Month: October 2019

In Media Res…

I was really interested in this week’s topic of seeing what other libraries are doing with media, apps, and mobile tech.

The first thing that popped into my mind was Overdrive. I’m a huge fan of being able to read ebooks on the go, and to listen to audio books, especially since I often have road trips to make, or twice daily dog walks (my dog isn’t much of a conversationalist, so it helps pass the hours of walking we do). My last car didn’t have bluetooth, so I’ve been very excited about all of the books I can listen to with my new car. I haven’t yet made the switch to Libby (the new version), but it’s on my kids’ tablets and they love it. The best part about this is that I’m not limited to the books at my library since we are part of the BC Libraries Cooperative: Library2go and there are many more books in all of these collections that I can draw on. I may also maintain a library card from another very large Canadian city and have access to even more resources!

I frequently recommend this online option to students, especially when they are looking for audio versions of classroom novels (it’s taking us a bit of time to get our audio book collection established). But with every up, comes a down! Recently, the Ottawa Public Library sent a letter to patrons and talked with CBC asking for patrons to sign a protest against MacMillan Publishers for severly limiting how many ebooks public libraries (only 1 copy!) can purchase for new releases. This is terrible for all of the people who rely on public libraries as their main source of information. Not everyone can afford to buy their own copy of every book they want to read – and nor should they have to in my humble opinion.

In a different direction, I was also interested to see what other libraries were offering for mobile apps. One of the first sites I stumbled upon was a software company that dedicated to libraries and their needs. Their article “5 Ways Library Mobile Apps Make Life Easier for Everyone” got me thinking about how a library mobile app can be more than an ebook / audiobook reader. There were the obvious ones that I completely overlooked like checking on your account any time, anywhere. I do this all the time myself, though from a web browser. It was the second one that really caught my interest: Free, Local events are easier to discover. I’m always looking for ways to get people involved in our library learning commons events. This is definitely something I need to look into and there are certainly a lot of different apps out there I could use!

Then I looked at two very differently sized libraries: the Thompson-Nicola Regional Library (my home public library) and the Toronto Public Library. I found that both library systems had similar mobile apps or online databases for ebooks & magazines (rb digital and Tumblebook), language learning (Rocket or Mango), and then a whole bunch more for learning various things like mechanics, listening to music (Naxos) or streaming movies / TV (Hoopla & Kanopy) and other neat things. While I don’t think that my school library learning commons is financially capable of doing all of that, it does remind me that we were wanting to find a way to make our magazine subscriptions available online, so perhaps one of these apps will work!

Is that a… growth?

A lot of people talk about how easy and natural it is to engage in inquiry learning when we are interested in something. I do this all the time, to bigger or lesser degrees: fixing things, researching items I want to buy, researching random questions like why the sky is blue or some other interesting but irrelevant, time wasting question.

The tricky part is engaging with colleagues to help enhance their pro-d, and ours. All the time we find new tools, or rediscover old tools that we know teacher x and y would really benefit from, but how to engage them. After 15 years of teaching, I feel like this is harder to answer than ever. I feel busier, and so do my colleagues. However, I really do think that if you are offering people a time and place to learn something meaningful and relevant, they will come.

We had Pro-D sessions offered frequently at our district learning centre, but I think they are not well attended by high school teachers. I suspect (though I’ve never done any research) that a lot of it has to do with the time the session starts, when it ends, and how much marking / prep the teacher has to plow through. Recently, our district librarian has started offering Lunch and Learn sessions at various campuses around the district, and it seems to be hitting the spot.

The first thing I like about them is that they are open to whomever can and wants to make it. The first one was at my school, and I have to say that it was a relief to see several TL’s from other schools there. They helped to round out the numbers from our staff who attended. Had it just been our staff, it would have been embarrassing that the presenter had driven 4 hours to get there for only 6 people. Frankly, I think that getting 6 staff out was pretty good since this is a pretty new format.

The second thing that I like about them is that they are where the staff is, so it eliminates the hassle (and our city is under a lot of roadwork currently!) of getting to which ever cite by a certain time. Hopefully staff will start to look for these opportunities and we can fine tune the areas that people are interested in pursuing.

This last idea is the key, I think, and something of a no brainer. Last year I tried having inquiry sessions after school. A couple of teachers expressed interest, but only one actually came out. It worked out well for the two of us, and we were able to put together a great inquiry project for her textiles class. I was a little disappointed by the fact that only one person came out, but it was a great learning opportunity for both of us, and you can never know what you need to adjust to reach people until you try to reach people.

Seeing how well the Lunch and Learn sessions are going over district wide, and with our own staff, I think that I will be putting together a survey to see what kinds of sessions people would like to have. Much better than offering my skills which maybe they already have, or aren’t interested in at this moment. It’s also quite nice to be able to call upon an expert to help teach, and be off the performing hook!

Building Tech Skills

To buddy, or not to buddy…

Two things come to mind when I think about how I’ve built my tech skills successfully in the past: get a buddy and jump into the deep end.

Honestly, I don’t get a buddy as often as I should. I have to say that they’re much better for morale, are great to bounce ideas off of, and can help with their expertise when you’re stuck. So though I don’t buddy up as often as I should, I’m hoping to get a buddy for my exploration with Twitter (and other social media).

Are you sure about this?

My New Media 11 class is engaged in a great inquiry about data, privacy, and social media and I’ve upped the ante by requiring them to have a specific target audience, 45 members of whom must give them feedback on their message. You should have seen their faces when they realized they couldn’t just slap it together for the unimportant audience of Ms Bell. After a few minutes, they started to putting together ideas and got into it. I know that having students reach authentic audiences helps them to improve the quality of their work. I think I had never really required it to happen before, certainly not in such a large audience. Now I am faced with the challenge of how do I ethically and safely get them to reach these authentic audiences without casting them to the trolls of social media. Buddy time! My two thoughts here are to buddy up with our district technology person. She likely has some great ideas, and hopefully a lot of knowledge about what our district’s parameters and policies are about using these kinds of platforms. I’m also hoping to buddy up with a local journalist who does a lot of his work on Twitter and has faced some pretty horrible trolls. Also, any of you lovely people reading this blog, please give me your ideas!

Here I go again!

Jumping in to the deep end. This is where I seem to spend a lot of learning time. You think I’d learn by now. Planning would be good, but I seem to be far more inclined to fly by the seat of my pants. Thankfully, I’ve learned to swim. Actually, I think I like the challenge. For instance, we’ve decided to change how chromebooks, the library computers & tables, and labs get booked, but we couldn’t find a utility that really worked with school schedules. The computer teacher at another school made up this amazing Google Spreadsheet, and I took on the task of changing it to fit our school – I had no real idea of what I was getting myself into!

Yes, each little cell has its own formula and if statement linking it to another sheet in the file, blah blah blah…

I’ve learned far more about spreadsheets than I had ever hoped to learn! But I’m pretty proud of my efforts to sort out this puzzle. Like all good inquiries in life, I figured it out because it was something I really wanted to learn. It took quite a while last year, and then we changed how we’re organizing the chromebooks again, so more tinkering. However, it’s the continual tinkering and using what I learned by jumping into the deep end that has helped me remember how to manipulate and adapt this spreadsheet. I could not have created it, and my hat is eternally off to the teacher who shared this with us! Constantly it reminds me that I have to practice what I’ve learned, or I’ll forget it as fast as I forget the names of my students from last semester.

Of course, there’s one final step to keeping and honing tech skills: become someone else’s buddy. There’s no point watching someone else jump into the deepend (unless they want to), when I can share what I’ve learned. Pay It Forward. What a great story and an excellent idea! I always find that by sharing ideas, mine get stretched into different directions and that makes them far richer.

Books I’m Reading: Cinder, by Marissa Meyer

I don’t know why I waited so long to read this book. I loved it! It’s YA book candy! Just sad I’m on hold for the next one, though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since it’s good, and good books last. The Lunar Chronicles (Cinder is the first book) are high recommended by me!

I love how Meyer merges the European and Chinese versions of Cinderella with a Sci Fi twist that makes this book all its own. You feel like you know where the story is going because of the old versions of Cinderella, but you’re never quite sure if they will, or if the characters will break out of the moulds.

I had already read / listened to Stars Above, a collection of short stories about the characters in The Lunar Chronicles, so it was like filling in the tantalizing gaps.

Words… Words… Words…

Last year we had a great year in our LLC with fostering reading culture! We had our first book club, and we launched Battle of the Books for high school students in our district. So much fun!
This year… it’s a bit like the air has gone out of the tires. Not many students have shown up for either the book club or BoB. However, I remain undaunted. Just have to change my strategy and visit the classes. Frankly, this is the part I love anyway. I’d much rather make connections with students by heading out to their classes, than by waiting for them to wander in. Plus, I really love the collection of books we’ve put together for out BoB competition. Check out our website for the list (we’re only doing grades 8-10 this year, and hopefully adding 11-12 next year). In the end, this was a great, and valuable experience for our students and it will continue to be, especially since our school (unwisely in my thinking) got rid of school wide silent reading several years ago.  Now it falls on the English Dept, so I’m working to help bring reading out across the school.

Another classic, it DEAR.  I love it, and teacher’s like it when they remember that it’s happening.  I try to be a problem solver, and so when teachers protested that they couldn’t participate because they didn’t have the time to bring students to the library, I started putting together shoeboxes full of books specifically targeting their students.  It has been a great success!  We have way more participation, and students (and teachers) have found some gems they didn’t we had. 

My library partner came across this video for DEAR by Parkland Learning Commons (Yes, our very own instructor!), and we are absolutely excited about making our own video.  They used zombies; we’re thinking handmaids! Great literacy tie in on so many levels!

The last item I want to try more of this year is buying and adding audio books to our collection via Destiny.  A couple of schools in our district and our district library do this, so I have some people I can call on (YAY!).  The timing for this was fortuitous.  We had our first technology committee meeting and one of the LAC teachers brought up the fact that their ipads were getting old and they were worried about losing the audio books that they had purchased.  I mentioned that I wanted to start putting them on our Destiny page for all students to access, and now we’re excited to get going with this experiment!  Hopefully this will be one more great reason to help get our students using our resources more often!