Category Archives: Information Literacy

A Roundup of Space-Related Links

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I’m sure you have more than enough Olympics news and links to last you through the month, but there has also been an amazing amount of space-related news these past few weeks.  The 43rd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.  The Mars Curiosity Rover landing.  Now the Perseid meteor shower this weekend.  Some news about our old friend Voyager leaving the solar system.

I’ve been reading Brian Floca’s Moonshot to my kids.  It’s a GA Picture Book nominee and ties in well with all this news.  Plus it’s a perfect read aloud for any age level.  Even the teachers who have stuck around to listen find it interesting.  Here’s a link to Brian Floca’s website.

A few years ago (on the 40th anniversary of the Apolo 11 landing) this mind-blowing site was created: WeChoosetheMoon.org.  It’s a recreation of the entire mission from launch to landing with real audio, photos, videos and other goodies.

NASA’s site is, of course, the perfect place to catch up on what’s been going on with Curiosity and to go back and watch highlights from their video gallery.  Exciting stuff!

And if you are not familiar with him yet, you need to introduce yourself to the link-happy Larry Ferlazzo, a high school ELL teacher in California who seemingly spends 30 hours a day collecting and sharing the best links on, well, anything and everything including the best sites to learn more about the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Now I gotta go get ready to stay up tonight for the Perseid show…

Jim Randolph

Partee Elementay

Snellville, GA

Infographics

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By now you’ve probably seen an infographic or two – they are popping up everywhere. Infographics are an interesting way to display statistics for the media center, whether to administrators or to teachers and students. I also think this has tremendous potential in the classroom as a meaningful way for students to represent information. However, they are not easy to create for those of us who are not graphic designers. That’s where Piktochartcomes in handy!

I’ve played around with and it’s easy enough to use that I’ve recommended it to one of my teachers that is willing to try new web tools with her students. After creating an account, Piktochart provides 5 templates to choose from. (Think making a brochure with Publisher.) Our plan is to have kids use piktochart to represent each time period in American Lit. Last year she said her students had trouble connecting one time period to the next, so we’ll be sure to include that as a requirement in the infographic (i.e. What were the people in this time period reacting to from the previous time period?)  We’ll print them and use them in the classroom as a refresher before tests.

I’ll try to remember to update this post after we complete the project. In the meantime, I wish everyone the best for a happy and productive school year!

~Holly Frilot, CHHS Media Center

Power Searching with Google

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Dan Russell has a very cool title: Senior Research Scientist, Google Inc.

He’s also a clear-spoken and affable guide to the ins and outs of really searching with Google.

If you want to sharpen your Google-searching skills there’s a short, free course going on right now over here: http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/course.

I admit, I use Google enough that I didn’t learn too much from the first two classes.  But I did learn a few tings and found the course design well done (which has given me some ideas for future online learning I may do with students and teachers).

The third class gets into more advanced stuff and I did learn more there.  I happily got an A on my midtem this morning.

Apparently if you take the midterm and final you will get a certificate emailed to you so you can show off your new found skills.

Here’s a news article from Mashable on the course: http://mashable.com/2012/07/09/google-search-classes/

Go for it!  And share the course with other students and educators you think may benefit.

Thanks,

Jim Randolph

Partee Elementary

Snellville, GA

Navigating the Information Tsunami: Engaging Research Projects that Meet the Common Core Standards, K-5

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Cherry Lake Publishing has a new and exciting book coming out called, Navigating the Information Tsunami:  Engaging Research Projects that Meet the Common Core Standards, K-5.  This text offers 18 projects, three from each grade level K-5, that go well-beyond fact recall.  These lessons are all grounded in the new Common Core Standards and focus on quality student research from our earliest learners to our older elementary students.  Each lesson is written by an educator who is an expert on the many literacies involved in research projects, the school teacher-librarian.  While the  lessons are written for classroom teachers, they all incorporate collaboration with the school librarian at some point during the project.  Also within the pages of the book, there are many graphic organizers and tips on topics such as citing sources in a multimedia world, creative commons images, what to do when Youtube is blocked, and more.  I encourage every elementary library in Georgia to own at least one copy of this book.  There are even featured lessons from Georgia librarians, Andy Plemmons & Linda Martin.  Check out the attached flyer and order your copy today!

Andy Plemmons

School Librarian

David C. Barrow Elementary

Athens, GA

http://barrowmediacenter.wordpress.com

http://www.clarke.k12.ga.us/webpages/aplemmons

Information Literacy in Savannah-Time for Proposals!

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Here’s your chance to hear Joyce Valenza deliver our keynote address AND spend time in beautiful Savannah in September learning and sharing your ideas about information literacy!

Call for Proposals for the
9th Annual Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

September 21 – 22, 2012
Coastal Georgia Center
Savannah, Georgia

Proposal deadline: April 15, 2012

For complete conference details and access to the online submission form, please access the website at:

http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html

Join us in Savannah for this annual conference jointly hosted by
Georgia Southern University’s:

Zach S. Henderson Library
Department of Writing and Linguistics, College of Liberals Arts & Social Sciences
College of Education
And the Continuing Education Center

See you there!

Judi Repman

How to teach 3 social studies units covering over half a century in 4 weeks: A 5th Grade Glogster Project

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Last year, I began a journey with 5th grade that integrated multiple social studies standards into one big project.  The teachers put students in cross-classroom groups and assigned them social studies topics for a unit on the turn of the century.  Each group made a glog about their topic after using print and digital resources to gather information.  We were amazed by the leadership, collaboration, and innovation that took place in that project, but we made a lot of mistakes along the way too.  You can read more about last year here and here.

This year, we almost didn’t do this project.  The teachers were feeling even more overwhelmed by the content this year because they had to teach 3 social studies units and 2 science units in 9 weeks.  You would probably feel overwhelmed too if you knew you had to teach these units in that amount of time:

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Even the district planner recommends a total of 12 weeks for the units, but requires that it be done in the 3rd quarter (9 weeks).

After multiple combinations of meetings between me, the 5th grade social studies teacher, the gifted collaboration teacher, and the instructional coach, we developed a plan for how this year’s content might look.  Each of the 3 social studies classes were assigned a unit.  Within each class, topics were assigned to individuals as well as groups of students.  These students made plans of how to divide the content among their group.  On Mondays and Fridays, the social studies teacher and gifted teacher did direct teaching of some of the content from all 3 units.  On Tuesday-Thursday, students came to the media center to research their topics in online databases, websites, and books.  Last year, students just took notes as they read, but this year we wanted students to have a better structure that was based in questions that came from the standards.  The gifted teacher combed through the standards and created 2 different graphic organizers with questions for students to consider.  The organizer also had space to document resources used.  Some students chose to use digital copies of this organizer while others chose to print it out and write their notes.

[slideshare id=11402093&doc=electronic3columnnotesforunits567event-120203061957-phpapp02]

[slideshare id=11402092&doc=electronic3columnnotesforunits567person-120203061959-phpapp01]

Once again, I pulled together a pathfinder divided up by topics.  This pathfinder gave each student a handful of websites about their topic.  I also showed them how to search the databases found in Georgia’s Galileo collection.  My paraprofessional took the topics and searched through our print collection.  If a book matched one group’s topic, she put a post-it with their names on the book.  If a book spanned multiple topics, she put it in a shared stack.

To begin our journey, I briefly introduced the pathfinder, graphic organizers, and how to take notes (not copying and pasting entire paragraphs of information from websites).  I also showed a glog from last year’s students to give them an idea of what they would ultimately be doing.  We chose not to introduce how Glogster works at the beginning.  We also chose to not give students logins and passwords to Glogster.  Students then began a week of research.  The social studies teacher, gifted teacher, student teacher, my paraprofessional, some college students, and me began working with students as much as possible to support them in their search.

After a week, I introduced how Glogster works by showing a very basic run-through of the kinds things it can do.  Students continued to research, but as they finished, they checked in with one of the adults.  Most of the time we offered additional guiding questions and support so that they had the most complete information possible.  Once students reached a point where they had enough information, they received their username and password to Glogster.

Most students began Glogster with deciding on their wall background.  Then, they moved to adding text from their organizer.  Eventually, students branched out to include photographs from public domain searches and linked their pictures to the sources they came from.  Some students also did audio introductions to their glog or recorded audio for various parts of their glogs.  Some students used Screencast-o-matic to do screencasts of timelines from PebbleGo or tours in Google Earth.  A few students used webcams to record themselves talking.  One group even did a webcam video of their resource list rather than just creating a text box for it.

You can view some of the finished or in progress glogs here:

Recovering from the Great Depression

Black Cowboys

Wright Brothers

George Washington Carver

Alexander Graham Bell

Thomas Edison

Spanish American War

McKinley & Roosevelt

Panama Canal

Immigration

Voting Rights

US Contributions and Treaty of Versailles

Lusitania and Other Ships

Duke Ellington

Louis Armstrong

Harlem Renaissance

Babe Ruth

Charles Lindbergh

Henry Ford

The Great Depression

Jesse Owens

Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, & Churchill

Holocaust

Presidents of WWII

Bombing of Japan

Changing Role of Women

Tuskegee Airmen

Cold War

Khrushchev & McCarthy

D-Day, VJ, & VE Days

Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, & Hirohito

Panama Canal 2

Once students finalize their glogs, they will present them to the rest of the 5th grade to share the responsibility of teaching and learning this massive amount of content.

Andy Plemmons

School Librarian

David C. Barrow Elementary

Athens, GA

http://barrowmediacenter.wordpress.com

http://www.clarke.k12.ga.us/webpages/aplemmons

Common Core and Library Media Programs

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“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs [...], yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
-Rudyard Kipling

From what I know of the CCGPS, I can see why some teachers would be in a panic: Middle and High language arts teachers are going to be teaching a lot less literature and focusing more on informational texts. Meanwhile, teachers in social studies, science, and other “technical subjects” will be charged with teaching subject-specific reading and writing skills. Students on all levels will be expected to read, write, research and think at higher levels. Next generation assessments are being developed that can actually test information literacy, rather than just factual recall. And tightening budgets don’t make any of this easier.

With that said, the CCGPS looks like the most exciting development for library media programs that I have seen in as long as I can remember. It is built on the concept of integrating “21st Century” skills into every subject, a concept which we in library media have been calling “information literacy” since way back in the 20th Century. It requires students to do much more research, and use research to answer “self-generated” questions. It requires that students read text that is at a higher level than what is in their textbooks. And it requires teachers to step outside their comfort zones.

ALL of these thing play right into our hands. Language arts teachers need a partner who is more comfortable with non-fiction informational texts. Teachers in social studies, science, and technical subjects need a partner who is more comfortable teaching literacy skills, source citation, and the like. All of them will be clamoring for help with research projects and help finding non-fiction sources beyond their textbooks. They will need someone experienced in matching the right text level to the right student, someone experienced in teaching these newfangled “21st Century” skills.

Any library media specialist who has spent their career solely promoting fiction, who has failed in 14 years to get on board with the whole Information Power thing, or who has ceded the direction of their program over to AR probably should be panicking. The rest of us should be seizing this incredible opportunity! Finally, the state curriculum is fully coming around to agree with what we have been saying is most important for students to learn since 1998. Will we have all the perfect resources to support it right away? Of course not, but we are already far better prepared for it than any individual classroom teacher. We have GALILEO, our existing non-fiction print collections, expertise in research and literacy, and an eagerness to collaborate. That will be plenty to get us started, and when the needs arise in the coming years, we will be better able to make the case that funding, staffing, and supporting library media programs is not a luxury, it is a necessity.

School Libraries Worldwide Current Call for Papers

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Current Call for Papers

School Libraries Worldwide is the official professional and research journal of the International Association of School Librarianship. It is published twice yearly, in January and July, and is available online and through select periodical databases. School Libraries Worldwide publishes new works of current research and scholarship on any aspect of school librarianship. All papers are double-blind peer reviewed and adhere to the highest editorial standards.

Connections: Linking learning, leadership, technology, information, and society through school libraries (Volume 18, Number 1, January 2012)

This issue of School Libraries Worldwide will center on the theme of Connections: School librarians linking learning, leadership, technology, and society. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his influential book The Tipping Point (2001), “Connectors are the people who “link us up with the world … people with a special gift for bringing the world together” (pp. 38, 41). For this issue, we use this definition as our point of departure in considering the many connecting roles of school libraries and librarians. We encourage papers that both affirm and extend this initial definition.

This issue will provide an opportunity for researchers to share their work relating to connections and connectors in school libraries.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • School librarians as agents who link home and school;
  • School libraries as places where children build connections between learning and their roles in society;
  • School librarians as ambassadors of broadband Internet and mobile devices;
  • School librarians as promoters of transliteracy in context;
  • School librarians as connectors across cultural, social, professional and ethnic boundaries;
  • The interplay between school libraries and digital libraries or virtual learning environments.

School library researchers are invited to submit papers reporting their own original research that has not been published elsewhere. Authors who wish to know more about the issue theme should contact the editors to discuss revision.

School Libraries Worldwide also welcomes submissions of excellent research on any topic relating to school librarianship for the open portion of the journal.

Deadline for submissions of full papers: September 20, 2011.
Authors interested in contributing to this issue should contact the editors, Marcia Mardis and Nancy Everhart at slw@cci.fsu.edu

Submission guidelines are available online at School Libraries Worldwide submission guidelines (http://www.iasl-online.org/pubs/slw/slw_guidecontrib.html)

Submissions and suggestions for the journal should be sent to:

Dr. Marcia A. Mardis and Dr. Nancy Everhart
Editors, School Libraries Worldwide
School of Library and Information Science
College of Communication & Information
The Florida State University
Tallahassee FL 32306-2100 USA
Fax: 1 (780) 492-7622
E-mail: slw@cci.fsu.edu

Marcia A. Mardis, Ed.D.
Assistant Professor
Associate Director, The PALM Center
College of Communication & Information
The Florida State University

Co-Editor
School Libraries Worldwide
Official Journal of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL)

mmardis@fsu.edu

Submit a Proposal to the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

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October in Savannah is a great time to share the great things you’re doing to build information literate students!

The Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy invites proposals for the September 23-24, 2011 Conference in Savannah, Georgia.

Deadline: April 15, 2011
Location: Coastal Georgia Center in the historic District of Savannah
Please submit your proposal via the website.  The online submission link of the website will provide all of the information you need to create and submit a proposal.

Judi Repman and Stephanie Jones

Georgia Southern University

2011 Horizon Report – Emerging Technologies in Education

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The 2011 Horizon Report was recently released by the New Media Consortium and Educause.  Each edition of the Horizon Report examines six emerging technologies and their potential impact on teaching and learning in the next 5 years.  The six chosen technologies are the result of a series of discussions by the 2011 Horizon Report Advisory Board and  selection process than can be analyzed at the Horizon Report Wiki.

The report recognizes the following trends that are affecting teaching, learning, and creative inquiry:

  • The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.
  • People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
  • The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
  • The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.

The report also recognizes the following challenges to technology adoption:

  • Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession.
  • Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching.
  • Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university.
  • Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike.

Each section of the report about an emerging technology includes an overview, relevance to teaching and learning, how it is in current practice (with links), and further reading (also with links).  The following are the final topics for the 2011 report and are arranged by a Time-to-Adoption Horizon:

It is interesting to compare the final 2011 topics with the 2010 finalists as outlined in this post by the Unquiet Librarian.  Some of the technologies have continually been on the list with evolved names and adjustments on their time-to-adoption.

What does this all mean to us as educators?  Never before has the technology demand out-paced the availability of resources at such a rate.  How will we incorporate these emerging technologies in our practice?  I look forward to learning with you.

Gregory Odell

e-Learning Specialist

Hall County Schools

Gainesville, GA

Twitter:  ugaodawg