This week I spent two days at Harmony Elementary School with their media specialist, Rachel Peters. What a whirlwind experience! Harmony has about 730 students, but Rachel is the only person in the media center. She has no additional staff--not even a part-time parapro! She relies heavily on parent and community volunteers to help cross items off her to-do list. Not only is she the only person in the media center, but she's also in charge of Harmony's computer labs, iPad carts, Chromebooks, AND the teacher workroom (!!!). She takes photos of school events, runs the morning announcements show, helps teachers out with technology... the list goes on. She maybe sat down for twenty minutes the entire day, and that was during her lunch period. MAD RESPECT.
The Harmony media center operates on a fixed schedule. Every class visits the media center during a set time once per week. Some classes are split to make sure every student gets a chance to check out a book, so sometimes we had a class of 25+ kids in the media center at one time. Rachel occasionally used part of the time to squeeze in some computer-based skills practice, to read a story to the class, or to guide students through an activity that related to what their teachers were covering this week. When students were in the media center, I helped out with simple tasks like checking in/checking out books (though students are pretty self-sufficient at this activity), helping students find books on the shelves, and general crowd control. I also got to lead story time for the kindergartners on both days... such a highlight! I read Drum Dream Girl by Margarita Engle since Harmony is currently celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. We even played bongo drums after the story, and students loved it. While in the computer lab, I helped students get logged in and helped them navigate their programs (like iRead). I also pulled books for teachers based on request lists, delivered books to classrooms, prepared materials (colored strips of paper for rainbows) for upcoming media center lessons, and reshelved like crazy. The hours passed very quickly. We did find a few minutes to chat throughout the day, and I learned quite a bit about Harmony's media program and how Rachel manages to juggle it all. She was incredibly helpful and forthcoming. Obviously, her biggest issue is staffing. There are simply not enough hours in the day to get everything done. She does an amazing job given this very big limitation; she's very efficient in her instruction and never wastes a minute. She has also tried to streamline the check in/check out process so that students can do it themselves, and third graders even help her keep the shelves clean by "adopting" a shelf they tidy up periodically. Very innovative! I might take some of these ideas back to my media center. Another issue is fixed scheduling, which is new for her this year. Students are not allowed to come check out or return books except during their scheduled library time, and sometimes students get pulled from their library slot for special programs like CHAMPS or 4-H. While fixed scheduling does ensure that every class visits the media center, it's not ideal in terms of allowing students unrestricted access to books or for allowing collaboration between teachers and the media specialist. Still, she makes the best of it and has a very good relationship with both students and teachers. I really loved my time at Harmony. Little ones are very different from my older students; I received plenty of sweet hugs and smiles! Rachel graciously offered to serve as a resource if I have questions in the future, and I'm sure I'll be taking her up on that offer. Secondary site visit at Harmony Elementary: 16 hours.
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This past Wednesday, I attended a live webinar on edWeb.net about open educational resources. I truly believe that OER is a big part of the school library's future, along with digital texts and other digital resources. I was excited to see what Andrew Marcinek had to say on this topic and where he saw K12 schools fitting into the OER picture.
First of all, I loved the live features. I've watched plenty of recorded webinars and webcasts, but I don't think I've ever attended one live, as it actually happened. I participated in the chat with the other attendees, I sent the moderators a question (that they actually addressed!), and I was able to take advantage of the resources attendees were sharing. It was awesome, and I'll definitely make more of an effort to attend live webinars in the future. This webinar also gave me a lot to consider. OER is a huge topic with many moving parts, and its implementation within any context will be a time-consuming and arduous process. Right now it seems that school districts who are pursuing OER in favor of traditional text books are asking their teachers to be responsible for curating content and vetting its quality. I think there are big pros and also big cons to that approach. But however districts get started with OER, it's nice to hear that Andrew Marcinek envisions media specialists playing an important role, especially when it comes to finding information, curation, and quality. I agree that the SLMS is definitely prepared to step into that role. We'll see how this topic evolves over the next few years. I'm excited to step up! This week found me working on a few major upcoming initiatives for the media center. It’s hard to believe that we’re finishing up our fifth week of classes! The school year always runs away from me in the fall. Suddenly the first day of school turns into the first day of final exams, and I’m left wondering where the time has gone. I’ve already taught a number of great lessons and collaborated with several teachers for combined units of study. I have a few more classes planned for the weeks ahead—as well as my secondary and tertiary site visits—so I don’t think the days will slow down any time soon.
Digital portfolios are well underway. I spent some time this past Tuesday talking with Ms. Crowell, the advanced composition teacher, and we considered both short-term and long-term approaches. We decided that fully integrating digital portfolios would really mean a reworking of the entire composition curriculum to include not only multimodal assignments but also digital citizenship concepts and information literacy. That’s just not possible at this point in the year, but it’s something we’d like to pursue for next year. However, we do want to go ahead and test Weebly as a possible platform and start the process of incorporating multimodal assignments. So we’re going to use what Ms. Crowell calls a “remix” approach to pilot digital portfolios this semester: Students will take several essays they’ve written and transform them into different forms of content using a Web 2.0 creation tool, then embed those elements in a Weebly-based digital portfolio. To get the comp teachers started with Weebly, I taught them an introductory session on Thursday after school. I’m actually going to use this training session for tasks 6, 7, and 8—so stay tuned for more details. I also started working on my plan for Banned Books Week. I want to make BBW fun and give teachers and students several opportunities to participate, but I also don’t want to disrupt students’ class schedule. I also like to design my own promotional graphics, although I know the American Library Association always provides great options for Banned Books Week through their graphics shop. I’m going to ask my library department personnel to decide on a final design from the choices above, or to make suggestions for revision. I used Lucidpress to create these fliers, a tool that’s new for me. I have pretty good ideas for displays, in-house activities, and a few suggestions for teachers, so I’ll spend much of next week getting feedback and finalizing plans. I chose the following objective for this practice:
Students will be able to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
Weebly it is!
After consultations with our director of technology and several English teachers over the last few weeks, we have decided to go with Weebly for our digital portfolio pilot program. I'm teaming up with our advanced composition teacher to standardize the adoption of digital portfolios across five English classes during this fall semester. She and I are planning to meet next Tuesday to design a template, collaborate on multimodal projects to include in the portfolio, and sequence instruction for pilot teachers and students. I hope to deliver my first training session on Weebly and how to integrate this platform into the composition curriculum sometime late next week, and I might use this session for Task 6. We're all very excited to see where this pilot goes, and if it's successful, we might even propose the inclusion of digital portfolios in additional classes outside the English department next year. We chose Weebly for a number of reasons, including ease of management and portability (students can take accounts and portfolios with them after graduation), transferability of skills, and platform versatility. We plan to evaluate the pilot at the end of the semester (since our composition classes are only a semester long) and then again at the end of the school year. At that point we'll decide whether to stick with Weebly long term or to try another platform. Stay tuned for updates! In other news, the media center has had a busy week. I taught research orientation to three 10th grade classes for their upcoming research paper projects. Our 10th graders write lengthy argumentative essays on hot button social issues topics, so I try to get them comfortable with a variety of databases we purchase specifically for such topics (Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context and Facts on File Issues & Controversies) as well as our general research databases (EBSCOhost Explora, Questia School, and Gale Research in Context). We also got word that we might be making a few improvements to the media center over the Christmas break, so we're taking a hard look at our collection and finalizing an intensive weeding plan--we need to streamline our shelving to make room for more furniture. Nothing is certain quite yet, but we're hopeful and want to be prepared. |
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