Blogging For Surprising Results! A School Year In Review - Part One

As we approach the ending of the 2013-14 school year, I can't help but reflect on a year that has brought the greatest professional growth of my teaching career.

It certainly didn't begin that way. In the summer before this school year began, I was dreading what the new year would bring. To be clear, I wasn't dreading coming back to our lovely school community, our beautiful library or our fantastic students and parents. Our district had made the decision to eliminate media clerks in elementary libraries, the seventh year in a row of changes to media programs that most would consider negative. As I prepared for a new year, the only word I could use to describe my outlook: discouraged. No one was advocating for our libraries and it didn't appear that anyone really valued them.

It was then that I began to search for answers. I searched the websites and blogs of librarians around the nation. What I found was not what I expected. What I found was a serious dose of tough love, and a good swift kick in the pants!  I began by reading a blog by Jennifer LaGarde and her series How to Survive the Zombie Librarian Apocalypse. I became more motivated with each blog post. 

Just a few of my favorite quotes in subsequent blog post by Jennifer LaGarde...

- It's time for all of us (librarians) to ask ourselves some tough questions relating to the focus of our work and the impact it has on kids.  It's not enough to just work hard. It's not enough to be exhausted at the end of the day.  The hours we spend with children must matter.  The work we do on behalf of students must result in measurable outcomes. 

- We can't just be busy, we have to be significant.  

- To me, it's simple.  The perception that library programs are unnecessary exists for one of two reasons:  Door #1: the work being done really IS unnecessary or Door #2: the work being done is not being shared effectively. 

- The more school librarians who establish themselves as indispensable members of the learning community, the greater the chance that the perception (and in some cases, the reality) of school libraries as being nice, but not necessary, will change. 

After I cried for a bit, which is what I do when I hear truth, I dried my tears and continued searching. What I found were teacher-librarians and media specialists (really the same thing) who were in fact contributing to their school communities and beyond by sharing! They had heard Jennifer LaGarde's call to arms, or maybe they wisely figured it out themselves. Whatever their motivation, I am supremely grateful for their willingness to share and help me find my way out of the Zombie Librarian Apocalypse.

A few of my early mentors (though they have no idea who I am!):
John Schu - Watch.Connect.Read, Tiffany Whitehead - Mighty Little Librarian, Jennifer Reed - Reederama, Gwyneth Jones - The Daring Librarian, Shannon Miller - Van Meter Library Voice, Matthew Winner - The Busy Librarian, April Requard - AppsolutelyApril, and Andy Plemmons - Barrow Media Center (from my home town in Athens, Georgia!!) These were just the few I found at the beginning of my journey, and I have since found many more fantastic librarians and teachers willing to share!

From these wonderful library and teacher practitioners, I was inspired to begin blogging myself. I began blogging because I knew that although what I was teaching students was significantly impacting their learning, no one knew about it! Why would they? I had never really shared what my students and I were doing!

So I began blogging.  I threw myself into sharing what my students and I were doing in our library, and along the way, I did considerably more than advertise our school's media program. Blogging and sharing our learning fundamentally changed my perspective as well. I would recommend it for anyone with a passion. When you begin to share your passion for a topic, it is extremely motivating!  While you are trying to build other people's enthusiasm for the thing you value, it builds your own enthusiasm! It throws fuel on your proverbial fire! It helps connect you to others who share your passion! And for me, it also motivated me to step up my game! Not that I wasn't always focused on creative lessons that would motivate my students to learn, but now I wouldn't accept anything less than the best! Best books, greatest web tool/app, most engaging challenging lessons, and most of all, the best outcomes for my students possible! The ultimate beneficiaries of my blogging epiphany were my lovely students!

Occasionally my discouragement does still rear it's ugly head. I am by no means willing to give up the fight to advocate for my school library program! I believe a strong school library program is good for my students! I am certainly willing to pout, whine, and even kick and scream if I believe that it will counter the belief that libraries are old and no longer relevant. But I now believe there is a better approach to convince everyone that our school library program is vital for student learning!

Step 1 - Have a vibrant, innovative library program that impacts student learning, and Step 2 - write about it!

...and only whine occasionally! 

Final Note - Part Two of "A School Year In Review" will be the surprising impact of blogging in spurts of 140 characters (Twitter) has had on my professional learning and subsequently my students!

Rethinking, Revamping and Revisitng Research! - Biography.com & InstaGrok!

Every so often, every teacher has a lesson that needs a little adjustment. It is just part of the job. Throughout each lesson, each activity, each practice, each discussion, we analyze how well our students are demonstrating understanding and adjust to improve outcomes. This week I found I needed to make some adjustments to help my student researchers in 2nd and 4th grade.  (To read earlier blog posts on the beginning of our research, check out 2nd Graders Find Inspirations for Research From Isabella and Alexander & Information from Kids Infobits!  and  Students Research Using The Notability App & The "You Wouldn't Want To Be..."Series As Inspiration)

Biography.com

For my 2nd grade researchers, I found that I needed an additional resource because Kids Infobits, a wonderful resource for research, was slightly too advanced for my 2nd graders. Kids Infobits gave students a little too much information for them to manage. Once I realized that I needed an additional resource, I decided to have students use www.biography.com. This website gave just the right amount of biographical information and in small bite size pieces for my young researchers. Each biography included a summary of the great leader's accomplishments, a short video documentary, a list of quick facts, together with a short synopsis. I was able to help students avoid biographies that might cover mature topics by linking students directly to the "search" page of the site.  There were advertisements on each bio. I typically prefer to avoid ads when I select a tool for my students, but this site was too perfect in every other way, so we endured the Home Depot & Crest Whitening Strips ads. Finally, because all the students were using the same website, teaching them to cite their source was streamlined because much of the citation information would be the same for each student. 

InstaGrok

My 4th grade students were just beginning their research projects when I discovered a new educational research tool called InstaGrok, a web and app based search tool that presents the search findings in an interactive concept map. Thanks to Bobbi Capwell, educator from Texas and part of my Twitter PLN for the tip about InstaGrok! After checking out the tool, I knew it would help my students gather facts while also organizing their newly found information. We tried it this week with fantastic results! Students could control the difficulty level of the web sources, it helped students keep track of their sources for citations, and it gave them a journal page to begin writing!

For a quick infomercial on InstaGrok...

This week was a great learning week for Oak Hills students and their library teacher! We all learned about new tools that would help us become better researchers!

1st Graders Love Mercer Mayer's Just Me And My Mom eBook App!!

First graders LOVE Mercer Mayer's Little Critter books. I hadn't even begun to speak, and as I prepared to introduce them by picking up a stack of Little Critter books, I could hear my 1st graders enthusiastically announcing to the class..."I love those books!", "I have that books", "That is my favorite book!" Clearly Mercer Mayer and his Little Critter series needed no introduction!

I was especially excited about today's Mercer Mayer lesson because I had been waiting for some months to introduce 1st graders to an eBook app that I thought would be great for this week, the week leading up to Mother's Day.  The ebook entitled Just Me and My Mom, like all of Mr. Mayer's books, was totally delightful! In ebook form, it had quite a few enhanced functions. Students could choose to read the story independently or have it read to them, complete with sweet little background music. Students could tap anywhere in the story to receive identifying popup vocabulary words. For extra added fun, there was a tiny frog on each page. Students could locate each frog and tap on them to add to their total frog count of 19.

After we read Just Me and My Mom, students used our "go to" app, PicCollage, to create a Little Critter Mother's Day Card. Students used an image of Little Critter and Mom from Mercer Mayer's website art gallery with permission for printing, http://www.littlecritter.com/gallery_mom_main.html 

Here are just a few examples!!!

Students #ThankATeacher In Writing & Using FlipGrid!!

Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day and the U.S. Department of Education began a new social media hashtag to share teacher appreciation! Oak Hills students had some great things to say about teachers!

In addition, I thought it would be fun to have the students I saw today (3rd & 5th graders) share their video appreciation using FlipGrid! Such a fun tool for such a fun day! 

Students spread out over the media center to record their appreciation!

In This Age Of Digital Cut and Paste, Why Teach Students Research Skills??

I am currently working with 2nd and 4th graders doing research.  To read about these projects checkout several of my recent posts 

Students Research Using The Notability App & The "You Wouldn't Want To Be... Series 

2nd Graders Find Inspiration From Alexander and Isabella & Find Information From Kids Infobits!  

These projects prompted me to ponder a question that parents may wonder about but are not willing to ask...

Why Research??  In this digital age of easy internet answers, some may wonder why we teach students research skills? Isn't this an antiquated skill?  You may remember your own tortured experiences with research papers that you wrote when you were in school. So why are we still teaching these skills? 

To begin with, the internet has turned us all into researchers. Not a day goes by that I am not using the internet to answer my questions, and I believe this is true for a majority of Americans.  

From fairly simple questions - What was the score of the game I missed? What is the phone number for ordering from Chipotle? What is the strange pain in my elbow? What is the weather forecast? Who is the best plumber in my area? 

To more complex questions - Why is Russia invading Ukraine, what is their history and why is this happening now? What is a drone? What are experts saying about raising resilient children? What new design ideas can I gather before I decorate my living room or landscape my yard? What is the prognosis for a loved one who was diagnosed with a stage 1,2,3 or 4 cancer? 

As we answer our questions, we are also learning how to research. Does this website answer the specific question I have?  Is it relevant to my question? How do a variety of websites answer the same question? (We are comparing and contrasting without the venn diagram!) Are all web resources equal and accurate, and if not, how can I tell?  This analysis, which we hope most adults do without realizing it, is why student research is still, even more now with easy web answers, a rich source for student learning. 

In addition to learning to analyze, students also learn the research conventions that will be required of them throughout their educational years. They learn to synthesize information from a variety of sources - books, ebooks, websites, databases and eReference sources! (Try to have a healthy respect for this part as it can be really hard at all ages!) They gather information from these sources to answer a question, use the information to create a written work or even better, a digital product that will answer the original question, and cite the sources of the information. Ideally students learn to share their learning with others, making their efforts more meaningful as they contribute to shared understanding! They also learn about copyright, plagiarism and giving credit to others for their ideas.  This last bit is even more important in this easy age of information cut and paste! 

Student research is more critical now than ever as we want students to acquire the life long skill of being curious!  We want them to wonder and ask themselves questions, not just for a school paper but for their life! Being curious, and the subsequent desire to solve a problem and answer a question is what leads to innovation! Unfortunately schools aren't often credited with promoting curiosity, which is why helping students research the topics that really interest them is so important! What are they curious about? What answers do they seek? Every student research opportunity doesn't have to result in a 15 page paper. We want students to be natural researchers, asking themselves questions and answering them in a variety of learning situations - from impromptu research during a math lesson that lasts only long enough to "google" it, to deeper questions that require multiple sources and leads to more followup questions! And finally, we want students to be able to articulate their learning to an audience in a myriad of ways! 

After reading this, it may become even more clear why all schools are trying to increase the number of digital devices that they can offer to students. Even though teaching students to be curious researchers can be done the old fashioned way, it is far more efficient, fun and intrinsically motivating for students to use the latest digital tools.

And just a final comment on teaching research.  Librarians and teachers who really tackle the art of developing student researchers do it throughout their day, in a variety of ways, and I take my hat off to them. It isn't easy to foster curiosity among students with such a range of interests, motivations and abilities!  It can be a bit of a three ring circus at times, not to mention the long hours of reading through student projects.  Even so, it is getting to see genuine student curiosity and watching them find their own answers that is the real teaching rush! 

Students Research Using The Notability App & The "You Wouldn't Want To Be..." Series As Inspiration!

I am always searching for creative research topics that will motivate my students. It isn't as easy as it looks! Finding topics that students are genuinely curious about, that also have sources they can access at their reading and maturity level can be quite difficult. This is what makes the You Wouldn't Want To Be... series great inspiration for student research! Titles include You Wouldn't Want To Be...

      a Pirate Prisoner!

      an American Pioneer!

      a Greek Athlete!

      an Egyptian Mummy!

      on Apollo 13!

      a Civil War Soldier!

      an Aztec Sacrifice!

      a Polar Explorer!

      sick in the 1600th century!

Many elementary students love books about disasters, shark attacks and mummies. The scarier or creepier the better! The fact that these events are true makes them even more irresistible. New Titanic books always fly off the shelf!  The You Wouldn't Want To Be... series appeals to their curiosity about very real scary events of the past! This series is great inspiration for student research. 

I began the lesson by sharing the books from the series and a few excerpts from several of the books. Then I asked my students a question.  Which historical event or period of time would you not want to live through and why?  

To help with our research, I introduced a great digital tool - Notability! This app gives students an easy way to take notes, cut and paste quotes that they want to remember, cut and paste source information for later citations (EasyBib), gather images, and record their thoughts throughout the research process.  It was my first time teaching with this app, so my students and I learned how to use it together. It turned out that there really wasn't much instruction needed because it was so intuitive for my wonderful young digital natives! (PS. Thanks for Chris Myers, digital learning coach, for alerting me that the price of this great tool had been reduced and was currently free!!)

Following a healthy reminder about the pit falls of occasional unwanted information and images during internet searches, a well traveled topic for my young researchers, I let them go. I wanted them to have the freedom to let their curiosity take them to a question that would really interest them. I was amazed at what they chose. They really embraced the topic! Students only had enough time to begin asking their questions and researching their answers. Stay tuned for our final research findings!

 You wouldn't want to be at the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius!

You wouldn't want to be in the bombing of Pearl Harbor!!

You wouldn't want to live through the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic!

You wouldn't want to be imprisoned at Alcatraz!

You wouldn't want to be a World War II Pilot!

You wouldn't want to be a Japanese Kamikaze!

2nd Graders Find Inspiration For Research From Isabella and Alexander & Information From Kids Infobits!

This week 2nd graders became researchers! They began their journey by reading two beautiful books by Jennifer Fosberry, My Name Is Not Alexander - Just How Big Can A Little Boy Dream? and My Name Is Not Isabella - Just How Big Can A Little Girl Dream?

Both stories center around the main character imagining themselves to be a variety of great leaders! Those leaders are featured with brief biographies in the back of both books. The books has a great final message that each character, Alexander and Isabella, should find the hero within. Perfect for my second graders!

A few examples of the great leaders imagined by Isabella -

Sally Ride

Rosa Parks

Marie Curie

After reading the books, I posed a question for my students. What great leader would you like to imagine yourself to be?  We brainstormed a variety of answers and then I sent them to continue looking for the answer using the newly redesigned Kids Infobits website!  

The Kids InfoBits site was perfect for my 2nd graders!  Their "People" section focused on a variety of categories of great leaders.

Students were able to browse through leaders in a variety of arenas.  Most of the great leaders on InfoBits website had a choice of multiple articles, each written at a variety of reading levels so students could find an article that was easier for them to read.  If the article was still a reach, there was a button for students to listen to the article being read. My only disappointment was that the voice of the reader was a bit automated, but it still helped students who needed help, so I was grateful for the assistance. 

Students browsed through the available great leaders, selected one that they admired and began to jot down a few notes on their accomplishments. A few students really struggled with their choice, so I pitched in and helped make suggestions. Together we were able to find someone they admired! 

Once our research is complete, I plan to ask students to respond to the question using Flipgrid!  I look forward to sharing their responses in a future blog post!