Banned Book Display

 Banned Book Week is sneaking up on me (Sept 25-Oct 1 this year) so I got my display for this month ready!  I basically cleared off my display case in the front of the library, covered it in a ton of caution tape ($6 on Amazon for a HUGE roll) and made the flames out of construction paper.  Then I made the display posters out of colored copy paper and glued black construction paper to the back.  I added 10 challenged/banned books, which I wrapped in caution tape, along with a display card of why the book was challenged/banned.  The bright colors have definitely caught the students' attention and some actually read the cards to see why the books were banned.  Many of the kids, along with several of the staff, didn't know that books are still banned in the US and that new books are challenged every year!  Knowledge is power, people :)

Biography Reorganization

 When I saw the biography section upon my arrival to my school's library (first year as librarian), I wasn't too impressed.  Most of the books were old, not in the best condition, didn't include color photos, or included people that the kids didn't know.  I used about $500 of my budget to buy some biographies on recent people of interest (Drake, anyone?) and decided to divide and conquer the whole section.  I decided on 9 different groups:  authors, leaders, athletes, explorers, notable people, entertainers, scientists & inventors, musicians, and artists.  Each group was assigned a color and I ordered color-tinted label protectors to place over the already-existing spine labels.  Then the heavy lifting began.  I moved the books to their new locations and started stickering.  Then I made signs for each group and voila!  The section is so much easier to use!

I don't have an amazing budget but I do have colored paper and a laminator machine.  So here's my eye-catching sign for the section.  

The shorter bookcases housed the smaller collections.

Sorry for the glare on the sign!  This section is entertainers, including actors, comedians, and the odd ones the kids love like Houdini.

I started with all these books in the "Leaders" section but I didn't like it.  There were so many that didn't really fit into that category like Anne Frank, Helen Keller, Mark Zuckerburg, etc.  So I created another section--Notable People--and they went there, along with Presidents' wives, company creators, etc.

Self explanatory and easily the most used section.  I just updated it with some newer biographies of the kids' favorites.

My tiniest collection!  We'll see how much use it gets and maybe I can expand it next year.

Who knew we had so many books on authors??  I weeded out some of the duplicates (not sure we needed 7 biographies on JK Rowling) and added some newbies.

My biography display gets hit by kids who are too lazy to search the biography section.  I try to put eye catching books on this display.

TRAILS: My Assessment of their Assessment!

I visited the following website for my LIBS 676 class:  http://trails-9.org/index.php?page=home

I started my exploration of TRAILS by clicking on a student view of an assessment (6^th grade), and quickly realized my error.  I had no idea what TRAILS was all about or what is was used to assess.  So I started clicking on the links to the left of the website and discovered that the program was created by the Kent State University Libraries to assess students’ informational literacy skills.  I think that this is an often-neglected area of instruction and assessment and is very important for students’ success in all of their content area classes.  If students don’t know how to find accurate and relevant information, how can they write research papers or learn more about topics from class? 

I explored the assessments for the sixth grade and I found them to be very thorough.  The students are assessed on their abilities to develop topics, identify resources, etc.  I don’t think that using TRAILS would be too much testing because the students are completing assessments that are only ten questions long.  The website also gives suggestions on how to “mix it up” by letting the students work in small collaborative groups to complete the assessments or creating a game show setting with a master of ceremonies to go through each question. 

At the time, our current librarian does not use any assessments for documenting students’ knowledge of informational literacy skills.  The language arts department uses their assessment times for documenting student reading levels, so they would probably not want to give additional assessments like the TRAILS.  For that reason, the library would be the perfect place to complete these short assessments.  They could be used to start discussions with the group based on the topic of each assessment.  I would use the TRAILS tests as a diagnostic assessment tool to get a snapshot of students’ levels before beginning a unit or discussion.  A weakness of the assessment could be its length in that it’s difficult to access students’ prior knowledge on only 10 questions.  Personally, I like the short assessment length, but it may be too short to show actual student knowledge. 

I found most of the questions to be written with vocabulary that was on or above grade level.  This might be a problem when using the assessment with my special education students, because they may miss questions because they don’t understand what is actually being asked.  TRAILS could probably be improved by creating differentiated assessments that accurately assess students at different learning levels.  The setup of questions might also be a problem.  Students at my school take online benchmark exams that only show one question on the screen at a time.  The assessments might allow better student focus by creating assessments that go through 10 slides of questions, allowing only one question on the screen at a time.

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi

Hardcover, 338 pages

Published November 15th 2011 by Harper

Number is series:  #1

ISBN:  0062085484

Characters:  Adam Kent, Juliette Ferrars

I have a curse
I have a gift

I am a monster
I'm more than human

My touch is lethal
My touch is power

I am their weapon
I will fight back

Juliette hasn’t touched anyone in exactly 264 days.

The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette’s touch is fatal. As long as she doesn’t hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don’t fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color.

The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war – and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she’s exactly what they need right now.

Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior.

My recommendation:  Lots of action for the boys and a little romance for the girls.  I liked the quick pace and consistent plot--unlike other books that try to explore a post-apocalyptic world, I found that this book was easy to follow and didn't try to overload me on details of a war-torn society.  The details were slowly piled onto the poetic, almost lyrical text and I found myself sucked into this world where Juliette has to decide if it's worth living in a world where she can't touch a soul without destroying them.  Enter Adam, the handsome soldier that she knew during her childhood and one instantly understands why Juliette can't decide to trust him with her life or run screaming in the other direction.  While I did find Juliette to be a little weak willed and whiny (lots of gasping, crying, trembling, etc.) her few moments of bravery almost made up for the stereotypical "damsel in distress" behavior.

Read Alikes:  I am Number Four, Divergent, The Maze Runner

Module 1: Dewey's Pedagogic Creed

As I read through this article, the first thought that popped in my head was “Wow, this guy was so far ahead of his time, it’s not even funny.”  John Dewey has hit the nail on its head with his points about education, school, subject matters, and the nature of method.  Dewey was a pioneer for early childhood education by realizing that children’s education doesn’t start in kindergarten but rather is an ongoing process that starts immediately after birth.   

In Dewey’s first article on education, he gives the example of a child naturally babbling, through which “the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language” (p. 77).  While reading this example, I immediately reflected on a particularly meaningful lecture I attended in my child psychology class as an undergraduate student.  I was very fortunate to have a leading child psychologist and researcher, Dr. Martha Ann Bell, as my professor that semester.  As an 18 year old, I didn’t understand that she was the “top dog” in her field; I just thought she told the more engrossing stories from her many studies in child psychology.  Even now, almost twenty years later, I can picture that day in class as clearly as I was sitting there now; that class period had a huge impact on me.   Dr. Bell was lecturing on the influence of parents on their children developing language, behaviors, etc.  She started to tell us a tale of how one of her studies involved having volunteer mothers be observed behind two-way glass as they entertained their baby in a high chair while preparing a meal.  As expected, most of the mothers tossed some Cheerios on the high chair tray and babbled to their babies while making some food.  The mothers make comments like “Those Cheerios are good, aren’t they?  Would you like some more?  Look at how you pick them up on your finger so well!”  The babies cooed and babbled back in response.  Dr. Bell described how one mother was observed putting her baby into the high chair and spreading the Cheerios onto the tray and then doing something Dr. Bell had never seen before—turning the high chair around into the corner while the mother prepared the meal.  The mother worked at the stove top silently for over twenty minutes while her baby sat in the high chair facing the wall, quietly eating Cheerios.  At that point in the lecture, Dr. Bell teared up and told us that she had never seen anything like this mother and she hoped she never would again in her career.  The mother was failing miserably at the process described by Dewey of introducing her child to appropriate emotion and language by responding to her attempts at communication.  Not only was I watching Dewey’s lesson in action while listening to this lesson, Dr. Bell was giving her students a personal inflection that transformed that lesson from a basic lecture to an endearing example that has stuck with me for almost two decades.  I learned more about child psychology that day than on any other day from that semester.  Not surprisingly, it was one of the only classes I remember from college.

Having an educational reformer like Dewey describe school as a “social institution” is probably a dream come true for most middle and high school students!  Dewey states that “it is the business of the school to deepen and extend his sense of values bound up in his home life” (p. 80) in relation to a child’s moral training.  As a middle school teacher, I couldn’t agree more.  A child’s moral training cannot begin with the introduction of “character words” in elementary school.  Morals must be an integral part of the child’s home life from birth so that the child has morals engrained in their upbringing from the beginning in order to embrace those morals in his or her lifestyles and choices throughout his or her life.  School fails to complete its purpose of educating students when it only prepares students for a theoretical future instead of providing “a model of social life, that the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought” (p. 80).   

As I reflect on my own middle school education, I can clearly agree with Dewey’s point that “far too much of the stimulus and control proceeds from the teacher” (p. 80).  The teachers that insisted on direct instruction through lecture provided the least-memorable lessons for me.  In fact, as a lifelong honor roll student, I was mortified to earn my first “D” in seventh grade social studies.  I cried for days!  Looking back on that experience now, I’m not surprised at all that I failed to excel in that class.  The teacher was one year away from retirement (and made sure we knew it every day) and basically read the textbook to us while handing out huge packets of worksheets.  To this day, I have a dislike of social studies classes.  No wonder!  The classes I performed best in were the ones where I got to move around while learning, such as science, where my teacher had us do the “mitosis square dance” and act as elements in the process of chemical bonding.  “You’re a sodium, go find a chlorine!  Go bond!” she yelled as we ran around the room, matching up according to our valence electrons.  Since I just used the term “valence electron” accurately, you can bet that particular lesson and that particular teacher stuck with me, creating a true educational experience. 

Promoting Digital Literacies: The Barbara Stripling Model

Barbara Stripling begins her article with a definition of “digital literacy” by discussing that there are many different definitions for it, but no matter which definition you use, it involves a student being able to gather digital information and make sense of that information (Stripling, 2010, p. 16).  For students today, there is such an inundation of information that bombards them from the minute they log onto a computer.  Students need to be able to decipher the “junk” from the relevant information, factual investigations, and legitimate sources.  And while Stripling’s article describes six distinct phases of inquiry, she describes the inquiry process as being “recursive and cyclical, with learners going back and forth between the phases of inquiry to resolve new questions and complexities as they arise” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 16). 

As a science teacher, I was naturally drawn to the “investigate” phase.  My collaborative group has chosen a life science SOL for our project, and its main focuses (food webs, food chains, interactions between species) cover many different areas of life science.  Sourcing, one of the areas of investigation, is an important topic that my students don’t typically consider when using the internet for research.  They see a slick website with “science” words and catchy graphics and assume that it is a legitimate source.  Stripling points out that “the criteria for evaluating digital sources include authority, purpose, currency, credibility, and perspective” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 18).  My group will be working to create a list of resources that give students access to credible sources all located in one place. 

Another part of the investigative phase is connected meaning.  It’s difficult for students to find the connections between all of the information they are digesting from the internet.  I hope to create different groups of resources that will help my students make those connections between the material, such as cultivating resources that show interactive simulations of food webs in action along with websites that have quiz games on key vocabulary terms, such as producer, consumer, and decomposer.  Until students are old enough to make those connections between the meanings of information, it is our job to help bridge that gap.

Media literacy is another crucial part of the investigative phase.  “Media literacy, the ability to ‘read” and interpret information presented in visual and oral formats, must be nurtured and taught explicitly” (Stripling, 2010, pg. 19).  As a middle school teacher, I often see that my students haven’t developed the ability to scrutinize websites for superficial information.  I use a fun assignment for my students where I have them look up an online article about Velcro crops and how they are dying out.  The website has lots of slick data tables and graphs and explains that the “loop” crops aren’t keeping up with production like the “hook” crops and soon, the world will face a Velcro shortage.  The students have a worksheet and have to answer all sorts of questions from the information on the website.  It usually takes a while, but eventually a student will look up from the laptop and ask if the article is real.  They will make comments like “I didn’t know we grow Velcro!” and a savvy student who has caught on early will respond with “We don’t!  She’s tricking us with this article!”  And then we have a great discussion on how websites can look legitimate and students will have to dig deeper to find reputable resources.

I plan on incorporating this part of the phase into our curation project by finding the legitimate sites for my students and collecting them in one place.  I want my students to be able to use the curation project to find a plentiful list of resources that have already been scrutinized by professionals (the members of my group). 

Stripling, B. (2010).  Teaching students to think in the digital environment:  Digital literacy and digital inquiry, School Library Monthly 26 (8), 16-19.

Where's the Librarian? Discussion Post

Richard Baraniuk’s TED Talk was very revolutionary for a speech given in 2006.  The idea of open-source is not new, but has not seemed to apply to K-12 school levels until very recently.  Because of the graduate classes I have taken in library science, I now see the librarian as the center of the informational storm swirling around a school.  The librarian has the education and knowledge to decipher accurate information from the millions and millions of webpages on every topic known to man—they truly are the “quality control” for the school.  With open source education comes the fact that anyone—and they mean anyone—can contribute information to the masses, and some of this information can be hurtful, incorrect, or damaging.  Teachers have long trusted their printed textbooks to relay information to their students, and the idea of creating textbooks that are tailored to specific students in terms of language and educational level can be a daunting proposition.  This is a perfect example of where a librarian can be the “person of reason”.  The librarian probably has the most knowledge of open source in the first place, and he or she can provide accurate information to the teachers so that teachers know how to use the sources productively.  It doesn’t matter how amazing a source is for students if the teachers don’t know how to use it or refuse to use it.

As a science teacher who is using ten year old textbooks, I can tell you that my books are out of date the minute they are published.  So many new scientific discoveries are made every year that the textbook cannot keep up with the information and no school district can afford to replace their textbooks yearly.  Open-source textbooks would help eliminate that lag time in scientific information.  A science teacher could choose to use a new textbook every year, provide several different sources to her students, or choose to not use a textbook at all.  My colleagues and I rely more on current scientific articles and websites to find current information for our students than the textbook.  In fact, I rarely use the textbook other than as a resource for basic background information.