Ms.berning

Ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day? At the end of the day, you look at your to-do list from the morning and somehow you were busy all day but not very many things were checked off? Maybe you’re a procrastinator like me. Maybe you’ve read all the tips on how to […]

The post How To Be More Productive appeared first on Edudemic.

The online programming education service Tynker has released an iPad app for students. The Tynker iPad app features stories that students animate by completing a series of programming challenges. The programming happens by organizing a series of blocks that represent commands. In that way it is similar to apps like Daisy the Dinosaur and MIT's App Inventor.

The Tynker iPad app provides the first story / programming challenge for free. The subsequent challenges require in-app purchases. The first story contains twenty challenges for students.

Applications for Education
The Tynker iPad app could be a good one for elementary school students to use to begin to learn about the logic that is used in programming. Students older than ten or eleven may find the challenges too simple.

Earlier today in my NCTIES workshop about creating media with mobile apps we talked about having students create comics to tell a story. Two of the apps that we looked at for that purpose were Animation Desk and ABCYa Animate. Unlike apps that are designed specifically for the purpose of creating comic strips, Animation Desk and ABCYa Animate don't include a standard comic frames format nor do they include pre-made characters for students to drag and drop into place. Instead Animation Desk and ABCYa Animate require students to draw each frame. When all of their frames have been drawn, students can play back their animations in a flipbook style.

Animation Desk is an iPad and Android app (free and premium versions available) for creating short, animated videos. The app allows you to create drawings using just your finger on your tablet's screen. In the free version of the app (the version that I tried) you can create up to 50 scenes in each of your projects. In each scene you can include as little or as much as you want to draw on the canvas. There are a few different brush and pencil effects that you can use in your drawings. The opacity of the colors you choose can be altered too. When you have completed drawing all of your scenes hit the play button to watch your animation unfold. If you're happy with your animation you can export it to YouTube. And as Kathy Schrock pointed out to me today, you can export all of your drawings as a set of PDFs.

ABCya Animate from ABCya (disclosure, an advertiser here)allows students to create animated GIFs containing up to 100 frames. On ABCya Animate students build their animation creations by drawing, typing, and inserting images. Students can change the background of each frame, include new pictures in each frame, and change the text in each frame of their animations. The feature that I like best about ABCya Animate is that students can see the previous frames of their animations while working on a current frame. This helps students know where to position items in each frame in order to make their animations as smooth as possible. Students do not need to register on ABCya Animate in order to use the tool or to save their animations. When students click "save" on ABCya Animate their creations are downloaded as GIFs.

                               
I made colored copies of 30 eBooks covers from MackinVIA and all of the PebbleGO databases. Diana painted a large piece of cardboard red.
I also used the website BlockPosters to make the MackinVIA logo (which you can get this logo and others from the Mackin Educational Resources website) larger for the sign on top of our Readbox.

We laminated the MackinVIA sign and all of the book covers.
Diana made the Readbox letters and glued them onto the board below the MackinVIA sign.  The sign put together looked so great....We loved how it turned out.
We used BlockPosters again and made the sign into two pages.
                            
 They went to MackinVIA to explore the different eBooks, PebbleGo, and Tales2Go.
                            
Bailey reviewed PebbleGo Animals and she was ready for me to record.
I first uploaded the images of the PebbleGo databases, eBook covers, and Tales2Go as "Pages" in the new campaign I started.

I went to the page with PebbleGo Animals to add Bailey's YouTube video.  This is very easy to do on the right hand side of the Layar Creator.
I also created two slides using ReciteThis. I wanted these slides to tell the person scanning the book covers a little more about PebbleGo....  
and where to find it.
I added these two images in the "Image Carousel" on the right hand side of Layar Creator....the same place I added the video.  You can add several images in the Image Carousel and then scroll through them while using the Layar app.

You add whatever you would like to each image or page that you upload into the campaign.
We hope that everyone stops by our MackinVIA ReadBox.  There is something for everyone.

NASA 360 is a series of videos about NASA's technological and scientific work and how it has contributed to elements of our daily lives. The episodes can be downloaded from the NASA 360 page or viewed on Hulu.

I've embedded the Hulu NASA 360 widget below for those who would like to preview an episode before downloading.


Applications for Education
NASA 360 could be useful for getting students to think about math, science, and engineering in new ways. Students may be surprised to learn that NASA's work translates to many fields beyond space exploration.

Yesterday I shared step-by-step directions for building maps with Google Maps Engine Lite. If your students aren't ready for Google Maps Engine Lite, take a look at Mapfaire.

Mapfaire is a free tool for quickly creating maps that contain simple placemarks. Using Mapfaire you can create a custom map that highlights places you specify. To use Mapfaire just sign in with your Google Account then name your map and start adding placemarks. To add a placemark all you need to do is enter a location then label your placemark. You can publish and edit your maps at any time.

Applications for Education
Mapfaire is not nearly as feature laden as Google Maps. But because it doesn't have as many features as Google Maps students should be able to get up and running with it much quicker than with Google Maps. You could have students create Mapfaire maps about all kinds of themes in history and or literature.

TouchDevelop is a great platform through which students can learn to program simple animations and games. Miles Berry gave an entertaining presentation about it at TeachMeet BETT. As I watched his presentation I was struck by how much TouchDevelop reminded me of Logo Writer that I used as a student in 1990. If you used Logo Writer you'll probably notice the similarities too.

On TouchDevelop students program a series of actions by entering sequences of commands such as "move forward" and "turn right" that are carried out on the screen by a chosen figure such as a turtle. In addition to the direction commands students program the distances covered on screen, the colors, the animations, and the images to appear on screen. All commands have to be entered into correct sequences of "if, then" logic in order for everything to display as intended.


TouchDevelop works on most modern web browsers including Chrome for iPad. Students completed programs can be saved online and or exported for use as Windows apps or HTML5 applications.

Applications for Education
TouchDevelop provides a great way for students to begin to understand some essential logic behind programming applications. The visual aspect of TouchDevelop provides a fantastic format that gives students immediate feedback on their projects. Click here for a series of six tutorials that students can use to get started right away without much if any instruction required from you.

It just got a lot easier for students to find copyright-friendly content using Google Image Search.

Here’s how:

After entering a search term, click on Search Tools.  A pull-down menu appears offering a variety of options: not filtered by license, labeled for reuse, labeled for commercial reuse, labeled for reuse with modification, labeled for commercial reuse with modification.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This tweet from Google’s Matt Cutts attributes the request for improvement to Creative Commons founding board member and open culture hero,  Lawrence Lessig.

Here at EasyBib, our main goal is to provide you with fabulous tools to use for citing any of your sources. We’re not the only game in town, and we wanted to give our readers a quick rundown on some of the other citation generators that are available along with their features.

Noodletools – Noodletools is a citation generator that allows users to cite one or two sources in MLA, APA or Chicago. You can create a full bibliography and notecards with a Noodletools subscription. Noodletools also has several features to help improve students’ information literacy and research skills and help them create accurate citations.

Citelighter – Citelighter is a fairly new citation generator and requires users to sign up and download a toolbar to Chrome, Firefox, or Safari in order to use their citation tools. Citelighter enables students to highlight direct quotes from a web page; these highlighted quotes and citations are then stored in the user’s project page.

RefWorks - RefWorks is an online research platform that gives users a place to store their notes and citations for a particular project. They offer thousands of different citation styles and enable you to manage your sources and cite directly from websites and databases. If your school does not have a subscription to RefWorks, new users may check it out with a free 30-day trial. RefWorks also recently introduced a new platform, RefWorks Flow, which is free to researchers not associated with a subscribing institution.

Zotero – After creating a free account on Zotero, users download the application to their computer or add the Firefox extension. While browsing on the Internet for information, users can add specific articles or pages to their Zotero library by clicking the add-on that is installed into the address bar. If a user wants to cite a printed book, they can search for the book on a vendor’s site, such as Barnes & Noble or Amazon, and Zotero will pull the information about that specific source into your citation library.

BibMe - is a free automatic citation creator that supports MLA, APA, Chicago and Turabian formatting. BibMe can auto-cite many resources for users. If users prefer, they can enter their citation information manually. While BibMe allows users to cite their sources in all four styles, BibMe does not offer a place to store and organize research notes and outlines.

Citation Machine – Citation Machine is a free service that allows users to manually cite their sources in all four styles. Citation Machine provides clear instructions on how to locate and input data to create citations. After a citation is created, users can copy and paste their citations into another program. There isn’t an option to log in or create an account, so users are unable to save and store any citations or research notes.

EasyBib - With EasyBib, you have the ability to cite 59 different source types for free in MLA style. To create your citations, simply type in the title of your book, website, movie, etc., and your citation is generated for you! After easily creating your bibliography, you have the ability to email or export the list to Word, Google Docs, or SkyDrive. When using School Edition you can create notecards and outlines and cite in APA and Chicago styles. Please contact us if you’re interested in learning more about School Edition!

With many different citation generators available, we hope that you find one that meets your research needs!

 

Michele Kirschenbaum is an information literacy librarian for EasyBib and ResearchReady. You can find her on Twitter, @Michele_EasyBib, or posting news you can use at the EasyBib Librarians Facebook page.

Last week I blogged about one of our first information literacy video tutorials, which explains the structure of a URL. This week, we’re building upon that with a release of a new video on top-level domains.

Understanding what top-level domains are and how they differ is a first step in website evaluation, and this video summarizes general evaluation guidelines in around 3 minutes—perfect for sharing during a short class when you’re crunched for time, or as part of a flipped classroom curriculum.

This video provides an overview of:

• .com, .edu, .gov and .org domains and their unique characteristics
• The importance of carefully evaluating unregulated .org websites
• Country domains such as .me and .ly

Check It Out!

Remember, these videos are free to use and share; we encourage you to incorporate them into your instruction or library website, or share with your PLN. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Emily Gover is the information literacy librarian for EasyBib and ResearchReady. You can find her on Twitter, @Emily_EasyBib, or posting news you can use at the EasyBib Librarians Facebook page.

The Impetus to Weed our Print Collection

Since early September 2013, my colleague Jennifer Lund and I have been working on a large-scale and aggressive weeding project for our entire collection.   This initiative was driven by two factors:

1.  We recognized our collection was dated in many areas, and we also knew other areas were in demand and might need to updated, replaced, and/or expanded.  We also have been working with faculty and students to foster a greater inclusion of reading choice for students and to support a pilot of dedicated independent reading time in classes, so having a vibrant collection with titles of interest to teens is even more important.

2.  Our plan to reframe the library as a learning studio through multiple mediums would require us to rethink what it means to develop a print and digital collection in a more strategic way.  Additionally, we knew we would need to shift areas of the collection to be located more strategically in the physical space and to remove some shelving to open up space for other modes of learning.

Our intent was not to devalue the importance of a print collection, but instead, we wanted to rethink how we approach collection development to better meet the needs of our students and faculty and to better support the library as a learning studio.  We also felt that getting “knee deep” into the collection would allow us to see patterns of usage that sometimes aren’t readily visible with traditional reports.  We first began by generating a report in Destiny ( hat tip to Jennifer Helfrich, our Coordinator, Media Services & Technology Training for helping us remember the steps for this report:  Reports>Library Reports>Collection Statistics – Summary; at the bottom of the page the report lets you limit by time frame and number of checkouts) to sort the books by call number and to indicate how many times each book had been circulated within the last three years; we also included the copyright year in the report.   We felt these metrics and parameters would give us a starting point for consideration as we worked through the weeding process.

It is easy to judge libraries and librarians with larger and/or dated collections as “bad” or “ineffective.”  While this judgement may be warranted in many cases, I think there are just as many instances where weeding can reveal some of the larger and powerful influences that might hinder a librarian’s effort to continually craft a relevant and meaningful collection.  Before I delve into our experiences and reflections, I’d like to offer some thoughts on how collections fall into disarray and decay.

Reasons Why School Libraries in Georgia Often Have Large but Irrelevant and/or Poor Print Collections

Here in Georgia, there has been a longstanding fear held by many school librarians to take a bolder approach to weeding for a variety of reasons.  In the past, accreditation standards from SACS required a certain number of books per FTE count; that rule disappeared several years ago for Georgia K12 schools.  Another factor, the cuts to funding from the state for school libraries, especially after expenditure controls were removed a few years ago, also exacerbated fears that if one really weeded everything that needed to go, then there would not be money to replace those books and/or there might be backlash from the community over shelves that were not as full.  Even when expenditure controls were in place, many districts flaunted the law and did not give the full allotment to the school libraries.   Additionally, smaller schools were and are penalized for their size—in my first school library job, we had fewer than 400 students and in spite of receiving our state full funding, we received a very small amount (if I recall correctly, about $2000) that was woefully insufficient to update a collection that included a book with the statement, “One day man will go to the moon” (true weeding story from 2001-2002).  Schools with lower enrollments rarely receive appropriate funding levels to develop print and virtual collections.

I have long felt school districts should set aside additional monies on a yearly rotating basis to help school libraries, especially those in older schools, have the appropriate monies to update their print collections and now digital collections (yes, eBooks age, too!).   However, with the loss of expenditure controls, very few districts get their full allotment; I felt very lucky when I was at Creekview High to get my full funding allotment every year.  It troubles me that so many school districts in our state say they value reading on their websites and in their professional learning events, yet they don’t give their school libraries their full allotment.  Instead, districts repurpose that money for school libraries into other areas to make up for other budget area shortfalls (welcome to the era of local control in Georgia); this practice is now legally sanctioned since our state legislature removed the expenditure controls for these monies a few years ago.   Some districts also have some rather interesting rules about what can be purchased with that state money even though the state places very few restrictions on what materials qualify or quantity—I know several media specialists who are hassled about purchasing eBooks; in some school districts, you can only purchase print materials and eBooks for the collection and not equipment or other items like computers , equipment, or 3D printers that are essential to a larger scope of “collection.”  Others impose bizarre practices like having everyone do three orders a year—each order from a certain book vendor or jobber even if that vendor (who might be more specialized) doesn’t carry materials relevant to that age group or reading interests.

Other factors influencing weeding practices:  in some schools and districts, school librarians simply have lacked the authority to make these kinds of decisions without having to do excessive paperwork to justify every weed.   Finally, some school librarians were and are so short-staffed that they simply have lacked the time and energy to engage in a thoughtful weed of their collections, particularly if they are under pressure to focus time on technology, if they have been reduced to the managers of “stuff” in the building, if the school admin does not understand the importance of weeding, or if they are so swamped with instruction (a good problem to have!) that weeding goes to the bottom of the triage list.

Even though the literature on thoughtful weeding practices emphasizes it’s better to remove the “junk” so that people can see what is “good” on the shelves, many school librarians fear there won’t be support from building or district level administration if there is indeed an outcry as to why you are “throwing away books” or parents angry that you’ve suddenly removed materials, while poor, that count for Accelerated Reader points (gasp!).  The cumulative effect in older schools, including ones that might have moved to a newer building but were forced to bring over part of the original collection, has resulted in large collections that have books that are outdated, are in poor physical condition, and are no longer relevant to the curriculum and/or the community of learners.

This backstory and resulting effects are important to consider when we think about equitable access to quality libraries and learning experiences, particularly for students already marginalized and attending schools that lack equitable access to both quality collections in many mediums as well as rich learning experiences collaboratively co-facilitated by librarians and classroom teachers.

First Strike:  Fiction

We began our efforts in Fiction in late September since this is the area that gets the most usage with our students.   We printed sections of the bigger report we generated with the weeding metrics we incorporated and had our student aids highlight all books that had not circulated in three years in that section and then pull the titles out to the edge of the shelf so we could more quickly identify candidates for weeding.  We then loaded up a cart with a laptop to access Follett Titlewave to add replacement titles or additional titles by an author for a new order we would develop as we worked through Fiction, a notepad for any handwritten notes, and sticky notes to place on any books we might pull but might want to relocate or re-catalog if we felt they didn’t fit in Fiction.  We initially were cross-checking books against the printed report to verify circulation stats; however, we eventually abandoned this practice because the books at Norcross have stickers on the back where the due date is stamped upon circulation.  By looking at this sticker , we can  just look at that rather than the report to get a sense of a book’s circulation history.  We also realized the process would be far more time consuming than we anticipated at the beginning because we felt it was important for us to

1.  touch every book together and discuss its use in the media center and reasons why it might have been purchased (student request, unit of study, award winner, etc.)
2.  collaboratively decide and debate whether a book should stay, go, or be replaced (and if additional copies were needed) .

Although it would have been easier to have weeded books on the basis of those circulation parameters we established along with copyright date, that would have been misguided and frankly wrong.   We knew that every book had a “story” in how it came to be in the fiction collection, and it was important for us to weigh each book’s merits together—at times, we felt very uncomfortable about this as we questioned what “power” we might be wielding and if there were more democratic or more participatory ways to do so.  At the same time, though, we felt it was our responsibility to lead the process using our expertise while consulting with our community if we could not come to a confident conclusion.   This weeding project has been  a wonderful opportunity for me a newcomer to get to know the collection, a chance for Jennifer to get reacquainted with the collection firsthand, for us to get to know each other better, and to think aloud as a team as we discussed each book—what kids thoughts about it, why someone might have ordered it, why it was ordered with certain funds, how past and present purchasing policies influenced a book’s selection, and how a book might have once fit into a unit of study or special project.   We’ve had many moments where we have literally laughed out loud, felt surprise at some of our discoveries, and been outright baffled by purchases in the distant past.

While Jennifer and Adria ( previous NHS school librarian and a fellow UGA alum) had weeded sections in the past, Jennifer and I both agree that doing a wholesale weeding where you feel there is administrative level support to be aggressive with the weeding is a very different experience from weeding sections for the purpose of maintenance and updating.  We both also feel that this experience and approach can also be a great bonding experience for colleagues–whether you’ve known each other a long time or for just a short time, the conversations that emerge in the weeding process are often springboards to other conversations about philosophy and practice!  Through this weeding experience, which is still in progress, we also have had lengthy conversations about conventional wisdom related to collection development and traditional weeding practices—this kind of reflective practice is valuable for revisiting beliefs and questioning what you think you know and being more intentional with your practice.  As we Tweeted some of our weeding insights (we noticed that our teens did not seem to read many of the Printz winners), we involved thinking from our peers outside of our building and engaged in some truly thoughtful conversations and debates with other school and young adult librarians about the purposes and values of award winners and how to contextualize the purpose of those awards in purchasing decisions.  In late December, Jennifer shared this poignant reflection:

I thought I knew how to weed. I was wrong. I’ve weeded this very collection several times, but this time was different. I guess I just never realized how powerful this process can be and how beneficial it is to intimately know your collection.

In our efforts to embrace many mediums for learning, I think our profession has inadvertently devalued weeding and portrayed it in a narrow way depicting it as a gatekeeping, menial task.   Perhaps this is not so obvious when you have the luxury of starting with a new or newer collection, but this realization hits you square in the face when you take on the challenge of sifting through layers and years of history in a large and somewhat dated collection like ours.   I think Jennifer’s reflection is not only a testimony to weeding as a learning process for us professionals, but it also reminds me how important it is to work hands-on with your collection both through weeding and inventory—tasks that are sometimes viewed as drudgery or as of late, written off as an insignificant practice not worthy of our efforts in some circles of school librarianship, a perspective I think is short-sighted.  The reality of trying to balance our roles as instructional designer and partner, information expert, instructional leader, and program administrator can definitely make people feel that weeding and inventory are not at the top of the priority list in the grander scheme of our work; however, these are responsibilities that are related to our larger scope of work and impact both physical pace, collection development, and people’s perception of what libraries are about.  Carving out time to do this sort of work ultimately helps us contextualize the work of our other roles in our schools and the ways a library might function as a hub of learning.

We completed Fiction in late fall; even before we finished weeding that section, we noticed circulation statistics increasing in this area and students selecting books in the collection with lower circulation jumping off the shelves because of greater visibility after the weed.  We are now preparing to move the fiction books from their current location to the rotunda where seating and reference books are housed; we’ll be using the “fiction nook” physical space as a new learning studio within our larger library studio once we remove the shelves and receive our new furniture we’re in the process of ordering (thank you Gwinnett County Public School District Foundation and Principal Will Bishop for your financial support of our library as learning studio).

Nonfiction:  A Work in Progress

We began tackling 000-599 of Nonfiction in November and thought we could finish it by mid-December; we actually just completed this section about a week and a half ago.  We thought the weeding of nonfiction would go more quickly, perhaps because of the date/relevance/timeliness issue that is often a major metric in this area, but we found ourselves tackling it in the same painstaking manner as we did the fiction books.  We definitely had lengthier and more involved conversations about how these texts relate to curriculum and the shifts that come with focal areas of study as faculty members leave or change curricular areas, state and district standards change, and how testing impacts project-based, inquiry driven learning.  The rise and availability of digital content on a particular topic through web resources, databases, and eBook acquisition also are factors in the use (or lack thereof) of nonfiction print materials.  Although it was very easy to choose many books for weeding, there were just as many that received in-depth review and discussion before made a final decision together.  We also were able to identify pockets of this part of the collection that needed updating and began a new book order to address these needs; in some instances, we decided to weed the print copy of the book and replace it with the eBook format in our Gale Virtual Reference Library.

It was also in this section that we found some of the more interesting and outrageous discoveries.   While terrible book covers were a common find with our older fiction titles, we found more antiquated books in nonfiction. Whether it was a retro style bibliography card, a book on how to deal with hijackers (written prior to 9/11), or even a book that clearly was something in the vein of a former librarian’s personal tastes, we caught more glimpses of policies and influences driving collection purchases at different points in the school’s history.  We also discovered many finds from the 1980s and 1990s that were outdated in terms of factual accuracy and no longer related to the curriculum; the design, length, and style of these texts are markedly different from contemporary nonfiction titles.  We were also struck by how dreadfully unattractive many of the covers were!  We also discovered many texts that seemed to be a better fit for an academic collection and could only surmise that they were purchased for projects in the distant past, perhaps when teachers felt they could devote more time to research projects and in-depth exploration of a topic over an extended period of time with their students.  Other books may have been purchased in the past to target a student demographic that is no longer part of our student population.   It is in this section Jennifer and I have had multiple conversations about the shifting sands of curriculum and how we can balance that reality with student interests and passions related to nonfiction topics.  We also found several inconsistencies in cataloging and other cataloging choices we plan to amend in order to place the book in a section that will make more sense to our students.  Other decisions we made in this process:

• We began selecting books that might be better suited for “coffee table” style display rather than on a shelf that is clearly not designed to accommodate or showcase it size and content.
• We have marked books, like test prep for ACT, SAT, and AP, to be pulled out of nonfiction into a special collection that will be more visually and physically accessible to students since there is demand for those kinds of print materials.
• Thinking about new signage and visualizations for the end panels to better indicate what might be find within a Dewey section.
• Exploring ways to retrofit our shelves to be more aesthetically pleasing and more conducive to discovery of books through browsing.
• Researching how we might retrofit our shelving to be mobile and how to add casters to the bottoms of our shelves that have metal foundation panels.  This conversation is part of an ongoing conversation about the need for contemporary shelving in high school libraries and what features can make our print collections more accessible.

We’re gearing up to resume weeding in February; we’re juggling those efforts with some new and exciting collaborative projects with classes.  We’ll resume with 600s and hope to complete the remaining sections of our collection by the end of March.

Weeding as Process to Expose Sponsors of Literacy

Since this fall, I’ve been thinking the dendrochronology, the cross-dating and study of tree rings as a means to discover influences in a tree’s growth in any given year (climate or stress), as a metaphor for weeding and how looking at a cross-section of collection can expose past and present sponsors of literacy in a library community.  According to the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, the purposes of dendrochronology research are:

1.  to put the present in proper historical context
2.  to better understand current environmental processes and conditions
3.  to improve understanding of possible future environmental issues

I would propose that the purposes of weeding a collection of any kind are similar in nature.  If we view weeding as  more than just the removal of materials and instead conceptualize it as a process of inquiry and discovery,  we can then begin to peel back layers and explore policies, philosophies, and other forces that have shaped not just the collection but the culture of learning and literacy practices in both the school and the library; we may also see clues that can reveal how library and literacy practices have influenced the “environment” of learning in a school and vice-versa.   Who and what have been privileged over time, and where is that visible or invisible in the collection?  The process of weeding a collection can help us  better understand the sponsors of literacy and learning that have shaped past and present practices and hopefully give us insights to more effective, thoughtful, and strategic decision making and practices for the future.  Additionally, it could be interesting to contextualize and situate weeding practices and insights as a form of ethnography of objects.  I lack the research methodology knowledge at this time to speak more knowledgeably on this prospect, but I think it’s an interesting thread to pull for the future.

If we think of weeding as one means as a way of exploring sponsors of literacy and learning in and through a library, we might consider these influences that can act as sponsors in both positive and negative ways:

• Purchasing policies—values reflected in formats that may or may not be privileged, limitations or lack thereof  for number of copies one might purchase of a title, and how certain funding sources may dictate or limit what can be purchased with those monies as well as rules for purchasing and how the authority of individuals involved in purchasing may approve or validate (or not) certain kinds of materials and content.
• Popular trends in terms of content, topics, and publishing.
• Beliefs of library staff, faculty, students, administration (building and district level), and community about reading. 
• Funding trends, funding sources, budget histories.
• Book challenge policies and history within a school district  and how those might influence content selected for purchase.
• How mediums for purchasing (purchase card, purchase orders, rules related to budget audits for districts) might influence what is bought from different vendors.
• Bid pricing policies and vendors approved for librarians to use in purchasing.
• Personal and professional values of librarians (see Mark Dressman’s Literacy in the Library); beliefs about what children/teens need and/or should read; beliefs about purposes and roles of the library in a school; use of physical space and how it is impacted by print collections.
• Identifying information about a book (example: funding source) included in processing; relevance of placement in collection, visibility of circulation history of a text to a patron.
• Corporate influence in imprints or types of books pushed/marketed toward certain groups.
• Collection practices taught at any given point in history.
• Percentage, identification, and arrangement of fiction, nonfiction, reference, biography, story collection, etc.
• Physical location of specific areas of collection and what values may be conveyed by placement.

Just as tree rings might show conditions of drought or flood, I encourage you to think of these “environmental conditions” in my working list above as forces that influence the ways libraries function as sponsors of literacy through their collections.   What clues of the past can we see through weeding to better understand the present and move forward more intentionally into the future?  How can weeding illuminate these sponsors of literacy and help us to elevate the positive influences while mitigating or stopping the negative ones that have impacted collection, library services and instruction, and the larger school culture?  I’m interested in what these sponsors of literacy look like across multiple school libraries in our state and nation and how they impact practices that may privilege or silence children and teens along lines of race, class, and gender, particularly when we look at school libraries that serve children and teens who may be marginalized by poverty and geography.

Final Thoughts and Wonderings

• While my post is situated in a school library context and comes with its own unique challenges, I suspect that our experience translates to a large degree to weeding practices in public and academic libraries.  How might we thoughtfully share our experiences and rethink as well as develop new practices together?
• This experience only reinforces my belief that libraries are not the neutral spaces we portray them to be and that looking at our work and practices through a lens of sponsors of literacy is important to elevate our awareness of our positional power.
• How will practices of weeding print collections inform practices of weeding other kinds of collection in the not so distant future?  Whether it is a virtual collection of eBooks, a guitar collection, a seed library, or something else, no collection can be static.
• How do we negotiate the challenges of doing this time-intensive work with other pressing areas of our work in our libraries and learning communities?
• How do we begin to address the challenges I outlined at the beginning of this post to address factors that create and/or exacerbate stagnant collections?
• How might we make collection development and weeding practices more participatory, organic, and nimble, especially in the face of mounting budget cuts in multiple kinds of libraries?
• How might the metaphor of tree ring study and weeding as one way of unpacking sponsors of literacy and accumulating layers of history reframe other practices of our profession?
• What data visualization methods might also help us expose patterns in collection and weeding data/statistics?

As you can see, this experience has exposed new insights for us while leading to new lines of professional inquiry.  I’ll continue to dwell in these ideas as Jennifer and I jump into the next phase of  our “Great Weeding Process” once more in another week and hopefully complete our work by the end of March.

Filed under: 2014, librarianship, literacy Tagged: collection, collection development, Dendrochronology, libraries, sponsors of literacy, weeding

From the e-mail inbox this past weekend:

I was recently re-reading your article on Managing Digital Resources from September 2007.  We are in the process of a GALE trial with World History in Context and US History in Context.  I am trying to come up with an evaluation rubric and online questionnaire for students and staff who are currently using these resources.  While I have some general ideas of what I want to get in the way of feedback, I am not finding any answers on how to come back to those students who basically say “I don’t want to the district to tell me what to use for my research, I just want to Google it”.  

...can you point me to anything that I can provide to teachers and library techs in response to those students who just want to Google?  Part of the problem too, is that teachers are not teaching website evaluation skills, and think (or just assume) that students know what they’re doing....(egads...and these are the kids who are going to vote and make health care decisions for me???) - Sharon

Sound like a familiar problem? (I could never convince my own son that he needed to go beyond Google when doing research.) According to a recent study (shared by Stephen Abram) Learning the Ropes: How Freshmen Conduct Course Reseach Once They Enter College by Alison J. Head:

4) Most freshmen said their research competencies from high school were inadequate for college work. As they wrapped up their first term, freshmen said they realized they needed to upgrade their research toolkit.

5) Many freshmen were in the process of trading out Google searches that satisfied high school assignments for searching online library databases that their college research papers now required. Yet other students said they still relied on their deeply ingrained habit of using Google searches and Wikipedia, a practice that had been acceptable for research papers in high school.

 

 

Vocabulary.com is an excellent vocabulary study service offering thousands of vocabulary practice lists and activities for students in elementary school through graduate school. In addition to lists of SAT, GRE, and other test prep words, you can find vocabulary lists that are attached to novels, historical documents, famous speeches, and current news articles.

When you sign up for Vocabulary.com you will be given an assessment quiz in order to give you suggested lists with which to start your practice. After completing the assessment you can use the practice lists suggested by Vocabulary.com or choose your own lists from the huge gallery of vocabulary lists.


Applications for Education
One of the aspects of the Vocabulary.com activities that I like is the instant feedback for every practice question a student attempts. As you can see in the image above, if a student answers incorrectly on his first attempt, he will see the definition and the word in context.

Vocabulary.com has an optional competition aspect to it. Students can play for their schools and climb the Vocabulary.com leaderboard.

When you're using blogs in your classroom there may be some posts that you want to keep at the top of the page rather than letting them get pushed down by new entries. For example, if you're students are contributing to a group blog, you might want to keep the instructions post pinned to the top of the list of posts. Or you might want to keep a reminder about an upcoming due date posted at the top of the page. These kinds of posts are called "sticky" posts and they're easy to create on WordPress.com, Kidblog, Edublogs, or any other blog running on the WordPress.org software.

To create a sticky post in any of the aforementioned services follow these steps.
1. Write your post as you normally do.
2. Before publishing the post open the "visibility" menu on the right side of your post editor.
3. Click "stick this post to the front page." Your sticky post will stay at the top until you uncheck "stick this post to the front page."


To make an existing post a sticky post follow these steps.
1. Open your list of all posts.
2. Click "quick edit" below the title of the post that you want to make sticky.
3. Check "make this post sticky."

Did ya know that you can easily embed your Tweets in blog posts or wikis? Sure can! It's sorta buried, but I'll show you in 4 easy steps!
— The Daring Librarian (@GwynethJones) January 4, 2014

Super thanks to Sasha Reinhardt or @MiddleGrdReads for letting me use our Tweet convo as the embed examples and inspiration for the graphic! Cheers!

@GwynethJones That's awesome!
— Sasha Reinhardt (@MiddleGrdReads) January 4, 2014

My Year in Twitter as an animated movie by @Vizify https://t.co/KO6wbSwex1 Wish they would give the EMBED code for blogs, tho!
— The Daring Librarian (@GwynethJones) January 4, 2014

Have you consolidated your many different flash drives, changed your passwords, cleared your cookies, & dumped your cache? Click below for 10 Super Geeky Tips for the New Year

---

Here's that golden Tweet. My silly Twitter high point of 2013! This is what got the most RT's & most Favourites? LOL Oh sure, this & not any of my ed tech bon mots! Ok, I'll take it! ;-)

We're watching #DoctorWho & all loads of cool stuff is going on and all I'm worrying about is Clara's turkey!
— The Daring Librarian (@GwynethJones) December 26, 2013

What about you!?
What was your Twitter high point this year?
What's your best geeky tip for the new year?
Is there something you've always wanted to know how to do & would like a comic infographic showing how to do it?

This post is a response to a question that I received on Twitter about restricting access to students' blog posts. 

While I prefer to guide teachers in the direction of teaching their elementary school students not to reveal personally identifying information on classroom blogs, I also recognize that sometimes the only way a teacher will try blogging is if they can restrict access to just students and their parents. The directions below cover the same steps you can take to restrict access to Blogger and WordPress blog posts. Edublogs and Kidblog run on the WordPress software so the directions for restricting access to posts on those services are the same as for WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Restricting Access to Blogger Posts


If you cannot see the video, the screenshots below offer the same directions. 

Step 1:


Step 2:

Step 3:


Restricting Access to WordPress Posts (and Kidblog and Edublogs)
(Click the images to view them full size). 

Step 1: Create a post or a page in your blog editor. Before pressing publish click the "edit" link next to the visibility setting just above the "publish" button for your post or page.

Step 2: Select "private" or "password protected."

Follow the two steps pictured below to edit the visibility setting on existing pages or posts.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Today, the first graders and their teachers, Kayleen Bertman, Mindy Doggett, and Deb Saylor, came together in the library to share their holiday family traditions eBook.

It was so special to have the follow along in the Our Holiday Family Traditions eBook as a class.

You can read their eBook at this link too.

Google's Inside Search is a good place to find information about how Google search works and to find a slew of search tips. How Search Works is an animated graphic that reveals the basics of how websites are sorted, ranked, and presented to you in your search results. More information is revealed as you scroll down the How Search Works graphic.

The Inside Search Tips and Tricks list highlights the kinds of information that you can discover through Google Search. Some of the tips and tricks highlighted include finding currency and measurement conversions, searching by file type, and using the advanced image search tools. These tips and tricks are what I would rate as beginner tips. To get more advanced search tips I recommend visiting Dan Russell's blog.

Applications for Education
To help your students develop their search skills try some of Google's search challenges and lessons. Or you can try developing your own search challenges as I outlined in this post.

Click here to open and download a PDF of ten search tips for students.

Magisto is a video editing service whose mobile apps I've featured in the past. This morning I tried tried their free Chrome App. The Magisto Chrome App makes it easy to stitch together video clips and pictures to create short videos.

The Magisto Chrome App allows you to quickly drag videos and images from your desktop to your Magisto account. From the videos you upload, Magisto will select the best portions to remix and blend with images. After you've uploaded the media that you want mixed, select a theme and music for your video. Magisto creates your video after you've completed the steps of uploading media, selecting a theme, and choosing music. The final video is emailed to you.

On the Magisto website you can create albums of your videos. Your albums can be made public or private. If you want to create a group album, you can invite other Magisto users to contribute to an album. From an album you can download videos and grab embed codes for your videos.

Applications for Education
The Magisto Chrome App is a good option for teachers who would like a simple video creation tool that offers a little bit more than Animoto in terms of sharing and length of videos that their students can create.

The Miller Center's Presidential Classroom website is a fantastic resource for teachers and students of U.S. History. On the site students will find a very good reference resource about US Presidents. The Miller Center's American President pages contain personal and political biographical information about every President of the United States. Each profile links to dozens of essays about various aspects of each President's life and work. Each profile also contains images of each President. Some profiles also include audio files and video of the President.

Teachers will find the a selection of lesson plans and course syllabi on the Presidential Classroom website. The lesson plans, appropriate for high school students, cover themes and topics post 1950. Some of the topics are the Space Race, the Vietnam War, and the 60's.

The Presidential Classroom also includes a speech archive that contains the text of inaugural addresses, State of the Union Addresses, and some other notable speeches that Presidents have delivered to Congress and the American public.

People often think that "incognito" mode (Chrome) or "private" mode (Firefox) is only used when someone has something to hide. There are other uses for it.

I use incognito mode quite often when I'm demonstrating how to use a web app or website that requires my username and password. I also use it when I want to show people what a shared or published Google Document looks like when you're not signed into a Google Account. In both cases opening a new browser in incognito mode saves me the hassle of signing out of an account when I know that I'm going to be back into it in a few minutes. Incognito mode thinks that I'm a new user and doesn't have my saved usernames and passwords so I'm able to show sites and documents as they appear when I'm not signed into them.

One of the elements that is common to almost every video recorded on a mobile device is "throw away" footage at the beginning and end of every video. "Throw away" footage is the five seconds of giggling, shaky shots of the ground, and other nonsense that is captured at the beginning and end of a video. Your students can save time in the final editing of a video if they clip the "throw away" footage before they upload it to their desktop video editor of choice (iMovie, Movie Maker, Kdenlive). Here are three free tools that students can use to trim videos on their mobile devices.

Magisto is a free video editing app available for Android and iOS. The app allows you to add music tracks and some simple effects to your raw video footage. If you have a series of clips you can string them together in one video. To create your video you can use footage that you have captured with your device’s native app or you can use Magisto to capture new footage. In addition to editing the length of clips and stringing them together, Magisto allows you to draw on frames in your video clips and add borders to your frames.

Using the YouTube Capture app for iOS you can quickly record videos and upload them to YouTube with just a couple of taps on your screen. The first time that you open the app you will be prompted to sign into your Google account and choose your sharing settings. After that you’re ready to start recording and sharing videos. YouTube Capture includes a few options for quickly editing and enhancing your videos. Within YouTube Capture you can trim the length of your video, stabilize the images in your video, add a soundtrack to your video, and touch-up the colors in your video.

WeVideo for Android puts many of the same features of WeVideo's web-based video editing platform on your Android tablet or phone. Through the app you can capture pictures, sounds, and videos. You can use the app to trim raw video clips. The app also allows you to put together short audio slideshows.

Of course, if your students have purchased or your school has purchased apps like iMovie for iPad then you can just record directly into the app and trim all of your video clips there. iMovie costs $4.99 which is why I've left it off this list. 

This morning on Google+ Tony Cacaccio shared a picture that offers a great tip for shooting better videos with your mobile phone or tablet. (I don't know who actually owns the picture so you'll have to see it here on Tony's page). The picture reminds us to hold our phones and tablets in landscape mode when shooting video because that is ultimately how we'll watch it on our televisions, computers, tablets, and phones. Shooting the video in landscape mode will save you editing time in long run.

Three good and free options for mobile video editing:
Magisto is a free video editing app available for Android and iOS. The app allows you to add music tracks and some simple effects to your raw video footage. If you have a series of clips you can string them together in one video. To create your video you can use footage that you have captured with your device’s native app or you can use Magisto to capture new footage. In addition to editing the length of clips and stringing them together, Magisto allows you to draw on frames in your video clips and add borders to your frames.

Using the YouTube Capture app for iOS you can quickly record videos and upload them to YouTube with just a couple of taps on your screen. The first time that you open the app you will be prompted to sign into your Google account and choose your sharing settings. After that you’re ready to start recording and sharing videos. YouTube Capture includes a few options for quickly editing and enhancing your videos. Within YouTube Capture you can trim the length of your video, stabilize the images in your video, add a soundtrack to your video, and touch-up the colors in your video.

WeVideo for Android puts many of the same features of WeVideo's web-based video editing platform on your Android tablet or phone. Through the app you can capture pictures, sounds, and videos. You can use the app to trim raw video clips. The app also allows you to put together short audio slideshows.

         
Our third graders have created a flippable eBook to share with all of us entitled, Our Advice On How To Be Safe Online!  
As part of the Digital Citizenship piece of the 3rd grade technology and library curriculum, there are several points that we need to cover throughout the year.
We have been having discussions throughout the year and have used Rosen Publishing CyberSmarts eBooks series, Professor Garfield and NetSmartz.

There are five interactive eBooks that make up the CyberSmarts series.  We have these available to our students, teachers, and parents through Van Meter's MackinVIA.
This time they used Common Sense Media's "Digital Passport."  Within Digital Passport, the students work through five modules focusing on digital citizenship and being safe online.  Once they have completed all of them, they get their Digital Passport.

After they all received their digital passport, we had a great discussion about what they learned.  I just loved the conversation and knew that we had to do something with it.

As a class, we decided it would be fun to have everyone draw and write a page of an eBook we would create for our younger students at Van Meter and in other schools too.



Once they all had a page created, I scanned them into the copy machine, downloaded them as a PDF, and uploaded into FlipSnack.
Now we have a wonderful new eBook that will help others be safe online too.

             
They are just so creative and love using the digital tools to really personalize and spice up their work.  I love how they use Google Presentation to make the pages their very own.

I just knew they were going to come together to create really awesome eBooks in FlipSnack.
Today when the 4th graders came for library and technology time, there were several students who were all ready to upload their Google Presentations into FlipSnack.
This is really simple to do.

All you have to do is "Download" the Google Presentation as a PDF.
Then go to FlipSnack, create a new one, and upload that file you just saved on your laptop of the Google Presentation.

When it has uploaded, you will also be able to choose how you want your flippable eBooks to look and the background it is on.  You can also give it a title, subtitle, and description.

Even though we just have a few of the FlipSnacks finished, I just couldn't wait to share them.
       
        
        
On Monday, I go to the two 4th grade classrooms for the morning.
We will be uploading all of the Google Presentations to FlipSnack and adding the flippable eBooks to the Padlet, Van Meter 4th Grade October Book Projects...FlipSnack eBooks.

We can't wait to share their eBooks with all of you.....The 4th graders hope they inspire others to read the books they read too.

They all enjoyed answering the questions too.  The took a lot of pride in doing a good job throughout the entire project....and they wanted to make sure they found the correct answers during the scavenger hunt.
Within Layar, you can also save and share your campaigns.  All of your pages are brought together, you can add a description and cover page, and then press "Save and go to sharing options."