Michael Stephens sums up the switch to digital resources beautifully. "I may have a bit of a bias, but I would much rather my students make the short trip to their desks and computers instead of commuting across town or farther. Time saved on travel could roll over into time spent on coursework or finding balance among school, work, and life. " Check out his post for the full article.
Librarians feel compelled to acquire eContent from only one distributor because it is too confusing – for them, for students, for teachers, for business managers - to purchase eContent from a variety of distributors, thus materials selection is driven by who they buy from, not what a
igns with the curriculum. This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.
It is our job to develop our collections, aligning them with our school/district’s curriculum – not to buy ready-made packages from vendors. It is our job to create, instructional materials, and to determine how to best assess our students’ learning. This requires granular knowledge of our patron base, our curricula, and our collections. You can't fake this. It takes a long time to build that knowledge base. If we relinquish these responsibilities to commercial interests, we literally sell out our own profession.
eContent requires meticulous, patron-aware (rather than traditional) cataloging. It is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to “display” eContent. There is no way to physically put it in the hands of students, if students are using their own technology. This is not happening for a few reasons:
Since vendors and library management systems have made it possible to import MARC records, librarians, as a whole, have been falling out of the cataloging practice.
Cataloging is time consuming, and tedious work.
Cataloging, as we learned it, doesn’t work for our students. We have to reinvent it. For example, at New Canaan High School, we add the project name as a subject heading to each title in the eCollection that supports it.
In BYOD programs, library programs should be undergoing significant instructional transformations that evolve as students’ facility with mobile technology increases. The ratio of print to digital content should be contingent upon students’ ability to access eContent. Developing a system to calculate this would help school librarians make sound decisions about format choices."
"The age of austerity has not been kind to libraries, and in many places they are the last ''storefront'' that still tries to put books into the hands of readers. Treating them like a captive market to be exploited is a huge - and potentially fatal - mistake on the part of publishers. If publishers wanted to get something truly valuable out of libraries, they could do no better than to help create a free, open alternative to Overdrive that gives them the data they need to compete with the e-book retailers and frees the libraries from their expensive circulation-management burdens."
Libraries are increasingly getting hip to using Twitter as a tool, with many offering the service as a point of contact with librarians. But Twitter is an excellent tool for librarian learning as well, offering lots of great opportunities for discussion. Many Twitter chats exist for the literary and library world, and we've discovered 20 of the absolute best for librarians to check out.
Kids in public schools face many hurdles today, the bulk of which we never had to deal with when we were young. The best way to help your kids avoid these pitfalls is to homeschool them, and the he...
started by milesmorales on 19 Aug 14
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Taking control of your health and well-being is a necessary and personal journey. "Complete Health and Fitness Guide" book lays out a sensible road map that makes health and fitness an ingrained part of your lifestyle, and an easy-to-achieve goal for everyone.
Less than twenty years after the Karmel reforms one of their architects looked back in dismay at what had been wrought. "We created a situation unique in the democratic world," Jean Blackburn pointed out in 1991. "It is very important to realise this. There were no rules about student selection and exclusion, no fee limitations, no shared governance, no public education accountability, no common curriculum requirements below the upper secondary level... We have now become a kind of wonder at which people [in other countries] gape. The reaction is always, 'What an extraordinary situation.'"
Abstract of video: Based on original data, the talk considers disparities in people's Web use skills and how skills relate to what people do online. Those who know how to navigate the Web's vast landscape can reap significant benefits from it. In contrast, those who lack online abilities may have a harder time dealing with certain logistics of everyday life, may miss out on opportunities and may also obtain incorrect information from unreliable sources or come to rely on unsubstantiated rumors.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
Creative Confidence: Learn It, Develop It & Change Your Life [Megan Coulter] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The book “Creative Confidence – Discover Your Unawake Potential & Self-Confidence” explains the most effective and powerful ways to build a spontaneous self-confidence that naturally lives within us. You will find the ways to bring out your unawake creative confidence that is lying deep inside you
without a strategic plan for a department, you cannot implement new initiatives successfully, nor can you plan changes or institute changes in thinking. Without a strategic plan, movement forward will always feel forced, slow and lacks critical conversations that must take place with all members of staff in order to have team “buy in”. In the formation of the strategic plan, it is the one time that all staff have input and can “own” the direction of the department as a whole.
As a library we are a strategic arm of the school, even if we are not mentioned directly, and if we are not mentioned directly, then that’s our fault for not doing enough to be important to the school plan.
Library strategic plan based on the goals of the school strategic plan
If you have a Library strategic plan that you wrote with your staff, but never talk to other departments about then how do you expect them to have “buy in”?
sent it to other Libraries or your personal learning network (PLN), then how do you know what you are missing that is critical Library functions?
no corresponding operational plan then you have not thought about how you are going to archive your goals in the strategic plan
if you do not review the plan with all your staff and see how far you have moved, then its just a bit of paper that makes you feel better and is not an item that you have action as a team.
ask everyone to write one goal based on the overarching goals setout in the School Strategic Plan. These are big picture statements.
highlight the main goals of the school strategic plan
1. Tell your team that you are going to need them to review and read the school strategic plan.
Each individual sent these through to the Head of Library who combined and sent these to everyone removing who wrote what.
this was the main opportunity for all staff to have a chance to contribute to the strategic plan and the direction of the library for the next three years.
As the Head of Library I undertook the role of reading each goal and combining some goals together to ensure they incorporated the essence of each team members thinking.
From these I started to break out these goals into articulated statements that specifically looked at the library and what this meant day-to-day.
the strategic mission statement needs to be written which sums up the overarching goal of the plan
Once completed you need to send these goals out to the team for comment and any aspects that need clarification.
Once the fundamentals have been articulated in the goals and then corresponding support statement as Head of Library I need to present these back to the Curriculum Leadership group for comment. In addition a meeting with individual departments needs to be conducted to hear what they require from the Library going forward over the next three years.
The plan is then reworked and specific items for each department are highlighted in a separate document.
Google Scholar is definitely one of the best academic search engines out there. The search part which I am sharing with you today is only a small part of what you really can do with Google scholar. There are actually several other features that are indispensable for academics and student researchers. Staring from today, I will be sharing with you some of the tips and ideas on how to unravel the hidden mysteries of Google scholar and tap into its full educational potential.
"On this site, you will find message templates (sample e-mails, letters, newsletter blurbs, brochures, and even videos) containing these taglines and targeting specific stakeholder audiences in order to promote school librarians as 21st century skills experts. We hope that these sample templates will be used by school librarians and school library advocates to inform their communities about the vital and irreplaceable role that school librarians play in teaching and learning. Maybe you'll get inspired to create something for us that we can use, too. In the meantime, we hope you find this site helpful."
Donna Baumbach on 07 Jul 11drop an email message into Time Cave and tell it when to come out. It'll stay there for as long as you'd like, within reason.
