The Mira Costa High School Library is pleased to announce that Andrea Cremer, a best-selling author of the Nightshade series and a History Professor at Macalester College, is visiting our school on January 13, 2012, and will be speaking about her craft during a session in the library from 2 PM – 3 PM. The third installment in the series is being released on January 3. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to hear an author speak in a small group session. Students are invited to sign up at the library to attend her talk. They must obtain permission from their Period 6 teachers to attend.
The library has some copies of Ms. Cremer’s first two books to borrow, but we encourage you to also consider purchasing one or more to enjoy and get autographed. All students who purchase books will have the opportunity to meet Ms. Cremer and have her books signed during the visit. This visit has been arranged for us by {pages} bookstore, a local Manhattan Beach independent book vendor. A portion of the profits for books purchased at Mira Costa before or during the visit will benefit our library. If you are interested in ordering books in advance, please complete the book order form and return it to the library. You can also purchase books on the day of the visit.
Ms. Cremer will also be visiting {pages} at 4:30 PM on January 13, and our library is grateful to {pages} for arranging our school visit.
You can learn more about Andrea Cremer and her books on her website.
During the recent California School Library Association Annual Conference in Pasadena last month, the organization held the first ever “Cyber Sunday,” an event open free of charge to the community with some of digital literacy’s top experts providing sessions on many different aspects of digital citizenship. Shirley Shoda, a Mira Costa parent and library volunteer attended. I asked her to write a guest posting:
“My main reason for attending Cyber Sunday was to learn about ways to protect my family on the net. I signed up for a session called Parent Support: Young Children Online.
“The first portion of the session was covered by Daryl Hulce, Program Administrator for USA-SOS Internet Challenge. This program is an Internet Safety Program for 3rd thru 8th graders, backed by the FBI and is designed primarily for participation by schools. The students answer a series of questions to earn points. The schools then compete against other schools to win a prize. Some of the topics include Virus Protection, On-Line Predators, Reputable Sites, and Social Networking. (There are 17 topics in all). The program is designed like a game, making it very kid-friendly.
“The second portion included an introduction of Nooks for Books by a rep from Barnes and Noble, explaining how this technology can be used in the classroom and at home. Everyone in the audience actually got to play around with a Nook!
“In addition to these talks, I received some helpful handouts, such as “A Parents’ Guide to Facebook”, presented by ConnectSafely.org, explaining about how kids can socialize smartly and safely on the web. It covered topics like “Why you should be honest about your age”, “How to choose friends wisely”, “Configuring who can see what you post”, and “Limiting who can see your info or search for you”. These topics were extremely informative not only for my children but for me as well.
“Cyber safety will continue to be a hot topic in our household as we use the web more to connect with others. I feel that having attended Cyber Sunday has definitely helped me become better equipped in protecting our privacy and ensuring our family’s safety online.”
After I wrote the posting about our library club connecting across the country, both Joyce Valenza and Shannon Miller cross-posted and added the perspectives of their clubs. Check their postings out:
One great activity that has been occurring at the Mira Costa Library has been the growth and development of TLC: The Library Club, now in its second year. Last school year when we established the club, it was primarily a group to support library programs, and the club met every other week. I very much appreciated the help the students offered with our D.J. MacHale author visit, with library displays, contests, PR, and more. They also conducted a very successful book drive and sent the collected books to a shelter. This Fall, the students took the initiative to expand our club by meeting weekly and incorporating more discussions of books in addition to supporting the library.
Then, in October, we had the opportunity to expand our club beyond our school when I responded to a generous open invitation from Joyce Valenza, Teacher Librarian at Springfield Township High School in Pennsylvania, to join several school library clubs in a virtual book club discussion of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. Despite some technical difficulties with my computer and the challenges of time differences, our club members were able to join the group for approximately a half hour of a lively discussion of this engaging book. And, they are looking forward to “Round 2,” when we have revisit Hunger Games after the movie comes out in March.
TLC Members discussing Blood and Chocolate
On December 1, we had our second virtual book discussion about Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. Two of the other schools – Springfield Township HS in Pennsylvania, led by Teacher Librarian Joyce Valenza, and Van Meter in Iowa, led by Shannon Miller – were able to attend this session, and one student who was ill even Skyped in from home. The students enjoyed a very lively debate about the different characters and clearly had very divergent views about how sympathetic they were. I was so impressed by their insightful comments and their ability to disagree with each other while always remaining polite and considerate.
We are now reading Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret and plan to compare it to the new Hugo film in January.
To bring the groups together, we have been experimenting with different platforms, including Google + Hangouts and Skype. These are some of the tools that we teacher librarians have been using for webinars, virtual conferences, and professional organization meetings. Communicating across the miles in this way has also offered our students an opportunity to practice virtual meeting skills they are sure to be using in many other contexts.
I know that I have been enjoying the opportunity to communicate across the miles – and connect and plan with talented Teacher Librarians Joyce Valenza, Shannon Miller, Michelle Luhtala, Colette Cassinelli, and Amy Lott – at least as much as our students.
In my November 8 posting about the American Association of School Librarians Conference I attended in Minneapolis, I promised to write more about it as I processed my notes, materials, and thoughts from the conference. One of the sessions that resonated with me was “Transforming Learning for Today’s Students: Libraries as Sponsors of Transliteracy” presented by Buffy Hamilton, the “Unquiet Librarian” from the Creekview High School Library in Canton, Georgia. Fortunately, the session was taped, and I was just able to watch the recording, since it took me a second time through to absorb all that she shared.
So, first, what is transliteracy? Buffy shared several definitions for what is clearly an evolving concept. Transliteracy, I believe, means being literate across the entire spectrum of the most traditional forms of communication to the most cutting-edge social media platforms. Our students are using many new platforms, including software like Facebook and hardware like smartphones, in their personal lives. We need to embrace these options and help them use these media as part of their educational experience as we also introduce them to new media they may not be familiar with. Here are a few of the points that struck me in Buffy’s talk that I want to make sure we foster at our library:
We need to move from just helping students learn to helping them learn how to learn. We need to help them move beyond being just knowledgeable to being knowledge – able.
Don’t tell students not to use Google to search or Wikipedia as a source. We aren’t going to stop them from using these tools. Instead, we need to teach them how to use and filter them effectively. (Whenever I see students using Wikipedia, I never discourage them; instead, I always share that it may be a good place to start research, but not to end.)
We need to be wary of the myth of the digital native. In practice, most students know a little about a lot of things. We must be careful not to make assumptions about prior knowledge of both tools or concepts.
We must also be wary about assumptions that all students have access to technology. The library needs to take ownership of helping to close the participation gap in access.
New technology tools can be powerful, but pedagogy and sound practice needs to come first. And, we can’t rely either on just theory or just experience from practice. We need both, and we need a sound framework before introducing new tools.
We need to help build inquiry-driven lessons and projects. A sound model is Barbara Stripling’s “Inquiry Model” which includes six non-linear, recursive phases: wonder, investigate, construct, express, reflect, and connect. Many students have lost the power of wonder, since they have not been given an opportunity to exercise it. We need to think of strategies to engage that. (Here is an article that outlines Stripling’s model and includes a great graphic Buffy included in her talk:
We need to allow students to fashion their own research questions and find what they are passionate about. We need to celebrate their strengths and differences and encourage them to share their work. We need to fight the idea that there is “the answer.”
We need to include students in the assessment process. The ultimate empowerment is when students can evaluate their own work.
At Mira Costa, we are blessed with outstanding teachers. I look forward to building on our strengths by working to foster these concepts in our library programs.
Here’s a review of some of what’s been happening at the Mira Costa High School Library since the beginning of the school year. For the best viewing, click the Forward Arrow, allow the presentation to load, then click the More button at the bottom right and select Fullscreen. Or, view the report at this link.
I had the pleasure October 27 – 30 of attending the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Conference in Minneapolis. This event is held every other year and draws an incredibly talented group of school librarians from all around the country. I am still processing all the information and great ideas I received there and pondering how I can implement them in my practice. Here, though, is a summary of a few of the highlights:
Digital Collection Curation
During the “Treasure Mountain” pre-conference and one of the conference concurrent sessions, I heard Joyce Valenza, the Teacher Librarian at Springfield Township HS Library in Pennsylvania, speak about the importance of digital collection curation in school library practice. So what is curation? Joyce described it as not just finding the pearls, but actually stringing the necklace. I would call it the next step after pathfinders. When classes come to the library to do research, I usually create a pathfinder, or guide to quality resources on a topic, to assist them with their work. Curation goes beyond pathfinders because it aggregates and actually embeds content on a topic into a guide. And, a good curation guide generally focuses on a specific topic, not just a broad subject area, and includes both automatically-generated hits based on well-crafted keyword searches and human additions and edits. For more details, click on the thumbnail for slides from Valenza’s talk:
Fortunately, we don’t all need to reinvent the wheel for every topic, since there are a lot of good curated guides out there already. But I think that creating your own guide on a topic you are passionate about can be an empowering experience for a learner, both student and adult. This year, I plan to begin transitioning as much as possible from pathfinders to curated guides for class projects and to helping students locate and create their own guides on topics they are researching or interested in. As Joyce commented in her talk, “students need new types of containers. They need to create reflective portfolios with their own curation.”
eBooks
One of my goals this year is to begin a collection of ebooks that students can access online and possibly also download to handheld devices. I don’t see us ever abandoning print, but I want to help students take advantage of the digital options available for reading and researching. There is a large, growing selection of ebooks out there, both reference materials for research, and fiction and non-fiction for independent reading. Some titles in the public domain are free and others are for purchase. Some ebooks are licensed for unlimited simultaneous readers; others allow for a single user at a time, just like print books. I focused on attending several sessions about ebooks and spoke to several vendors during the conference. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer as to what is the “best’ platform in this rapidly-evolving market. I wish that I could find a way to add all the titles to our library catalog and have them accessible in the same way through that one portal, regardless where they came from. That isn’t possible, at least not yet. Everyone I heard from at the conference acknowledged that we have a ways to go before the options and market settle down. We can’t, though, wait until that happens to start offering ebooks to our students. I do plan to begin our Mira Costa ebook collection very soon. Stand by for details!
Authors
The conference was also a wonderful opportunity to hear and meet authors and get some great free books. Here is the pile of free books I brought home 🙂 :
Mrs. Lofton's books from the AASL Conference
At the Authors’ Banquet on Friday night, I had the treat of sitting at the table with Author Andrea Davis Pinkney and hearing her share that “we all know that librarians will go to the end of the earth to help you with research.” I was also very impressed by how passionately Joan Bauer described her interest in creating heroes who are survivors of adversity and Pata Mora share that “we cannot have a democracy without literacy.” I enjoyed meeting Maggie Stiefvator, author of The Wolves of Mercy Falls series (Shiver, Linger, Forever), and hearing her present at the Sunday Author Brunch about the story behind her new book, The Scorpio Games, her most deliberately autobiographical work. Stiefvater explained how she is fascinated by “world” novels, and wanted to create her own world. Being a food lover, I was amused to learn that she wanted to “torture readers with imaginary foods.” Here’s a photo of me meeting her in the Exhibit Hall and relishing the opportunity to receive a free, autographed copy of Forever:
I would like to extend an invitation to all of you to attend a very special “Cyber Sunday” event being convened next Sunday, November 13, by the California School Library Association (CSLA) at the Pasadena Convention Center from 9:45 AM – 3:15 PM. As an addition to CSLA’s regular annual conference, CSLA is hosting a day of sessions by experts from the field – elected officials, reps from Yahoo, Facebook, the CA Dept. of Education, CA Dept. Office of Privacy Protection, and more – on all aspects of cyber citizenship, online safety, digital literacy, and empowering our 21st Century learners online. This program is being offered free of charge, and intended for educators, parents, government leaders, and any other interested parties. Please consider spending the day at this event, which I am confident will be very informative and rewarding.
Here is a link to the Cyber Sunday Registration form. Registration is free, but the organizers will appreciate knowing that you are coming.
For general information, visit the Calif. School Library Association website at csla.net. And, please do contact me if you have any questions. I would love to have you attend.
Sincerely,
Jane Lofton
Your Mira Costa Teacher Librarian and Incoming President Elect, Calif. School Library Association
The Mira Costa Library will be closed during the school day Thursday and Friday, October 27 and 28, while I attend the American Association of School Librarians Conference in Minneapolis for three and a half jam-packed days of professional development sessions, author events, and networking. I am sorry you won’t be able to visit our library while I am away. But, don’t forget that our virtual library is open 24/7. 🙂 And, I know that I will have lots of wonderful new knowledge and ideas to share when I return.
October isn’t over yet, and it’s not too late to participate in Teen Read Month at the Mira Costa Library. Don’t forget to visit TLC: The Library Club’s Scary Books Display, then borrow a book from the Scary Books display or any library book, and earn a chance to guess the number of candies in the candy jar, and you could be the winner of the whole jar!
Also, don’t miss these deadlines:
Create a bookmark for the Manhattan Beach Public Library Bookmark Contest. Entries are due to our library by October 31.
Create a poster for California School Library Association’s @YourLibrary Contest. Entries due to our library by October 31.
And, to help you get ready for Halloween, here’s a great scary book you can listen to online: Master Storyteller Neil Gaiman reading of his Newbery-award winning thriller, The Graveyard Book, during a national tour, including his answers to audience questions. Here’s the link. Be prepared to be spooked!
If you aren’t sure yet if you want to read or listen to the book, check out the trailer at the top of this posting. You’re sure to be hooked!
