Personal: Friends in the Boston area: Please help Emily!

Please forgive my use of this space for another personal post. 

My daugther Emily is a talented art teacher who moved to the Boston area this past year.  She worked as a long term sub after she arrived in the fall and was hoping for a number of interviews this spring or summer.  Despite her presence on the job banks and the large number of resumes she distributed, as August approaches she has had only one interview. She really needs a foot in the door.

If you hear of any teaching positions–art K-12–or any other types of work, especially relating to the arts, please let us know! 

• Emily’s portfolio and resume are posted here: http://emilyvalenza.com/contents.htm
• Her new art ed blog is located here: http://evalenza.edublogs.org

I promised to return to the blog’s real mission next post!

DOPA Passes the House: Moving to the Senate

Beth Yoke, Executive Director of the Young Adult Library Services Association, posted this news and call to action yesterday. If you value use of blogging and wikis and social networking tools in the classroom, please contact your senator.

Please also take a look at YALSA’s document: Teens and Social Networking in the School and Public Library.

From Beth:

Today the US House of Representatives passed the amended Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) bill by a vote of 410-15. The proposed legislation will now go to the Senate. The Senate may or may not have time to vote on this before their session ends for the year. In the meantime, you can help out in two ways:

1. If your Representative was one of the ones listed below, please email them a quick thank you for opposing DOPA. Representatives who voted against DOPA: Conyers (Detroit, MI), Grijalva (Tuscon, AZ), Hinchey (Saugerties, NY), Honda (San Jose, CA), Kucinich (Cleveland,
OH), Lee (Oakland, CA), Zoe Lofgren (San Jose, CA), McDermott (Seattle, WA), Payne (Newark, NJ), Schakowsky (Evanston, IL), Scott (Newport News, VA), Serrano (Bronx, NY), Stark (Fremont, CA), Watson (Los Angeles, CA), Woolsey (Petaluma, CA). Go to www.house.gov for contact info.

2. Start educating your Senators about the importance of social networking sites, which are the types of sites that will be blocked if DOPA passes. Go to www.senate.gov for contact info. Send them (and have parents & teens send) faxes and emails of personal stories about how you or your library patrons use these kinds of sites in productive, educational ways. Let them know what negative impact DOPA will have on
libraries and library users if it passes. ALA has five key points that you can reference:
1. The terminology used in DOPA is still overly broad and unclear. As written, this legislation would block access to many valuable websites
that utilize this type of communication, websites whose benefits outweigh their detriments.

2. DOPA still ignores the value of Interactive Web applications. New Internet-based applications for collaboration, business and learning
are becoming increasingly important, and young people must be prepared to thrive in a work atmosphere where meetings take place online, where online networks are essential communication tools.

3. Education, not laws blocking access, is the key to safe use of the Internet. Libraries and schools are where kids learn essential information literacy skills that go far beyond computer instruction
and web searching. Indeed, DOPA would block usuage of these sites in the very environments where librarians and teachers can instruct students about how to use all kinds of applications safely and effectively and where kids can learn how to report and avoid unsafe sites.

4. Local decision-making - not federal law - is the way to solve the problems addressed by DOPA. Such decisions are already being made locally, in part due to the requirements of the Children’s Online Protection Act (CIPA) for E-rate recipients. This additional requirement is not necessary.

5. DOPA would restrict access to technology in the communities that need public access most. H.R. 5319 still, as presently drafted, would
require libraries and schools receiving E-rate discounts through the Universal Service Program to block computer users from accessing
Interactive Web applications of all kinds, thereby limiting opportunities for those who do not have Internet access at home. This unfairly denies the students and library users in schools and libraries in the poorest communities from accessing appropriate content and from learning how best to safely manage their own Internet access in
consultation with librarians and teachers.

Thank you for working to ensure that all Americans have easy access to critical Internet resources!
Beth Yoke
Executive Director
Young Adult Library Services Association,
fastest growing division of the American Library Association
50 E. Huron St.
Chicago, IL 60611
1 (800) 545-2433 x4391
byoke@ala.org
www.ala.org/yalsa

Add your 2 Cents Worth

Please read, consider, and add your own perspective to David Warlick’s comments on the future of libraries and librarians. Is authority or value more important in information evaluation?  What will libraries look like down the road?  I read and respect David, but I suspect he and his reader responders have not seen too many 21st Century libraries and librarians.  My vision and his are very different.

Meme: You know you are a 21st Century teacher librarian if . . .

I am just back from the PSLA Leadership Conference.

Facilitator Celeste Nalwasky led us in exploring paradigm shift and creating a new strategic plan. I’ll write more about that event in a later post. What resonates with me was one younger librarian’s comments.
I’ll try to paraphrase: We’re all doing different stuff. The other school librarians I know are not doing what I am doing. Some don’t even know about the state databases. Some maintain websites and blogs; others do not. Some have seriously retooled; others have not.
So I thought I might enlist you readers in an aggregated response. What should we be doing right now? What should we be planning for? What does a 21st Century librarian look like?

I’d love to compile a list and I volunteer to begin it.

You know you are a 21st century librarian if you . . .

1. Make sure your learners and teachers can access developmentally and curricularly(?) appropriate databases, portals, and websites.
2. Have the skills to create a blog or website to pull together the resources to meet the information needs of your learning community. You organize the Web for learners.
3. Think outside the box about the concept of “collection.” That collection might include: ebooks, audiobooks, open source software, streaming media, and much more!

4. You think Web 2.0. You know the potential new technologies offer for interaction–learners as both information consumers and producers. You are thinking interactive service: materials suggestion forms, book review blogs, online calendars, etc.

5. Consider new interactive and engaging communication tools also for student projects. Are we looking at digital storytelling, wikis, podcasts, streaming video as possibilties beyond paper and PowerPoint?

6. Consider just-in-time, just-for-me learning as your responsibility and are proud that you own the real estate of one desktop window on your students’ home computers 24/7.

7. You are concerned about what you can do that Google cannot. What customized services will you offer that will not be outsourced to Bangalore?

8. You read both edtech journals and edtech blogs, not just the print literature of our own profession. You learn by visiting the webcast archives of conferences you cannot attend.

9. You consider your role as info-technology scout. You look to make “learning sense” of the authentic new information and communication tools used in business and academics. You figure out how to use them thoughtfully and you help classroom teachers use them with their classes.

10. You consider ways to bring experts, scholars, authors into your classroom using telecommunication tools like Skype and Internet2.

11. Grapple with issues of equity. You provide open source alternatives to students and teachers who need them. You lend flash sticks and laptops and cameras and . . .

12. You consider new ways to promote reading. You are exploring downloadable audio books. You (and your students) are creating digital booktalks.

13. Model respect for intellectual property in a world of shift and change. You insist on documentation for media in all formats and recognize the growing number of copyright-friendly portals. You understand Creative Commons licensing.

14. You know this is only the beginning of social networking. Students will get to their MySpace accounts through proxy servers despite any efforts to block them. You plan educationally meaningful ways to incorporate student excitement (and your own) for social networking. This is social networking too!

15. You seek professional development that will help you grow even if you cannot get Act 48 credit (or other credit) for that growth.

16. Even if you are a digital immigrant you learn the language of digital natives AND you consider what you want to unpack from that trunk you carried from the old world. Rigor and information fluency matter no matter what the medium. So do excitement, engagement, and enthusiasm.

Please feel free to add and edit!

New rubric for school websites

Because of the connection with my virtual library research, colleague Dan Fuller recently shared with me an article and development I completely missed. http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=6287

Building Blocks to Electronic Communication: A Rubric for School Web Development and Management was released back in March http://www.eschoolnews.com/schoolspanwebsiterubric.pdf

I am hoping this “rubric” marks a shift away from templated content and the paralyzing fear we have of sharing what makes us special and unique–our students and their work. 

This new self assessment model for measuring the effectiveness of school sites, urges schools to move beyond the print paradigm.  It values interactivities, media, community authorship, and Web 2.0 tools.  It also considers the importance of graphics, particularly images of students. 

Regarding sharing student images and written content:

The information students post (often without their parents’ knowledge or consent) on MySpace.com offers significantly more risk than the tame-by-comparison news and photos posted on school or district web sites.

Frankly, it makes no sense to restrict web-based photos that could end up in the daily newspaper or local TV newscast.

According to the eSchool News piece:

The bottom line: School leaders need to make the web an integral part of how they work and communicate with each other and with teachers, support staff, parents, students, reporters, and community members.

November Learning, July 17–20, 2006

I sat in Logan Airport (yet another delay) trying to grasp what made this conference so powerful for me. My head reels with ideas for September, the stuff I need to learn or do better, and the people I need to follow through their sites and blogs.

For me, this conference was heavily about establishing new relationships, expanding my learning circle to include others–many of them nonlibrarians–from around the world.

On the first night I met librarian Barbara Jansen whose work on information literacy and Big 6 I long admired. I suspect this will be a lasting friendship.

If you’d like to peek at my presentations, you can download them here:

• http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/november.ppt
• http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/landscape.ppt

You can read Steve Dembo’s post about one of my sessions on his Teach42 blog.
What I learned and loved:

Random ideas: Several speakers mentioned WikiYa a wiki for discussion of young adult literature. They recently lost their database and are in the process of reloading content. I plan to visit and contribute there. Wikispaces seems to have more features and a simpler interface than the wiki software I am currently using. I may make a switch. Wikispaces share 42Ways, strategies for using wikis in the classroom. Combine that with Bernie Dodge’s Design Patterns for EduWikis for enough ideas to keep you going all next school year and the year after!

What is the right channel? Marco Torres’ students’ work with videos. Marco noted that teachers have three options: quit, complain or innovate. He chooses to innovate.
Marco’s grandfather recently passed. Before he died, he told Marco that his was the most important job of all his many cousins. “The secret to curing the disease that is killing me may be resting in the head of the shy kid sitting in the back. You have the power to unlock that secret.”

Marco is using media to engage and create with his largely Latino California teens. For many of them, for many of their learning situations, says Marco, “it is the right channel.” The fifteen page term paper is not always the “right channel.” Though I believe students need to learn to create in a variety of channels, the concept will resonate as I consider the right channel at the right moment for the right learner. Marco’s students’ authentic media productions were clearly the right channels for their tasks and learning needs and powerful enough to grab the attention of the folks at CNN and George Lucas, to name a few.
 

Sara Kajder, University of Louisville, also teachers 11^th grade “on-level” English. Visit her website: Bringing the outside in designed to accompany her book Bringing the Outside In: Visual Ways of Engaging Reluctant Readers. I attended two of Sara’s workshops and came away with some very practical ideas for inspiring and improving reading and writing.
About classroom blogs, Sara suggests they should:

• Have strong and clear purpose
• Be reflective, involve metacognitive writing
• Have a recognizable and well-informed point of view
• Offer semi-structured opportunities to experience and emulate expertise
• Incorporate quality of presentation + multimodality

Bottom line—Classroom blogs need to produce the same conditions in which genuine affinity spaces can emerge and be supported. Most classroom blogs are not authentic—the blog is not an artifact born out of genuine interest. You want the blog to be the place they go to everyday because they are so charged by it!

Another issue to warn students about regarding public writing. MySpace profiles and postings are not just an issue for employment, university admissions committees regularly look at applicants’ Facebook and MySpace presence.

I look forward to trying Sara’s “open mind” strategy in which students create a visual representation of text and their own reading of it.  Using tools like Photoshop Elements, students create a visual interpretation of a reading, adding reflection and argument to explicate their images.

Andy Hargreaves does a mean Tony Blair. More importantly he presents a much-needed rallying cry for reexamining the direction of education through sustainable leadership. I plan to share his new book with my very forward-thinking administrators in the fall.
Hargreaves presents a number of ideas designed to get folks on the leadership bus: America is “colonizing the sinking sands” of strategies that other countries have left behind. (The UK experienced a spectacular and calamitous failure in this same arena.)  

Imposed short-term targets (adequate yearly progress) transgress every principle of sustainable leadership and learning. American people are beginning to understand that we need to equip ourselves–to be ready for the moment, when that “nonsense on stilts, adequate yearly poppycock” will be gone.

How can we be part of the high stakes, NCLB effort without losing integrity? We lose integrity compromising with small adjustments to insane systems and suddenly we find ourselves in a place we never meant to be. For instance,we witness “the artifice of improvement”—progress related to making test items easier.
Hargreaves believes we can prepare for life beyond reform. Sustainability is also about social justice and responsibility. Initiatives can be developed without compromising the development of others in the surrounding environment, now and in the future. If you improve by robbing the best capacity of the teachers around you, it is not sustainable.

Reform has changed us into little “Enrons of educational change.”

• If you’ve narrowed the curriculum to focus on just English and math. . .
• If you focus only on the bubble kids and cast the other kids to the wayside . . .
• If you find rates of literacy achievement go up while rates of reading for leisure go down. . .
• If you get better results by searching for better students and keeping others away when testing occurs . . .
• If you are a principal and you see immigrants coming into your school and look for a new job before your numbers go down

. . . you are becoming an Enron of educational change

Hargreaves identifies seven principles of sustainability:

1. Depth—it matters—

Learning to achievement to testing

NOT

Testing to achievement to learning

Data driven to distraction—You should be the driver, not the data

If we work together with clarity we’ll see the results, but those results will not happen the first year. Things get worse before they get better, like getting used to wearing bifocals.

Statewide assessment is reaching a plateau because it is running out of tricks. You have to think of longterm learning. You have to pay attention to the other parts of the lives of poor people, educators are not wholly responsible for the problems.
2. Endurance—it lasts. It doesn’t disappear when the charismatic principal goes away. It lasts beyond the individual leader. It preserves and advances the most valuable aspects of that leadership. Few things succeed less than leadership succession. All leaders, no matter charismatic or visionary, eventually die. People will not face the end of their leadership, it’s like talking about death.

The best legacies are in principles, practices, and people. All school improvement plans should include succession plans. We need to conduct conversations about where the school is now, where it’s going, what it’s leadership needs are, and what they will be. We need to establish leadership development plans. What if principal is knocked over by a bus tomorrow?

3. Breadth—it spreads—shared across community.

There are three cultures of teachers—

• Veteran dominated
• Novice oriented
• Blended

4. Justice—it does not harm the surrounding environment—not without thought for those around us

5. Diversity-in promotes diversity and cohesion—strong ecosystems are diverse

6. Resourcefulness—it conserves expenditure

7. Conservation—it honors the past in creating the future
We should work toward innovating into the future by building selectively on the best of the past. We need to use both mapquest and a map, we can overcome the male chemical imbalance that prevents us from asking for directions.
Rather than data driven practice, we should be guided by evidence informed practice; it’s a right and better term. We should use what we know from practice, put learning first.

Thank you for inviting me, Alan! I loved this event and hope more librarians will attend and share next time around.

On blogging and thick skin

I discovered over the last several months that library students are assigned to read my blog. Occasionally, when I search for what folks are saying about libraries in general, or this blog specifically, I discover these posts on class or individual student blogs. While I often got email responses to the print columns I wrote, I never expected this kind of critique.
Students are disturbed that my blog sometimes waxes personal or is boring, especially if that particular week they are assigned to comment on a pressing professional issue. I could keep to the letter of mission I established (or change my mission) but hard as I try, I cannot keep the most important moments of my life–my son’s college graduation, for instance–outside of this space.

It is my blog. If it bores you, with all due respect, please move on. Find one that is more interesting. I won’t be hurt. I know there are way better blogs out there.

At a recent conference, a session moderator noted that one speaker’s book was negatively reviewed in an Amazon post and hoped that the many others who appreciated the book would post their positive reviews as balance in Amazon or their own blogs.

As you know, a great number of bloggers–myself included–are blogging these conferences. I love that I can read reports of the workshops and speeches I miss or read others’ takes on the workshops I attend. These days I am a little less loose, just a little more self-conscious at these sessions. I’ve heard a number of speakers–myself included–preface their talks with words like, “please don’t bash me in your blog.”
It’s funny, I always (mostly alway) enjoy reading the print evaluations of my conference sessions. I learn much from them and I like to think I grow from reading them. But, there were also a couple of very nasty comments over the years that made me angry or brought me to tears. When my husband caught me reading the pages and crying, he grabbed them and tore them up and I felt much better.

I know I talk too fast. I know I tawk funny. I know I don’t know everything about everything and I admit to my imposter syndrome straight up most every time. I know that my colleagues who also put themselves out there are sometimes less than perfect, but I almost always learn from them.

I am a great respecter of First Amendment freedoms. But bloggers out there, be a little kind and remember that there are real people behind these blogs and real people who read about themselves in your blogs.
Times are indeed shifting. The information consumer is also the information producer. When we blog professionally, I hope we can be kind, as well as sharp and professional.

You cannot tear up a nasty blog post.

Just in case you missed it . . .

Jeff and Dave of EdTechTalk recently posted the transcript of our Sunday chat:
http://edtechtalk.com/EdTechTalk53.

I hope I did my school library colleagues proud. As always, there’s so much I forgot to say and so much I wanted to say so much more clearly!

Thank you Jeff and Dave for your continued support of the library world. You guys rock!

LibraryFest at EdTechTalk

Thanks to Dave and Jeff for focusing ALL of last night on the library world at EdTechTalk. Though I found myself doing nearly all of the talking, I am now hearing that many folks were actually listening in.
I am hoping that the EdTechTalk archive will provide at least one librarian’s view of our evolving role in the school. I am also hoping that dear Dave and Jeff will let us do it again, perhaps during the school year when more of us are sitting around on Sunday and Wednesday nights.

Following the school library chat, the pioneers of Second Life Library gave a tour of Info Island and I was blown away with the possibilities. Here’s the official site: http://secondlife.com/ if you’d like to download the software and explore. Wikipedia offers a basic overview of the Second Life experience.

This was my avatar’s third visit to Second Life and my first time successfully getting around without flying and crashing into walls, thanks to several new friends who guided me. The information professionals of the Second Life Library are creating engaging environments for access to government documents, databases, author visits, literary exhibits, book discussions, and much more.

I can see such possibilities for reinterpreting the school library in Second Life. There learning curve seems a bit steep now, but I believe the folks I met last night will lay the groundwork for the rest of us. I can so imagine meeting learners there. I am looking forward to translating our own virtual library into this 3.0(?) space.

Is there room for a prototype school library on Info Island? Anybody want to join me in creating this new space?

Reflections on ALA and NECC and the upcoming November Learning

I am weary from the craziness of three conferences packed together and the notion of having to slightly reframe my thinking to prepare for the third.

NECC was different this year. This first time not presenting allowed me to embrace the buzz around me and reflect. Without the pressure of a regular newspaper column, I was not forced to search for a year’s worth of stories about new products and did not have to attend vendor sessions. (The couple I did wanted me to believe that storage solutions and assessment software would transform learning. I am not so sure.)

I feel so quilty about my biggest regret. Instead of attending the Thursday night bloggers’ event, I had a truly beautiful dinner with good friends who could not (and should not have to) reschedule their dinner for my new passion. It was the best dinner I have had in a very long time. But I so wish I could have met those folks whose ideas I read so regularly.

I returned from NECC with mixed feelings. I know everything is changing. I truly believe we are at a turning point. I know kids are learning differently. I know–both first and secondhand–the power of social networking and Web 2.0 communication tools.

I also believe that students need to be both paper and Web trained. They need to play. They need to invent with all the tools available to them. They need to learn to critically read and write in a hypertext, networked environment and to pull together a thoughtful, edited argument. They need to tell compelling multimedia, digital stories and they need to submit far less flashy pdf white papers.

Hearing both Alan November and Ian Jukes on the same day made a little of this tension more clear to me. We (I!) get so excited about the new tools, that I often feel guilty about the skills I know I need to teach to ensure that my own learners use those tools ethically and powerfully!

Though I use the tools of the 21st century, many of the lessons I teach around them incorporate my immigrant accent. How do we find and create quality? How we get our voices heard in a world of noise? How do we move learners from being mere consumers of information to effective creators of information? When is it important to find the best information? How do I synthesize from multiple sources a communication product that presents my voice saying something new and powerful? How do I present my own work with integrity in a cut and paste world? Regarding evaluation, I loved Alan’s line: “You’re not literate if you can’t figure out who wrote the site.”

Will Richardson’s sessions pointed to strategies for both worlds–how to use blogs for thoughtful discussions of literature, the importance of audience to student writers, how to use wikis to aggregate class knowledge and to create collaboratively, how learning is changing from just-in-case, to just-in-time. As Will tells us, “It’s not about the technology, it’s about imagination.”

Kathy Schrock shared a wealth of information about finding and using primary sources. Peter Milbury hosted a Birds of a Feather session for LM_NET and allowed many of us to remember how the list enriched–sometimes saved–our professional lives.

My favorite session was Dan McDowell’s (http://ahistoryteacher.com/necc2006). Dan is a history teacher who uses wikis regularly with his classes. He described Bernie Dodge’s Design Patterns for EduWikis, which offers ideas for classroom wiki use–what type of wiki to choose for particular learning goals. Don’t miss Dan’s careful planning and explicit instructions in his  World War I Battles and Holocaust Wikis. I particularly like the student decision-making elements in these activities.

I am flooded with ideas for next school year. Apps are increasingly Web-based! Open source rocks! (Check out Gliffy for concept mapping, Simile for timelining, Writely, a word processor, and Jump Cut for video editing!)

Teachers in 2006 have all the tools they need to create amazing learning experiences. We can connect learners across geography and time. We can teach critical thinking and effective information seeking and communication skills in new landscapes, with newly empowered learners working collaboratively to create and share knowledge. We have new power to engage students in transformative learning experiences, experiences that remember what we already know about the power of inquiry and graceful thinking.