We recently conducted two surveys at the library, one to students and one to faculty. There were many interesting pieces of data to come out of the results, and I am trying to focus on one of them right now: faculty want more outreach from the library. I’ve got some big plans to address this, but in the short term, I decided to work on providing a monthly newsletter for our middle and upper school faculty, highlighting news, resources, and classroom ideas.

I used scoop.it to curate a collection of links (twelve total). It was incredibly easy. I used the bookmarklet to grab links that I’d favorited on Twitter or saved via Diigo, and then it only took a few minutes to arrange those links on the scoop.it page. The bookmarklet grabs images from the page you’re bookmarking — usually you can choose the image you want to display — and usually grabs some text, as well. You can change the image by uploading your own, and you can also change the displayed text and the tiI changed the background to green (our school color), and voila! I had a page to share with faculty. tle of the link.  The result is easy to read and attractive.

]]> http://sarahludwig.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/using-scoop-it-to-share-faculty-resources/feed/ 0 sarahludwig Screen shot 2012-02-01 at 11.10.42 AM http://sarahludwig.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/just-dropping-in/ http://sarahludwig.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/just-dropping-in/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:54:25 +0000 sarahludwig http://sarahludwig.wordpress.com/?p=349 ]]> …to share my latest column for VOYA, “Beyond the Book Talk.”

I have to use this in a presentation someday.

A few things will be different next time, hopefully. We need to devote class time to teaching the students how to do book trailers, including how to find free and legal music online. Happily, the students who did the book trailer project with me last year automatically went to Jamendo to download their soundtracks. (AND, I was very excited to see the seventh graders going to Google’s advanced image search to find pictures for their Glogs, since I’ve been teaching them how to do this for a year and a half now.)

We also need to think about how to occupy the kids who finish their projects earlier than others. Some of the projects could be worked on from home, while others — most notably the book trailer — could not. So some students were scrambling on the second day of in-class work while others had “nothing to do.”

I also wonder about grading. When I asked one of the teachers if the students were being graded on these, she said: “yes. After all this hard work, I want them to be rewarded.” And I totally get that…. but I also wonder if sharing simply for the sake of sharing would work. After all, these kids are highly motivated by grades.

I’m only going to share Glogs, because they are easy for me to access and share. Unfortunately, I can’t embed using iFrame, so I have to share links with you instead. The students spent one class period sharing their projects with each other, with the goal of getting their classmates interested in reading it. I hope to get one video of a student rapping about The Hunger Games up on the blog later this week. PS: notice any themes in the books selected?

Matched

Divergent

Enclave

Catching Fire

Ship Breaker

And finally, the title of this post comes from a seventh grader, a boy who seems to struggle with technology every time I teach it in class. On Monday, I was looking at his Glog, about the book Enclave. (Side note, this was by FAR the most popular book, with at least three people in every class selecting it.) I asked him if he had finished the book — almost — and if he liked it. With a very serious look on his face, he told me that it was, in fact, the first book he’s ever liked. For a moment, I just stood there stunned, because no one has ever told me this before. In the end, trying not to freak him out, I just managed a quick “that’s awesome” and patted him on the shoulder. But the truth is, I wanted to cry. This feeling was amplified a few minutes later, when two girls who had finished their books each grabbed a copy of Speak off the shelf and started quietly reading it to each other, section by section.

So I guess the obvious morals of the story here are that 1) Booktalking works. 2) Librarians can help get the right books into the hands of kids. 3) Kids like to read. Period.

But I’m very excited, because those two days of middle school English are related to an experiment that the three MS English teachers and I undertook this year. After a full day of booktalking last Wednesday, the students went home for break with a simple assignment: read from their books for 30 minutes. Upon their return to school, the students may choose from one of four options for sharing their book with their classmates:

• Create a glog, incorporating images and text
• Make a digital book trailer, using either images or original movie footage
• Create a mashup, either by putting your character in another setting or having a character interact with one from the class book
• Write an original rap or song and either record it or perform it live

I can’t wait to see what the students come up with. Because I’m the Glogster administrator, I am starting to see their glogs trickle in, and they’re great. About half of the middle school selected our library books, most pulled from those I booktalked, while others selected something different. I’m planning to collect some of these projects online, to act as recommendation tools for other students. And I’ll share that here when I do.

All this brings me to my main point, which is that none of this would be possible without the cooperation of these three teachers. When I decided to focus on reading for pleasure as a major library initiative this year, I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own. It’s true that YA circulation has gone up just by virtue of having more new titles, putting books on display, and weeding out old books. But increased circulation isn’t enough. This project grew out of my desire to have students share their books with each other. How can you do that with middle school students who are booked solid from 8 AM to 3 PM and then go home? When I sat down with the English teachers and asked them if they could devote class time to this project, they said “yes” without hesitation.

I am very lucky to work with these people. And for all the other teachers who are open to new ideas and who trust me with theirs. From environmental science to Islam, teachers are trying new things. I can do my job because of them. More than anything, they care about engaging their students. The excitement that our teachers have about new technology and new projects is infectious and inspiring. So for all those reasons, I’m thankful for them, and for my school.

For a little while I toyed with the idea of literally just posting all the stuff I’ve done the past two months, but that’s really self-congratulatory and, frankly, a bit of a turn-off. For you…. and for me. In fact, I just edited my CV on this blog to make it a bit less HERE IS EVERYTHING I’VE EVER DONE. The fact is, it’s only sort of an accomplishment to be busy. It’s great that people want my help and trust me, but on the other hand, it means I’m running from one place to another in a highly reactionary way. One thing that still troubles me is that I feel like sometimes we just throw out ideas to see what sticks, instead of thinking about the skills we want our students to have. Now, when you’re working at a fairly traditional school with a fairly traditional faculty, the fact that people want to try new things at all is an achievement. But the other day I was reading over Edutopia’s list of skills that elementary students should have, and I felt this spasm of panic — because when our students build these skills, they’re doing it incidentally. The teachers and I try to create projects that support the curriculum, and we try to vary the tools that students use, but there’s very few conversations taking place about the value of these tech skills. So, I need to find a way to address that in a way that’s not overwhelming to our faculty… which is daunting, considering it overwhelms me.

I created a planning worksheet over the summer for the very purpose of encouraging these conversations and I have yet to employ it. Mostly because I’ve been out straight, but also because we’re adjusting to a new model of integrating technology in the Lower School, a model which places far more onus on the classroom teacher. It’s been a bumpy ride, with moments of great success. As things normalize, we’ll be able to develop projects more thoughtfully, but in the meantime, much of my job is cheerleading the teachers as we all adjust to our new reality.

I guess this brings me back to the great debate about how to integrate technology — should it be done in support of the curriculum, or should certain skills be taught in isolation? Are some skills important regardless of what students are learning in the classroom? Should technology be treated like any other subject, or should it be woven into the other subjects? I’m still trying to figure all this out. I do believe that, whenever possible, technology skills should be reinforced in the classroom. I believe that students learn best when there is a way for them to apply what they have learned, and when the skills have context. But I do struggle with the lack of a technology curriculum that I have control over. It means that one of my major responsibilities is trying to influence others — which can be very hard, and feel weird. There’s a delicate balance between letting teachers take the lead (because they need to be responsible for bringing technology into the classroom) and trying to suggest that teachers employ certain technology. It’s a balance I have not yet achieved.

I do know that nothing but good can come of our school’s recent full-on technology explosion. Some teachers will quickly find tools that they love, some will stumble with tools that aren’t quite right, and sooner or later, everyone will find their own comfort zone. I will keep trying to forge my way through these thorny issues, and by the end of the year, we will have made great progress.

I’ll try not to go 4 months without blogging again.

I think that’s because I just spent three weeks teaching Scratch and nothing but Scratch. The first two weeks, I had one class with six students in grades four through seven. The third week, I was still teaching that class, plus I added two more middle school-age classes, co-taught with Lorri. It was amazing, even though I was pretty exhausted by Friday, exhausted enough to plop my three-year-old in front of a Dora marathon so that I could lie on the couch and decompress.

The great thing about this experience was that I learned along with the kids. During the first week, we went through pre-made lessons together, taken mostly from the Scratch cards but also from other educators’ online lessons (I’m happy to share if you want). Just like my students, I at first struggled with understanding how Scratch works. You have to fit the pieces together? What are these crazy variables? WHY ISN’T THIS WORKING? (Hint: did you leave out your “forever” loop?)

So we Googled things together. Need help making a gun? Google it. Or, better yet, find a game on Scratch that has the element you’re looking for, download the code, and remix it. So not only were the students learning programming, they were practicing smart information gathering and reworking others’ creations, all without even thinking about the fact that they were learning. Pretty awesome.

The second two weeks were devoted to building games and interactive stories. A few of my students aimed too high at the beginning. They wanted to make Mario-style games with scrolling backgrounds and lasers that shot at the boss and health points. Two boys insisted on this, but one, at the end, made a catching game that was a thousand times better than his scrolling game, and he knew it. The students who had the most success took ideas they’d learned about through trying and then adapted them. We talked about game rules, objectives, making games challenging, and what the point was of playing games.

After some of them finished their games, they moved onto interactive stories. So amazing! One of the girls used what my colleague Chris calls “spaghetti code” – stringing a bunch of code together in a really inelegant way, like broadcasting back and forth and back and forth so that she had dozens of small blocks of code crowded into each sprite’s stage. But it worked!

Another great point that Chris made, when I asked him if too much help from the teachers was detrimental to the learning process, was that no matter what, if the students are watching you or doing it themselves, they’re thinking about programming language in a new way – they’re figuring out that blocks need to fit together, that there’s cause and effect, and that it has to make logical sense. With the middle school Scratch classes, we acted out a command. I asked the students how they would tell a friend to walk to the printer, and they all said “walk to the printer.” Now, you can’t tell a hard drive that. It’s not a human being; it’s incredibly powerful, but not a person. So how do you break down that command? “Turn 90 degrees to the left. Take ten steps. Stop.”

I have to say, of all the things I’ve taught, Scratch was probably the most satisfying, both for myself and my students. The feeling I got when a kid turned to me and said “It works!” with a huge grin on her face was pure joy. It can be extremely frustrating, too, but the process of looking at faulty code and making it work makes you feel very accomplished.

Want to check out my students’ work? Here are the games and stories they created in my three-week class. Some of them are unfinished. I am so proud of all of them.