from Blowers' 23 Things

 This week I chose to read 10 Tips About 23 Things by Helene Blowers because of how I decided to create my professional development project. I actually began my project before reading Blowers, so in a way I chose it because I was already halfway through my little website. I love making research guides or LibGuides at my academic library, so creating a professional development course using Google sites that mimics a research guide seemed like a good fit for me. I had a lot of fun putting it together and then going back and re-vamping it after reading the Blowers article.

The article provides guidance and advice for anyone who would like to setup a similar online course for their colleagues like Blowers’ 23 Things. Many of the advice involved comradery. Blowers suggests having participants create blog posts, networking activities, and creating informal group discovery sessions. Another theme found throughout her tips are about pacing, such as catering to the people reluctant to learn about new technology and encouraging people to explore the new tools and apps first and with time they will build the confidence to learn the hard skills. I really liked how Blowers concludes that library staff should be encouraged to explore the new technology for themselves. I think this advice points to the fact that people will be more open to voluntarily participate in your professional development program if they know it will be fun.

My biggest takeaway from the article was the team work aspect that Blowers reported other libraries finding successful with their staff. I decided to integrate into my professional development project a component about participants sharing their journeys right there in the site. I’d encourage anything from personal experience as to how a tool used in a lesson plan went, step-by-step instructions for a new app someone discovered, or even a quick annotation for something a person found themselves. Now, I don’t currently work in a school, so this is all hypothetical, but I do wonder if I can take what I made this week and bring it with me to my first job.  

 

About this Image: It's an original picture I made in Canva using its graphics.

 

Source

Blowers, H. "10 Tips About 23 Things," School Library Journal, October 2008, pp. 53-57.

Best of the Best: My Top 5 Tools and Apps

I found my previous lists of classroom technology from the past eight weeks did not seamlessly fit into my lesson plans for this assignment. It really made me think how exploring technology on its own when you're not currently teaching in a school has its pitfalls. Once you're tasked with a lesson plan and standard to meet, you start looking for technology that fits your needs rather than a technology that may work someday. 

In the end, though, none of the tools or apps I used in my lesson plans were entirely new to me. However, I did re-visit old discussion boards to get ideas from other classmates of technology I decided not to include in my annotations. So after creating a unit plan, my top tools and apps are...

1) Padlet: I get the hype from others in the class now. It's an awesome tool to get students collaborating. 

2) Socrative: It's a virtual exit ticket, but I used it in one of my lesson plans get students thinking about the topic and as a pre-assessment. I think it will be a cool way to grab students' attentions at the start of class and to make sure everyone is caught up before moving on with the unit.

3) Plickers: Same with Socrative, I used this as a pre-assessment rather than an exit ticket. As I learned in LBS 750 about the research process and checking in with students throughout their work, I think creating a questionnaire that checks in on students' feelings about how their research is going would work great with Plickers. 

4) Canvastera: I love Canva, but this is a much simpler app that allows students to just make posters with a limited number of graphics to choose from. 

5) MindMup: This is a tool I used in EDU 737, but the first time I'm including it in this class. I think it's a great tool to make spider maps and you don't need to create an account. It's easy to use, so I think it would be a great way to get students using technology to do something they already know how to using pencil and paper.

This week's image is a concept map I made for one of my lesson plans. It is step 8 in the SSU Lesson Plan Template (used for EDU 737). It was made in MindMup and I really get why the template has so many steps. It forces me to understand the standard and what I am trying to teach students.

Observations About Gaming and Social Media for Youngsters

 The focus of my response paper this week was how gaming is a neutral use of the internet. Meanwhile social media leads to mental health problems. I think gaming is fine for kids to play and to then be used in the classroom or library because of its controlled environment. Games come with ratings, so parents and teachers can rest assured that the content will be appropriate for the age group of the students. Gaming done at school also involves supervision, adding another layer of safety for students. 

Social media is really hard to curate. It can be impossible for parents to ensure that their children will not be exposed to anything inappropriate or possibly even traumatizing. And then of course there's the problem of children not being able to quit scrolling.

I didn't put it in my paper, but there is educational content on social media. We found some last week with our annotations! However, we're adults. I can recognize when I am endlessly scrolling for "one last video" to entertain me because I *know* there will be one more interesting thing any second now. But I'm an adult with self-control and can force myself to put down my phone. Teenagers' brains are not developed in that way yet. 

After this week's readings, I will not have a social media account for students to interact with the library. I do not want to personally contribute to the amount of content students' are consuming.

 

The image this week was created in Canva's Dream Lab. The prompt was: 

a woman is on her cellphone in pajamas on her bed doom scrolling.

Parasocial Mentors

It occurred to me during this week’s exploration into social media sources for our own personal development that so many bloggers and YouTubers give me a lot of inspiration and direction. It’s an “I want to be just like them” type of fondness. Of course, this is not a true mentorship because they have no idea who I am and likely who most of their followers are. However, bloggers and vloggers mimic a lot of what we see during observation hours: they walk us through a day in their life as school librarians. We see what other librarians, libraries, and school districts are doing and can emulate what we see fit for our students.

It makes me want to pay it forward by creating another blog or YouTube channel chronicling my own journey as I transition out of higher education and into the K-12 school. I think this is a testament to how important building connections with other school librarians is. It may be a job that you’re the only one in your school doing what you do, but it’s not something that can be done in complete isolation. I’ve learned this from being on the MSLA listserv, your colleagues advice is crucial to your daily success. 

Image Source:

Open Clip Art. (n.d.). Thumbs Up Like Hand. https://openclipart.org/detail/241293/thumbs-up-like-hand.
 

Navigating My First MSLA Conference

This was my first, but definitely not my last, MSLA Conference! I was nervous and excited to go and so glad I did. These are the highlights of each presentation.  

Kwame Mbalia  

The keynote speaker was very entertaining and had such a touching story about his relationship with his school librarian. She’d slyly put a book down on the table that he sat at during lunch each day knowing that he’d read it and like it. This librarian would do this to every sort of misfit student in the school. It gave me one more idea for how I can serve students when I work in a school someday.  

The Great Genrefication Project presented by Jennifer Jones 

This was probably my favorite presentation. Jones explained her process for genre-fying her entire high school library collection. Some things that stuck out to me are that she picked up one book at a time to determine if it should be weeded or assigned a genre. For books that could be in more than one category, she chose the location her students would most likely find it. She also collaborated with a math teacher who assigned his students to calculate how many books should be distributed to each shelf. So far, Jones’ circulations have increased by 35%.  

I know there are a lot of varying opinions about genre-fying a collection. Every librarian I’ve done an observation with is against it. However, I think if it’s going to get the books circulating, why not? Non-fiction is still in Dewey, so there is still a lot of opportunity to teach students how to use the OPAC.  

Storytime on Steroids: Turn read alouds into student engagement showcases presented my Emily Litman 

I found this to be a really great insight into how one librarian is conducting her story times. She based her presentation around Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s Mirrors, Windows, and Doors philosophy. I’d already known about Dr. Bishop’s work, so it was great to understand how someone is doing it in their library. Litman actually asks the students, Is this a mirror story for you? She then gives her students a chance to draw something about the story. It is an open-ended assignment to relate to the book in whatever way they’d like. For the rest of the class, she lets them do a free time where they can read, color, play with Legos, etc. There is also a puppet she uses and introduced us to. She works at a Montessori School and someone in the audience asked about doing this in a public school. From that discussion, I learned that students’ days are so structured that when given an opportunity to do what they want, they don’t know what to do with themselves.  

Removing Roadblocks to Reading by Barbara Johnson  

This one was very similar to our class! Barbara Johnson is a former librarian, now Technology Director for her district. She presented quite a few assistive technology resources, many of which I have not come across during my own exploration. One thing that stood out to me is that many of the resources she found were a result of one student needing an accommodation. It made me think that we don’t know what services our libraries are lacking until a student has a need that is not being met. It also made me realize just how important staying up to date with all the applications out there.  

• BookShare Reader: a program that provides full-text to books across all genres. Books can be downloaded as a Word document. In Word, you can translate the text to a different language for a student.  

• Dyslexie: a Chrome add-on that changes the font on a computer to a dyslexic-friendly font. This includes webpages, Google results page, etc.  

• BeeLine Reader: Highlights one line at a time to make reading easier.  

Dig into Digital Citizenship for Elementary and Middle School Learners presented by Amy Salinger and Paul Hundley 

This presentation went nicely with LBS 750, which I’m also taking this semester. The two presenters gave a lot of different resources they have used to teach media literacy to their students. A few notable things were that the students are already learning to just be good citizens in real life in the library. The other was how media literacy also coincides with the Social Emotional Learning DESE framework. The presenters talked a lot about teaching the students empathy. They also said the classroom/library is a neutral setting to teach students media literacy because at home parents are fighting with their children to put their phones down.  

I completely forgot to take any pictures, so here’s a meme: 

 

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