Bibliotech

EdWeb Emerging Tech #20 - Global Collaboration

2012-02-15T05:27:00.000-08:00

Digital Learning Day

2012-02-13T18:00:00.001-08:00

If you are an educator, you might want to skip straight to the "Note to educators and parents" Then, if your interest is piqued, dig around and see if you like the rest. If nothing else, you'll get to see what SlideRocket can do. It's free for Google Apps school districts. Otherwise, it's expensive!

World Read Aloud Day collaboration: #WRADCONNECT

2012-02-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

Adapted and cross posted from Shannon Miller's blog, Van Meter Library Voice:

On March 7, 2012 we will celebrate World Read Aloud Day (WRAD) with the world. The theme this year says it all....

Change the World, Story by Story

LitWorld, whose mission is "to use the power of story to cultivate literacy skills in the world's most vulnerable children through education, advocacy and innovation" sponsors this world-wide celebration.

Communities around the world will come together via participatory media (i.e., Skype, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) to share the power of words and stories on our lives.

John and Shannon Minneapolis, MN 2011

Last year, Shannon Miller, Teacher Librarian and Technology Integrationist at Van Meter School in Iowa collaborated with John Schumacher, Teacher Librarian of Brook Forrest Elementary School in Oak Brook, IL to celebrate World Read Aloud Day 2011

Shannon and Joyce Arlington, VA 2011

Eager to involve our New Canaan High School students in a similar collaboration, we connected with Shannon, Joyce Valenza, Teacher Librarian at Springfield Township School in Pennsylvania, and Rocco Staino, contributing editor for School Library Journal and chair of the Empire State Center for the Book.

The Van Meter, Iowa crew

We selected student leaders from each school to collaborate and plan this year's WRAD activities. The Van Meter group includes Lizzy, Quinn, Collin, Paxton and Sebastian. Meg and Alisa, while not pictured are members of the Van Meter team.

The Springfield Township High School, PA crew

At Springfield Township High School, Somewhat Virtual Book Club (#SWVBC) members are taking the lead.

The New Canaan High School, CT crew

In New Canaan, Michael, Charlie, Molly, Alex, Isabelle, Franci and David are taking charge. Franci and David are missing from the picture, but we'll catch them soon.

Our student groups connected via Skype. They brainstormed through two lunches, and by the second day, their ideas gelled into a concrete plan for World Read Aloud Day 2012.

Collaboration is awesome!

They decided to call the group #WRADCONNECT,

and continued the conversation via Twitter.

Connecting via Twitter

Molly and Michael creating Facebook group and page

Michael and Molly created a WRAD Connect Facebook Community Page and WRAD Connect Group on Facebook.

The Twitter hashtag #WRADCONNECT will connect all participating students, regardless of location or time zone. We already connected with Jessica, from the Boston area, thanks to our friend Jeremy Angoff. New Canaan students will interview Jessica on March 7th, as part of our World Read Aloud Day celebration.

Shannon created the Change the World, Story by Story wiki. It will serve as our organizational hub - a repository for resources and artifacts about our collaboration.

We started collecting video clips for the project - recordings of people responding to the prompt, "Tell us about a story that changed your world." The following video is a compilation of four Van Meter students' responses.

"Tell us about a story that changed your world."

The Story that Changed My World from michelle luhtala on Vimeo.

We invite everyone to contribute to the clip collection. Videos can be uploaded to the Facebook page, to Flickr via email, or anywhere else! Short and unrehearsed is preferable - people of all ages, clips in all languages are welcome! We created a form for contributors to fill out, so that we have an "inventory" of #WRADCONNECT contributions, regardless of where they are published. Here is the form.

The #WRADCONNECT schedule

Our students will collaborate to co-present WRAD activity on March 7. They are contacting authors and other students to interview between 11AM and 2PM, EST. They will also feature selected video submissions. The entire program will be broadcast live. We'll post a link as soon as we have one.

As we look ahead to the year, and all of the events that lay ahead, World Read Aloud Day is one that is sure to bring excitement, fun, and new friendships to our students and our school communities.

We sure hope you will contribute to this celebration of World Read Aloud Day, and tune in on March 7th to #WRADCONNECT to witness and participate in this powerful collaborative effort to promote worldwide literacy!

BYOD revisited

2012-02-01T03:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, my daughter, who is working on a radio journalism piece about librarians (?!?) for WERS' You are Here, asked me what makes me look forward to coming to work in the morning. I answered something that hinted at the mystery each day brings. From the second I wake up until I shut down my computer at night, I have no idea what conversations will transpire, and where they will take my thinking.

So this morning, I logged on to find an inquiry on the Connecticut school librarians' listserv about BYOD policies in K-12 schools, as I composed my response, I though it might have a place here in this blog. I haven't written about this in a while, and my thinking is not shifting, ad much as expanding. So here goes.

We have BYOD. Students are not (yet) required to bring their own. We are still exploring 1:1 as a long term option. Many stakeholders feel pretty strongly about one v. the other.

Ultimately, we want more computing power, but the philosophical question is whether we want every kid to have 24/7 access to digital technology for consumption purposes, or for creation purposes (this is more expensive, but it is also better aligned with our ICT program). The answer to that question will determine how we procede - 1:1 tablet or laptop, BYOD, or whatever unknown the near future will deliver. The exploration is fun, though. You get to ask big questions and involve students in the conversation ;-).

In the meantime, we encourage students to use what they have. For example, yesterday, I encouraged three classes download the Destiny Quest app (online catalog) in class. They were embarking on a new research project. About 1/3 to 1/2 the class were able to download it and use it instead of COW laptops (many of which were not charged by the time we got them). Instant start up is VERY compelling in a 48 minute period class, and once kids sign in for the first time, they don't have to do it again. Not only that, but they were able to renew outstanding loans on their devices the day before their report cards were due (we withhold report cards for students with outstanding obligations)!

Even the classroom teacher (who, in the past, has balked at my suggestion to have kids use their MP3 players and phones in class) thought this was a productive move.

We recently surveyed our kids and learned that 41% of those who bring connected, app-ready devices to school have NOT downloaded an eReader (iBook, Kindle, Nook, Google Books, Kobo, Biblio, Overdrive, etc..)! Kids need training on how to use their devices for productivity. Halo, they've got. But Macbeth? No way (even though it is probably on every high school's required reading list and it is FREE)!

We do have students "register" their devices. Instructions and the form are linked to our library website under Tech support. They can do it from anywhere, any time they wish to. Requests are "pushed" on Tuesdays, and Thursdays (and sometimes more frequently, like right after the holidays).

Our AUP/RUA: http://bit.ly/NCPSAUP If you look very carefully at the end of the first paragraph, you will see a vague reference to devices. That's all it takes! We've been doing this since kids started bringing their devices to school. My "brand new" iPod was stolen in 2006. I am sure that happens on occasion, but not to the extent where it is seriously impacting administrative duties. I think TI-84 calculators still hold the lead in that realm. Our kids never take their hands off their devices. They are pretty hard to swipe!

The ideal tools for learning (consumption AND creation), in my opinion: school-provided MacBook AND student owned app-ready/WIFI connected device. Hey, that's just in fantasy land, but here's to dreaming! I know of one public school (not in CT) that has that, and they are considering adding 1:1 iPads next year! Wow!

To participate in deeper conversations on the subject, please join me and my Twittter friends, Jeremy and Kate Angoff, Steve Hayes, and others for the first #BYOTchat on Thursday, February 2, 2012 from 9-10, EST!

Happy pondering!
:-)ML

EDUCON 2.4 - Free-Range Media

2012-01-28T05:13:00.000-08:00

Open letter to librarians everywhere!

2012-01-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

It is not enough for you to sign. We need more!

Dear Fellow Librarians:

This weekend at ALA Midwinter, there was a massive push to collect signatures for AASL President Carl Harvey's appeal to launch a conversation at the federal level about securing a librarian for every K-12 school.

As you may remember, this is the second petition this school year. One was drafted in October, and it failed because we were unable to collect the required number of signatures. So we are trying again.

In spite of HUGE efforts from conference leaders and attendees, we actually went backwards this weekend.

As of Saturday, we needed to collect 1,000 signatures per day until our petition expired, but we only collected 726 over the weekend. Now we need 1160 per day, every day, until 2/4/2012.

How can we achieve this? There are 60,000 ALA members (ALA, not AASL). The current number of ESEA signatures represents 18% of that total body, many of whom are not as invested as school librarians in this initiative. We need to reach out to other communities - not just librarian communities.

We need to involve vendors, colleagues, students (13 years-old and over - this is a great civics lesson, by the way!), family, friends, etc. It's not enough to sign, There simply aren't enough of "us" to push this through.

On Saturday, Follett Software responded to a Twit-plea: "@mluhtala - We support @aasl @caharvey2 ESEA petition 4 k-12 libraries ow.ly/8BJu3". This is excellent! We are so appreciative! Is it enough? Only if the organization asks its employees to sign, and then encourage colleagues, friends and family to do the same. Let's face it, they have a stake in this too! Everyone who relies on school librarians to acquire or promote their products does. It's a very, very long list, but here is a start: Gale/Cengage, ProQuest, EBSCO, ABC-CLIO, EasyBib, NoodleTools, School Library Journal, Barnes and Noble, SlideRocket, Glogster, Animoto, EdModo, and so on.

The upside of all this is advocacy. The conversation alone reminds people about the essential-ness of school librarians' role in teaching and learning. We are more indispensable now than ever before. But every time we launch a new petition, our effort is diluted by prior failed attempts. If this one fails, many solicitees will likely say, "Oh no, that thing again?" the next time we launch one. So PLEASE participate in this effort. While your signature is appreciated, it is not enough! We need more. And just in case you missed the link, here it is: wh.gov/Wgd.

Thank you!

AASL Region I
Director-Elect

On a related note, Mike McQueen, a school librarian in Denver, CO invited me to "like" and post to his new Support School Libraries Facebook page - kudos to Mike for getting it going, and here is the back story:

"I'm Mike McQueen, teacher librarian and founder of http://www.GettingBoysToRead.com (http://www.gettingboystoread.com/). Like many school districts, we are in a financial crises. Our school board recently proposed to eliminate ALL 20+ middle school teacher librarians and also cut all 90+ elementary schools to half time. Since we are the biggest district in all of Colorado, we worry this will cause other districts to follow suit. We launched an online movement and are going to do our best to put up a good fight. If possible, please visit our Facebook page and "Like" us http://www.facebook.com/SupportSchoolLibraries . Adding a positive comment and sharing with your friends would help our morale as well. The board finalizes the budget soon so your timely support would be greatly appreciated!"

Go Mike! Go Colorado! Go school librarians, everywhere!

Please support school libraries!

2012-01-21T05:48:00.000-08:00

Direct link to petition

EdWeb Emerging Tech #19 - Learning Commons

2012-01-12T05:24:00.000-08:00

The One-Month iPad Challenge

2012-01-04T07:26:00.001-08:00

I've always been an iPad skeptic. When my daughter first asked me about them back in January 2010, I wrote a snarky Facebook note that prompted a fiery exchange with my friend, Matt. My post went like this:

"Dunno... Neither here nor there, like that Air thing from a few years back but cheaper and cooler. Still not a real computer - and I am still a computer gal, I think. I want RAM and GIGs, and tons of utility applications, not futility applications (for me the fundamental difference between a phone and a computer). But at $500 bucks, not a horrible thought. Great. Just another device to carry around! Pretty soon, my purse will contain:
1 ipod (classic)
1 iphone
1 flipcam
4 flashdrives
2 chargers
2 iPod/iPhone cables
1 VGA/mini DVI adaptor
1 remote for my computer
1 computer charger
1 Kindle
1 iPad (sounds like a a super-duper feminine hygiene product for the digital age)
1 portable external hard drive
1 emergency network cable for wireless failure
1 ipod-to-speaker output cable
4 headphones, one with built in mic for phone
1 H2 Zoom microphone
1 MacSpeech headset
1 partridge in a pear tree

You think I'm kidding? Nope! Except for the partridge, the Kindle, and the iPad (only men could have come up with that name! They need more women in Dorkdom!), those ARE the contents of my purse.

Time to shop for a bigger purse."

My purse is a lot more streamlined these days, and yes, I did give in and buy an iPad last year. But I hardly ever use it. I still maintain that iPads are superfluous to those who already have iPhones and Apple laptops. But as more and more school districts (including New Canaan Public Schools) invest in iPads, I feel compelled to explore their potential as stand-alone computing tools.

Thus the January pledge:

For the month of January 2012, I will leave my laptop at home, and try (as often as possible) to use my iPad (or my phone) for all computing transactions while on campus during the school day.

This means that when I am not using my iDevices, I will be relegated to using Windows machines, and...well... that's all I am going to say about that.

So this is my first post about this pledge. In order to minimize clutter on my own blog, all subsequesnt posts will follow below.

WEEK 1
Day 1 - Data, Printers, Spreadsheets
Day 2 - Spreadsheets (part II), and Blogs
Day 3 - Browsers, Bookmarks, and Blogs
Day 4 - Audio, Formatting, and email

#18 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session 18 (Dec. 14, 2011 4PM, EST)

2011-12-14T19:32:00.000-08:00

Presentation Part I:
 Part II 
Part II:

Part III:

L4L in Action

2011-10-29T04:36:00.000-07:00

This is the extended version of my segment of the Learning for Life in Action – “Ideas Worth Spreading” presentation at AASL on Saturday, October 29th at 8:00AM in room101E

Taking a page from the successful TED conference format, this “snapshot session” features an elementary, middle school, high school, district-level, and library educator practitioner sharing how each has been able to embed the standards and guidelines into their delivery of instruction and service, using strategies and materials from AASL’s Learning4Life (L4L) implementation effort.

Karen Gavigan, Director Library Media and Technology, Londonderry School District
Elementary School - Leslie Savage, Palmer Elementary School, Baldwinsville, NY
Middle School – Susan Kowalski, Pine Grove Middle School, East Syracuse, NY
High School - Michelle Luthala, New Canan High School, New Canan, CT
School District – Ann Martin, Henrico County Schools, Richmond, VA
Higher Education – Karen Gavigan, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

WLMA - 2.0 for L4L: Empowering 21st Century Learners with Social Media

2011-10-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

Slide deck for today's presentation:

Diigo list works now: http://bit.ly/WLMA20FORL4L
Please complete the session evaluation form

A few other items:
New Canaan High School library
THE ANNEX@ New Canaan High School Library (instructional portal)

WLMA: 2.0 for L4L: Empowering 21st Century Learners with Social Media

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#16 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session 16 (Oct. 12, 2011 4PM, EST)

2011-10-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

Learning Models & Keeping Up With The Standards
edWeb.net: Emerging Tech #16
Wed. Oct. 12, 2011 4PM EST – Session 16

What are the commonalities and distinctions between Common Core, ISTE/NETS, L4L & P21? How can we develop instructional programs with all of these directives? How should we decide which instructional model(s) to follow?

I will also virtually drop in on David Loertscher and Betty Marcoux's presentation at Washington Library Media Association's annual conference (WLMA) to answer a few questions:

The School Learning Commons

WLMA 2011 Annual Conference
Fri. Oct. 14, 2011 3:00 PST

and on Saturday... also virtually at WLMA...

BWAD is in 3 days!

2011-09-25T06:55:00.000-07:00

AASL's Banned Websites Awareness Day (BWAD) is just around the corner on September 28, 2011. A special thank you to all those who contributed posts about the impact of filtering on teaching and learning to the AASL blog over the past several weeks.

Stephen Abram

Vice President Cengage Learning (Gale)

Librarian

Author of Stephen's Lighthouse Blog

Helen Adams

Former School Librarian and Technology Coordinator (WI)

Online Instructor for Mansfield University, PA

Chair of the AASL Intellectual Freedom Committee

AASL liaison to Freedom to Read Foundation Board

Deven Black

School Librarian

New York City Public Schools

Author of Education on the Plate Blog

Connie Southworth Coyle

Adjunct instructor at the University of North Texas

Librarian

Doug Johnson

Director of Media and Technology

Mankato (MN) Public Schools

Author of Blue Skunk Blog and six other books

Lisa Nielsen

Technology Innovation Expert

New York City Department of Education

Author of Innovative Educator Blog & co-author of Teaching Generation Text

Mel Riddle

Associate Director

National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP)
Former Principal (VA)

Author of The Principal Difference Blog

Lisa Von Drasek

Children’s Librarian/ Director of The Center for Children’s Literature

Bank Street College of Education
Author of EarlyWord.com Blog

At New Canaan High School library, we will show solidarity with blocked schools by BLOCKING Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube on 9/28. Students will video interview the learning community about the impact of filtering on our learning and post their footage to Facebook.

#15 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session15 (Sep. 14, 2011 4PM, EST)

2011-09-20T09:45:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2011 11AM EDT – Session 14

Title: #bannedsites: The Webinar

Synopsis: We’ve been talking about this event for months. The time to celebrate our freedom to learn is now. This session is the Banned Sites Awareness Day (September 28, 2011) tool kit. We will reveal our national filter and access survey results, feature innovative lessons using commonly blocked resources, offer justification for lifting bans, showcase sensible policies, and provide resources to help librarians celebrate Banned Websites Awareness Day.

For broadcast recording and certificate of attendance, please visit edweb.net/emergingtech (it's free!)

Presentation:

#15 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session15

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College Application & Facebook

2011-09-13T15:09:00.001-07:00

I loved this infographic, when i first saw it last winter, but I wanted to check the sources before posting it. I got in touch with the author, Loreal Lynch at Schools.com, and she forwarded them. They follow:

Highlights from Kaplan's 2010 College Admissions Officers Survey

Establishing a Benchmark for Social Media Use in College by Cappex.com

Courtesy of: Schools.com

#15 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session15 (Sep. 14, 2011 4AM, EST)

2011-09-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

It's almost here! Banned Websites Awareness Day (BWAD) is just over two weeks away, and this Wednesday's edWeb.net Emerging Tech webinar; (9/14 at 4PM EST) will focus that and more - what you can do to promote the freedom to read, learn, and publish online in K-12 education. We will talk about policies, rationales, and we will look at several lessons.

Lots of folks have been asking what they should DO on September 28th to celebrate AASL's Banned Websites Awareness Day. We are compiling a list of suggested activities into an editable document. The document is embedded in the bannedsites.info website. We encourage you to add your thoughts! Just know that the document is public.

I have a confession to make. Until yesterday, I wasn't really sure what we were going to do at New Canaan High School, which is a free-range media school. Oh, I had ideas, but nothing that really gelled for me. Then I ran it by our new and most awesome principal, Dr. Bryan Luizzi. He made a BRILLIANT suggestion. I am keeping it secret until the webinar - mainly because I haven't yet shared the idea with our teaching and learning community ;-).

I really hope you can make it to Wednesday's webinar. It's at 4PM on Wednesday (Eastern). We are back to the academic school year time slot now that it is in full swing.

"See you" soon!

:-)ML

But before Wednesday, there is today! Be sure to join TL Virtual Cafe tonight, Mon. 9/12 at 8PM EST where The Mighty Little Librarian Tiff will present Back to School Special: 7 Web Savvy Starts to a New Year! This evenings festivities will be emceed by Gwyneth Jones, AKA The Daring Librarian. Please come and join us!

Back to School Message: We Trust You!

2011-09-06T19:30:00.000-07:00

Well, after a hurricane, and a week-long delay, our students finally returned to school today. Thank goodness! The building always seems so empty without them! Our first day is traditionally a half day for 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. Our freshmen eat lunch together, then attend an assembly and end the day with the guidance team. It's a nice transitional day.

For the first time in years, the library requested the floor at today's assembly - just for five minutes. After making the request last spring, we wondered what we could say about the library in five minutes that would seem useful or memorable to freshmen on their first day of high school. Then, Joyce Valenza posted her students' library orientation video on her School Library Journal blog, The Never Ending Search, and we were inspired. So, on the last day of the 2010-2011 school year, our students helped us put together our presentation for the first day of the 2011-2012 school year. It follows.

Dear Missouri Educators

2011-08-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Missouri Educators,

Your freedom to choose your friends is restored for now. Circuit Judge Jon Beetem issued a preliminary injunction against the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act. Phew! Now what?

Do you wait for your legislators to amend and reintroduce the bill? Or do you start a conversation that will prompt education policy makers to support you the next time your elected representatives try to violate your constitutional rights?

Last month, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) designated September 28, 2011 as Banned Websites Awareness Day. This campaign provides organizational support for school-based activities designed to raise awareness about intellectual freedom for learners. If you feel as though Missouri teachers just averted a close call with Orwellian censorship, please consider celebrating the freedom to read, learn, and communicate freely online on September 28th.

AASL created a portal where the public can contribute links to helpful resources about Internet censorship. They are also featuring guest posts on the AASL blog about the impact of filtering on teaching and learning. You are invited to contribute your thoughts about how it would affect you and your students if a) Bill 54 went into effect as originally written, and/or b) Internet filtering in K-12 education was less restrictive.

Gail McCray, a Lawyer for the Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA), said yesterday,"This gives everyone time to debate and discuss the issue to come to a proper resolution rather than rushing to piece together language that doesn't resolve the concerns of educators or allow time for teacher input." There is indeed much to debate as some sections of the law still remain in effect: You are now required to make your work-related Internet sites accessible to administrators, parents and guardians, and Missouri school districts are still required to develop written policies governing teacher-student digital communication by January 2012.

Taking proactive measures to inform the public about your state’s recent drama and other Internet censorship issues might help your and other legislators think twice before interfering with teachers’ professional practice and their civil rights.

Dear Missouri Educators (cont.)

2011-08-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Written in response to a Facebook inquiry from a Missouri educator, "Other than the banned websitones website, what would you recommend as proactive measures?"

Response:

I learned from the Missouri ACLU that school districts across the state are scrambling to revise their district policies before January 2012. Sadly, they are doing so with Bill 54 in mind. Even with Friday’s injunction, it looks as though “unsupervised” teacher-student online contact will be discouraged in the revised legislation.

Where possible, I would recommend advising district administrators to consult the Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) guidelines for creating a 21st Century-friendly Acceptable Use Policy. The National Association of Secondary School Principals also published a position paper that should be of help . Here is our district’s Acceptable Use Policy. There is a lot of confusion about eRate funding and CIPA compliance. For clarification, please refer to the Mind/Shift interview with United States Department of Education’s Director of Educational Technology, Karen Cator.

In Connecticut, we've seen districts rethink their own policies after observing other districts earn recognition for using participatory media to innovate teaching and learning. There are five examples of this kind of instruction at Bannedsites.info under lessons. Districts you might want to look at include Osseo Minnesota, Burlington, Massachusetts, New Milford, New Jersey, and ours (New Canaan, Connecticut).

Last spring I wrote a blog post about friending students on Facebook. This was a follow-up to a post I wrote in response to a board of education policy that bore some resemblance to the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act that went into effect in December 2010 in the town where I live – Westport, CT (not where I teach, thank goodness!).

There is an open document where educators can contribute ideas for activities to celebrate Banned Websites Awareness Day. CoSN opened its awards applications a couple of weeks ago. One suggestion would be to nominate a progressive Missouri CTO for the Withrow award, or a team of innovative educators for the CoSN TEAM Award. Innovative use of technology, particularly where participatory learning is concerned is a valued practice.

Finally, edWeb.net, an online professional learning network for educators, hosts a community for educators to exchange practical information about using emerging technologies in the classroom. It is called TEAM21 (Teachers for Educational Access to Media for 21st Century Learning). Please join. It is free! And since it is exclusively for educators, not students, it will be exempt from the constraints of Missouri legislation.

#14 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session14 (Aug.17, 2011 11AM, EST)

2011-08-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

August 17, 2011 11AM EDT – Session 14

Title: How to Enlist (and Keep) Volunteers: Students and Parents, and Out of the Box Ideas for "Stretched" Librarians

Synopsis: Establishing a successful volunteer program requires planning and structure. In this session we will learn how improve library services by systematizing volunteer recruitment and training, and organizing resources and schedules.

For broadcast recording and certificate of attendance, please visit edweb.net/emergingtech (it's free!)

Presentation:

#15 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session 15 (Sep. 14, 2011 4PM EST)

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AASL Designates September 28th, 2011 as Banned Websites Awareness Day

2011-08-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from the AASL blog

On Tuesday, August 9th, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) published a press release designating September 28th, 2011 as Banned Websites Awareness Day. Embedded in ALA’s long-standing censorship awareness campaign, Banned Books Week (September 24 - October 1), this new initiative formally directs national attention to a percolating conversation about the impact of Internet filtering on teaching and learning in K-12 education.

Art: Kalan Lysenko, NCHS Class of 2013

AASL is to be commended for taking the lead on this intellectual freedom issue. It is becoming increasingly evident that access to participatory media is essential to teaching the frameworks set forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, and more specifically for librarians, AASL’s Learning for Life (L4L) standards. Yet, these resources – those that create opportunities for students to contribute and publish online – are often blocked in schools.

Internet censorship is most often fueled by fear. Costly litigation, online predators, network security, privacy breeches are commonly cited as justification for aggressive filtering practices. While these concerns are legitimate, denying teachers and students a chance to experience online participatory learning together is professionally irresponsible. When schools, which presumably exist to prepare students for 21st century citizenship, fail to teach students how to learn and publish on the World Wide Web, they deny students fundamental instruction that is necessary for success in today’s world, and even more so in tomorrow’s.

Students are entitled to guidance and supervision by vetted, certified professionals when learning to navigate the participatory web. This is how they learn responsible use. School should be the training ground for online interaction, the place where digital citizenship instruction is embedded across disciplines – not the place where students are sequestered from the real world. In most cases, students have access to what is blocked in school once they leave the school building, and students in censored schools have to learn how to negotiate this unregulated landscape unsupervised and on their own. Educators have an obligation to correct that, even if it seems frightening to do so.

I teach in a free-range media school. We use a wide array of platforms for instruction, including an online course management system, a library management system, blogs, microblogs and social networks. Digital citizenship is part of our school culture. We trust teachers and students, and with trust comes responsibility. We refuse to penalize everyone for the potential transgressions of a handful of offenders.

In 2007, we incorporated Facebook into the academic program. Students had found a way around our proxy server to access it, and rather than trying to force students into compliance, we opened access. We kept waiting for the fallout, but it never happened. It is now a staple resource for student-student and teacher-student communication.

We use Facebook to teach communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity – not because we can’t do it elsewhere, but because students are already accustomed to contributing there, and it helps us get to our teaching objectives faster. Most of our students are adept at reading, writing, evaluating, providing feedback, expanding conversations, contributing knowledge and content on Facebook for social purposes. If our aim is to develop and apply those abilities toward learning and productivity, it saves students the cognitive process of transferring those skills to a restricted, less familiar platform. It helps them focus on improving the quality of their interactions rather than navigation. These are assessed proficiencies, and students learn from each other when they see interactions among all participating learners. While they could do this on any forum, they spend more time on this one, and are thus drawn back into the conversation more frequently. For better or worse, time, space, and clear divisions between work and play have become muddled in the 21st century. This experience teaches students to blend productivity and learning into their every day life, which sets them on the course toward becoming lifelong learners.

This is not about Facebook. What we taught on Facebook last year, we might teach on Google+ next year. The point is to deliver instruction as simply and conveniently as possible. If the instructional objective involves learning to navigate a wide range of interfaces, then by all means, take students out of the familiar realm. But if the objective is already an embedded part of student’s experience in a specific medium, and our goal is to build on that prior knowledge and apply it to a new purpose, then start in a familiar place – wherever that is. It is a simple instructional strategy to build engagement, and teachers have relied on it for years. The only difference is that many educational policy makers are not comfortable with what is familiar to students, and allowing students to use platforms educators don’t understand seems scary. Scary or not, we must empower students to collaborate with, learn from and produce for the public. It is an expectation of 21st century citizens, and they should be afforded the opportunity to have educators guide them in the process. In the current environment, many children are left to fend for themselves online without direction or supervision. It sets a great example when teachers learn in partnership with students, and that may be a sound solution to bridging the aptitude gap between teachers and students when it comes to participatory media. But it would be a societal blunder to allow students to learn without teachers.

So kudos to AASL for jump starting the conversation about Internet censorship and intellectual freedom! Ideally, this will prompt policy makers to refocus their filtering practices toward student learning rather than institutional protection.

#bannedsites4real!

2011-07-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

This morning's USA TODAY featured a brief article about #bannedsites Day!

To support the initiative, there is a new Facebook page and website, bannedsites.info.

Both are designed to fuel conversation among educators and to showcase instructional exemplars. Please send your ideas and links to contact@bannedsites.info

Special thanks to Greg Toppo, of USA TODAY for covering this important issue!

Librarianevolution

2011-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

I was asked by a participant in my June ALA session, 2.0 to P21, to forward my job description. The request came from Tom Ferenc, Principal at Green Mountain Union High School in Vermont (LOVE that he was at #ALA11!). His library is scheduled for a renovation, and he wants to capitalize on that opportunity (almost wrote disruption. I am a huge fan of disruption, but it tends to have a pejorative connotation) to implement programmatic innovation.

So I dug up my job description. Wow. It didn't reflect a lot of what I do, and it overemphasized a lot of very basic expectations (classroom management is part of any educator's job regardless of classroom size, but does it belong in a job description?) I wrote it in 2005, but jeez!

@work in the NCHS library, 2005

Here's is what I wrote in 2005:

Position Summary: Supervising the media center facility, its staff and its patrons. Managing the collection and teaching information literacy in his/her designated areas.

Essential Job Functions (listing most important first):

Collaborating with classroom teachers to develop resource based learning units that will teach information literacy skills within the context of curriculum content instruction in the following disciplines: Mathematics, Science, Business, Family and Consumer Sciences, Technology Education, Physical Education and Health. This will require developing an understanding of the district curriculum in each of the designated disciplines and participate in the curriculum review process.
Promoting reading for pleasure among the entire student population, giving special attention to the following fiction genres in Young Adult and Adult literature: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure and Mystery.
Building and maintaining a strong rapport with NCHS students to maintain discipline and order in the media center.
Keeping abreast of current trends in the profession by regularly reading professional literature.
Selecting materials in the following non-fiction areas: Mathematics, Science, Business, Family and Consumer Sciences, Technology Education, Physical Education as well as the following fiction genres: Health Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure and Mystery.
Shelf listing/cataloging in the following non-fiction areas: Mathematics, Science, Business, Family and Consumer Sciences, Technology Education, Physical Education and in the following fiction genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure and Mystery
Weeding the following non-fiction areas of the collection: Mathematics, Science, Business, Family and Consumer Sciences, Technology, Physical Education, Health and in the following fiction genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure and Mystery
Creating imaginative displays of student work and special celebrations (i.e. women’s history month)

Essential Job Requirements:

CERTIFICATION:

062- Library Media Specialist (Connecticut)

092 - Intermediate Administrator Certification

other teacher certification

EDUCATION:

Master’s Degree (Master of Library Science preferred)

EXPERIENCE:

Minimum 5 years of classroom instruction

Minimum 1 year in library service (or internship/student teaching)

REQUIRED SKILLS:

Lesson planning and instruction

Curriculum development

Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office™ products including Word, Excel, Power Point and Publisher

PREFERRED SKILLS:

Shelf listing, cataloging

Familiarity with science fiction, adventure, mystery and fantasy literature in both Young Adult and adult markets

Math and/or Science background

@work in the NCHS library, 2011

So I revised the document to better reflect what I do, and this is what I came up with:

Position Summary: Envision and implement innovative teaching and learning across disciplines through the library program

Essential Job Functions:

Participate in district and building level administrative conversations and professional development.
Collaborate with the teaching and learning community to develop inquiry-based instruction and assessment that embeds P21* and L4L* skills into the core NCPS curricular program. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the district curriculum in each of the designated disciplines and participating in the curriculum review process, where possible.
Implement varied and innovative strategies to promote reading for pleasure for all members of the learning community.
Engage learners, and demonstrate impact of instruction.
Publish digital version all to face-to-face instruction online – must be accessible by entire learning community, including parents, and outside districts.
Manage program advocacy & promotion via participatory media and face-to-face interaction.
Interact with internal and external Professional Learning Communities regularly to keep abreast of current trends in educational innovation.
Document and publish impact of personal professional growth on student learning
Manage library collection – collect, organize, preserve, and disseminate resources.
Manage department budget and evaluate staff.

Essential Job Requirements:

CERTIFICATION:

• 062- Library Media Specialist (Connecticut)

• 092 - Intermediate Administrator Certification

• other teacher certification

EDUCATION:

• Master’s Degree (Master of Library Science preferred)

EXPERIENCE:

• Minimum 5 years of classroom instruction

• Minimum 1 year in library service (or student teaching)

REQUIRED SKILLS:

• Lesson planning and instruction

• Curriculum development

• Self-directed learning

VALUED APTITUDES:

• Curiosity

• Resourcefulness

• Resilience

*P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning

*L4L Learning for Life

Now that I have done some independent brainstorming, I will refer to Joyce Valenza's revised Manifesto for the 21st Century School Librarian to see what I am NOT doing and add that in.

In the meantime, the document is posted and editable. Please add your own two (or twenty) cents!

More to come on this...

#13 edWeb.net/emergingtech Session12 (Jul.13, 2011 11AM, EST)

2011-07-12T08:01:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from edWeb.net's Using Emerging Technology to Improve Your School Library Program

Hellllloooo Everyone!

Summer is officially in full swing, and edWeb.net is too! We have almost one hundred new members in our Using Emerging Technology to Improve your Library Program community here, bringing us up to over 2,300!

I want to take a moment to welcome our new members. Here at Emerging Tech, we present webinars on the second Wednesday of each month (4PM during school year and at 11AM during the summer - EST), and we participate in ongoing discussion threads in between to continue the conversation and provide context and continuity for each webinar. Our past 12 webinar recordings are available on the Emerging Tech landing page - just scroll down to where it says Freshman Year , and you can watch them at any time. If you would like a certificate of participation, all you need to do is take the corresponding quiz; we will email you a certificate. We are launching some exciting collaborative projects, including designing a survey about filtering, access and learning in K-12 education.

For Emerging Tech regulars, in explanation for my recent silence, I am just returning from 10 days of camping without electricity or mobile service, and it was delightful! I read three books (new James Frey, The Paris Wife, and a charming advanced reader copy (ARC) I picked up at ALA called The Ghost of Greenwich Village) I read them all in print - now a novel experience (no pun intended). I hope that everyone's Independence Day week was relaxing and joyful.

Tomorrow, will present our fist episode of Emerging Tech's second season - Using video for Instruction. We will review available resources, share basic tips and tricks, and focus on applications for video in library programming. I am always surprised at how much video enhances my practice and increases student engagement. We will log into http://instant presenter.com/edweb2 at 11:00AM, Eastern time. We hope you can join us, but if you can't, the recording will be posted shortly afterwards and you can view the entire session at your convenience.

It's quite sultry here in the northeast this morning, so I'm wishing you a cool day, but I suppose if you are in San Francisco, I should be sending you warmth! Regardless of your location, have a great mid July day, and I hope to "see you" tomorrow!

:-)ML

#13 edWeb.net/emergingtech (Jul.13, 2011 11AM, EST)

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#ALA11: 2.0 to P21

2011-06-27T03:24:00.000-07:00

I finally shrunk my presentation to an uploadable size. SlideBoom shifted things a bit, but here it is. I had to take out all the video files, but the images are linked. Resources, including the videos, are available in the presentation Diigo list.

Here is the presentation:

2.0 to P21 @ #ALA11

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Summer Reading

2011-06-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

Just a super quick update to link to the New Canaan Summer Reading website. This was a collaborative effort between the high school and the town libraries. Our NCHS Library Instructional Assistant extraordinaire, Mariana Psenicnik, who is working on her Masters in Information and Library Science degree, constructed the site for a graduate course at Southern Connecticut State University. Our New Canaan (town) Teen Librarian, Gretchen Kolderup, worked on the website design with Mariana.

New Canaan Summer Reading website

Feedback Needed

2011-06-13T12:03:00.000-07:00

In preparation for Banned Sites Week (9/17-9/24, 2011), one of our art teachers, Jeanne McDonagh, assigned her Photoshop students to create designs New Canaan High School will use to showcase its intellectual freedom celebration next September. Our objective in the Banned Sites Week campaign is to encourage other districts to unblock mainstream social media sites to promote unleashed learning, 21st century skills, and digital citizenship. We encourage other districts to join us. Our students are looking for feedback on their designs.

We invite you to post comment on the VoiceThread below. Does the design convey its intended message? What works? What would make it better? Comments are moderated, so they will not post right away. Please be patient. Thanks.

Emerging Tech, Season 2

2011-06-13T07:10:00.000-07:00

edWeb.net

Using Emerging Technology To Improve Your Library Webinednesdays

2011-2012 Program (subject to revision)

Commons: Core, Creative, Learning and Other Common Threads in Education

Please join our Using Emerging Technology to Improve Your Library professional learning community at edWeb.net. The free webinars, hosted by Michelle Luhtala, are just the beginning! The first season’s recordings are available for online streaming. Certificates of participation will be sent to live and asynchronous participants. This series is sponsored by Follett Software Company.

July 13, 2011 11AM EDT – Session 13

Video Instruction: Using Video To Increase Instructional Availability

Wish you had more hours in the day? Tired of teaching the same thing over and over again? Wish you could be in more than one place at a time? You can! In this session, we will explore tools for video content creation, how, when and where to incorporate video instruction, and the advantages of complementing your program with streamable lessons.

August 17, 2011 11AM EDT – Session 14

How To Enlist (And Keep) Volunteers: Students And Parents, And Out Of The Box Ideas For "Stretched" Librarians

Establishing a successful volunteer program requires planning and structure. In this session we will learn how improve library services by systemizing volunteer recruitment and training, and organizing resources and schedules.

September 14, 2011 4PM EDT – Session 15

Filtering & Aups: Banned Sites Week

We’ve been talking about this event for months. The time to celebrate our freedom to learn is now. This session is the Banned Sites Week tool kit. We will reveal our national filter and access survey results, feature innovative lessons using commonly blocked resources, offer justification for lifting bans, showcase sensible policies, and provide resources to help librarians celebrate Banned Sites Week.

October 12, 2011 4PM EDT – Session 16

Learning Models & Keeping Up With The Standards

What are the commonalities and distinctions between Common Core, ISTE/NETS, 4L4 & P21. Where does Big6 fit in? How can we develop instructional programs with all of these directives? If we had to narrow the standards field down to a half dozen, which would we choose? And how do we decide which instructional models to follow? What’s the difference between linear and cyclical learning models? In this session, we will define, and describe initiatives and assess their strengths.

November 9, 2011 4PM EST – Session 17

Digital Citizenship Part I: Ethics, Creative Commons, And Intellectual Property

How do you teach digital citizenship to a generation raised, in many cases, on illegally shared music and video files? In this session, we will review basic copyright law, unpack licensing and labeling lexicon, explore sites that offer shareable resources, feature instructional resources, and examine downloading and editing tools.

December 14, 2011 4PM EST – Session 18

Digital Citizenship Part Ii: Manners, Privacy & Security

How do you teach digital citizenship to a generation raised, in many cases, with multiple digital identities? In this session, we will review privacy rights, and examine instructional tools and strategies for teaching students to be respectful, and security conscious contributors to online communities.

January 11, 2012 4PM EST – Session 19

Learning Commons: The Relationship Between Learning Environments And Instructional Programs

What if you could build your dream library? What would it look like? How can environment influence 21st century learning? What arrangement is the most conducive to student achievement? Can this be generalized? In this session, we will explore the work of David Loertscher, Carol Koechlin and Learning Commons advocates.

February 15, 2012 4PM EST – Session 20

Global Collaboration: It's A Flat World! How Can We Capitalize On Technology To Connect?

Skype, meeting software, social media platforms should make connecting easy, right? Think again! Obstacles include buggy software, bandwidth, filters, social reticence (shyness), and time zones. In spite of all that, some educators are getting their students connected. In this session we will look at successful instructional cross regional collaborations, how they were organized and how they can be replicated.

March 7, 2012 4PM EST - Session 21 (time change is likely)

Pd 2.0: How To Make Online Professional Development Work

Pending conference proposal acceptance:

In March 2010, Lisa Schmucki and Michelle Luhtala met at CoSN in Washington, DC. In March 2011 they co-presented a workshop on online professional development, featuring edWeb.net, with Cathy Swan and Dr. Gayle Bogel at CoSN in New Orleans. In 2012, they propose to bring the instructional and administrative communities together for a hybrid online/face-to-face webinar about online professional development.

Webinar focus, regardless of location:

We have the technology and resources to develop our own personalized and differentiated professional growth programs, in most cases free of charge and off the school clock. What can we do to incorporate these learning opportunities into our teacher evaluation and professional growth programs? What opportunities and challenges do these learning opportunities present?

April 11, 2012 4PM EDT – Session 22

Econtent Delivery (Revisited): Ebooks, Ecollection, Digital Resources, & Etextbooks

In April 2011, almost 200 participants joined the edWeb.net Emerging Tech eBook webinar. That session highlighted the diverging interests of publishers, vendors, authors, librarians and educators to deliver eContent. The presentation raised more questions than it answered. A year later, we will revisit those questions and assess progress in meeting stakeholder needs.

May 9, 2012 4PM EDT – Session 23

Mobile Learning: There’s An App For That!

Devices are changing. Is instruction? This session will feature resources for mobile learning and demonstrate how they are impacting learning for students. We will assess the pros and cons of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies, particularly as measured against one-to-one initiatives.

June 13, 2012 4PM EDT– Session 24

Elearning: Hybrary, Blended, & Totally Digital Libraries

Is face-to-face as relevant as ever? The New York City Public Library delivers online services to students without school libraries. This kind of news sends school librarians into panic mode. Is this a viable option for students? Do we accept it as “better than nothing”? Regardless of how we feel about it, what can we learn about service delivery from these programs? How can this model help us improve our own?

Upcoming presentation at #ALA11

2011-06-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

If you are attending #ALA11 in New Orleans, LA this year, feel free to stop by my session on Sunday June 26 from 8-10AM:

2.0 to P21 – Using Emerging Technologies to Embed 21st Century Skills into your Library's Instructional Program
Convention Center room 339

Social media and online collaborative tools offer librarians myriad opportunities to boost program visibility. Examine a plethora of free online tools that, when used in a library program, improve student learning, strengthen librarians’ instructional partnerships with teachers, forge evidence-based practices, bolster budgets, increase circulation, and ameliorate community collaboration. Presenter, Michelle Luhtala, department chair at New Canaan High School (CT) Library, a 2010 NSLPY winner, will highlight the impact of emerging technologies on her program, and provide practical guidelines for replication.

Hope to see you there!

PS Uploaded 2 new presentations to presentation page (the #ALA11 one isn't ready yet)

edWeb.net Emerging Tech Session #11 - Pooling Resources

Full recording available at http://edWeb.net/emergingtech

Certificate of Participation available to viewers who take the quiz

edWeb.net Emerging Tech Session Session #12 - Earning Recognition

Full recording available at http://edWeb.net/emergingtech

Certificate of Participation available to viewers who take the quiz

AEP CiC Content in Context 2011

2011-06-07T06:46:00.000-07:00

I am very pleased to be speaking at the Association of Educational Publishing (AEP)'s Content in Context Conference (#CiCCon on Twitter) with Lisa Schmucki, founder and C.E.O. of edWeb.net, Eric Sheninger, Principal at New Milford High School, and Tim Ridgway, Vice President of Marketing at Califone International this morning. Here is my part of the presentation.

AEP CICcon 2011 (Luhtala)

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yfilter? Responses

2011-05-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

Last month, I resurrected my colleague Cathy Swan's yfilter survey, reaching out to my PLN to compile additional responses. I posted preliminary responses in What's Blocked in Schools? A Whole Lot!

At New Canaan High School, we will dedicate our 2011 intellectual freedom celebration (orchestrated by the American Library Association) by highlighting censorship in American schools. We will call it Banned Sites Week, and we invite you to join us.

I am putting together some documentation for the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), and I was reviewing the full results of the survey. How fascinating! The open ended answers are particularly interesting.

I uploaded them into a very unglamorous presentation which I embedded here.Take a peek. What do you think?

What does accessing social media in school teach you?

2011-05-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

Guest Post by Nellie Stagg

Staples High School (Westport, CT) Class of 2009

University of Connecticut (UCONN) Class of 2013

Last week, I posed a question for students as a Facebook status, "OK! This is for students! I am collecting the top ten reasons you NEED access to social media in schools - what does it TEACH you?" I wrote about their responses in Y U Need to "Friend" ur Students.

A few days ago, I receive a very thoughtful response from one of my daughter's friends, Nellie, who is now a college sophomore. I had to share:

"Halloo!! I thought a lot about your question and discussed it with a few friends and here's my response:

The protests in the middle east are a prime example of how our generation is using social media to make history. I read a quote from one young organizer in Egypt that said, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” With social media sites I am able to know what is happening around the world right NOW, for example I know about Earthquakes in California before CNN does through facebook. I had a friend who was raving about a 4 hour chat she had through one of those randomized chatting sites (like omegle and chat roulette) with a soldier in Israel who was giving her amazing insight into that conflict from a soldier's perspective. She couldn’t have learned stuff like that from a textbook— that stuff wouldn’t even be in a textbook for years, it’s happening now, and we should be learning about it now. These sites are the primary documents of our time.

Social media has taught me the permanence of the typed word. I have seen countless examples of someone’s quote being bought back to bite them or a posted photo used against them. We are leaving paper trails of our most intimate thoughts and experiences. This technology (and privacy policies) are all evolving so rapidly schools MUST not only allow access to such sites but TEACH students about responsible usage of this media. There are consequences to hitting the enter key and I think it’s crucial that schools discuss it. Also Cyber-bullying is real and is having horrific consequences and it’s negligent of schools to take an ‘abstinence only’ education policy regarding social media. When schools censor these websites they send the wrong message, that social media is bad and should be avoided altogether. As with everything, it should be used in moderation, but banning it from school just makes me spend a longer time at home checking the site, where I could have spent a few minutes in a free period checking my facebook I’ll just wait until I get home and then spend much more time on it. If that's their beef, then schools should teach responsible time management and have dialogs with their students about how they use these sites.

Social media has a huge presence in our daily lives, we are receiving massive amounts of information daily and it’s important we learn how to filter this information. We have to learn to critically think about the information we’re receiving. I think there should be classes (at the very least seminars) in schools discussing seeking out the validity of information provided to you and thinking about the motive/intent of the creator. Additionally students need to learn about online etiquette. In our day and age it’s equally important to learn how to format a 5 paragraph essay as it is a facebook message.

Facebook groups have been instrumental to the group projects I have worked on in college. It’s our main hub to communicate about dividing tasks. The page lets us ask and answer questions that everyone can access and is WAY more convenient than sorting through email threads. People check their facebook more than their school email so it also makes the response rate much quicker. The projects I have done that used facebook groups to organize have been much less stressful and have turned out more cohesively.

Facebook is an amazing resource for publicizing events such as speakers or club meetings and it’s foolish of schools not to utilize it as a resource."

#bannedsites

2011-04-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

We seem to be at a critical juncture in the struggle against overzealous filtering in schools. Many administrators indicate that they are ready to unblock social media sites, but claim that network administrators and lawyers caution them against it. There is a lot of misinformation about federal regulation in this realm. To demystify the issue of e-rate funding and CIPA (Childrens Internet Protection Act) compliance, Tina Barseghian, of MindShift at KQED in San Francisco posted an interview with Karen Cator, U.S. Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology on April 26, 2011. A few weeks earlier, Lisa Nielsen (The Innovative Educator) and Tom Whitby (My Island View) address some of these issues in their co-authored blog post, The World's Simplest Online Safety Policy (April 3, 2011). In February, CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) outlined recommended guidelines for Acceptable Use Policies in Web 2.0 and Mobile Era (February 18, 2011).

Students today lead dual lives – their interactive social life and their “receptive” academic life. At the end of the school day, young people log on and engage online with peers. They share resources, express themselves, opine on their friends' content and activities and the world at large. They are contributors in their social world. But in school, collaboration often begins and ends with “group projects” – which, in many cases, feel contrived in contrast to the organic participatory culture students experience outside of school. In order to inculcate that same participatory culture into students’ academic life, and channel it toward productivity, it is important to provide them with a wide range of online edu-social experiences. Unfortunately, portals for online social interaction are often blocked in schools. We are thus denying students critical learning opportunities about digital citizenship, collaboration, and communication. If we are not teaching these skills in a relevant, real-world context, we are failing to teach them how to apply our lessons to their “other life.”

To highlight the importance of the First Amendment, the American Library Association (ALA) has a longstanding tradition of celebrating the freedom to read during the last week in September - Banned Books Week (BBW). Librarians are enlisted to feature frequently challenged books. This is a most worthy cause as it celebrates our freedom to access information and it exposes censorship. At New Canaan High School, which is a free-range media/BYOD public high school in Connecticut, we will dedicate one day (Wednesday, September 28th, 2011) of censorship awareness week to featuring sites that are commonly banned in schools – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Blogger, etc. We hope that other innovative educators will join in this initiative!

I created a rudimentary survey to compile a list of blocked sites: http://bit.ly/whatsblocked Please add yours! Here is a list of resources (http://bit.ly/BSWsources).

BYOT/D @ NCPS

2011-04-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Once again – a Response to Lisa Nielsen’s (The Innovative Educator ) great post, The Contraband of Some Schools is The Disruptive Innovation of Others with BYOT (Bring Your Own Tech) turns into a blog post in its own right. You should see what happens when we get together face-to-face!

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s February 2010 study, Teens and Social Media, 74% of American teens have a high-speed Internet connected computer at home, but 93% of American teens say they go online. That same report states that 41% of teens whose family income is less than 30K, go online using their phones. That number drops to the twenty percent range for higher income brackets. Clearly, students are bridging the connectivity divide with their portable devices (I avoid talking about phones, because MP3 players work too). When districts prevent students from using their devices in school, they are denying their neediest kids a chance to learn how to use their device for productivity. Talk about educational inequity! Kids with computers at home are taught how to use them in school. Kids who connect on phones because they can’t afford computers are not.

I teach in a BYOT (I've been calling it BYOD, but T works just as well) district. It is a powerful time saver. It helps embed 21st century learning, and it spares taxpayer dollars. Our policy helps us work around using district computers that are nearing their lease expiration period (5 years). The library also circulates 7 iPads (to be used in library) and 10 iTouches (overnight checkout), which we procured with award monies.

When a class signs up to use the library for research, it is only allocated 16 computers. Back in the day, we would expect students to pair up. But this means that one student does the bulk of the work, and another has an opportunity to stare off into space - not the most efficient model for productivity. Now, we - and this is going to ruffle feathers - separate the kids when they come in - not by topic, group, or research task, but by device. Kids with Internet connected devices (smart phones, MP3 players, tablets, netbooks and laptops) go to tables, kids without go to computers. Others opt to borrow library iPads, or, if they are all checked out (very common), iTouches.

Does this scream injustice? I don't think so. It teaches students to cope with the realities of the real world: "Not everyone has the same stuff. You make do with what you've got to get the job done as efficiently as possible." Where else in education are we teaching this lesson?

Here is the beauty of the system - Kids collaborate on their devices while working independently. They write and publish in the cloud (Google Apps), they use social media to organize a productivity plan, and delegate group tasks. To communicate, they can talk face-to-face, text, or chat online. To share resources and compile bibliographies, they collaborate in the library management system. They use QuickCite – a camera-based app for sharing book citations. For research, they turn to resources that offer mobile apps, where possible. Not only does this save them time during class, but it also trains them how to continue to collaborate out of class so they don't have to "go over to so and so's house to work on that group project." We all know that in many cases, that translates into "going over to so and so's house to watch the most motivated person in our group do the project while the rest of us hang out.” This kind of collaboration teaches students how to work together in a more authentic way, which takes some of the artifice out of the teacher-constructed “group project.” Group projects are not bad per se, but they don’t teach real-world collaboration if they only involve face-to-face collaboration.

BYOT/D @ NCHS from michelle luhtala on Vimeo.

Our BYOD/T approach embeds 21st century skills instruction in completely new ways. I blogged about this in Need a Prom Date? Try the Cloud! With this model, kids are required to assess their workload and time constraints, evaluate the merits of the wide range of tools and resources for the task at hand, factor in learning styles, decide how to proceed, and get it done efficiently. True differentiation occurs when students have ownership of, if not their learning (we’re still working on that one, Lisa! ), at least their learning tools!

What's blocked in Schools? A Whole Lot!

2011-04-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, my colleague, Cathy Swan, created a survey about filtering in schools. She shared it with fellow Google Certified Teachers, and then at a round table discussion at CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) in Washington, DC in March of 2010. Then it rested for a bit.

As of 3PM yesterday, we had 84 respondents. I've been digging around for the past couple of days trying to assess how much social media is really blocked in schools. I hear folks complain, but I want real numbers (I am most interested in 9-12). I made some calls to the Pew, Knight, and Kaiser foundations, but they didn't have any answers. I Tweeted a few educators who speak and write about media censorship. They didn't have anything either. I Googled it. I scanned the deep web. I checked the databases. I really don't think it's out there. Please tell me if I am wrong!

So I resurrected Cathy's survey and pushed it out to Twitter fairly aggressively (my new followers are probably annoyed). I have a pretty small following on Twitter, thus not a whole lot of crowd sourcing leverage, so I asked a few friends to disseminate the survey too. I reached out to my edWeb.net Emerging Tech community, and as of 4PM Tuesday April 26, 2011, we have 216 responses.

For now, I just want to share responses to one question, and I apologize to elementary folks, but I am going to focus on high school, because that is where I expect the least amount of filtering. I promise Cathy will publish the whole thing once we get more answers. I was fascinated by the results. It is so much worse than I imagined!

Google Search is blocked for 14% of high school students
Google Images is blocked for 23% of high school students
Google Docs is blocked for 28% of high school students
YouTube is blocked for 63% of high school students
Facebook/MySpace is/are blocked for 87% of high school students
Personal email is blocked for 49% of high school students

If we were to rewrite the question, we would have included Twitter. Since it is omitted, please feel free to talk about that in your open ended responses.

Thanks to all respondents and disseminators! Please continue to distribute the survey!

http://tinyurl.com/yfilter

PS I received a response from a former Director of Technology who now works in education marketing. She challenge our questionnaire and wanted to make sure I saw a more comprehensive one that was done in 2009. I Thought I should share.

PSS MindShift also posted a list of commonly blocked sites in schools. It's rather astounding. During my last edWeb.net webinar, edmodo was identified as a blocked site!

Y U Need 2 "Friend" ur Students!

2011-04-21T12:21:00.000-07:00

This post started as a response to Lisa Nielsen’s (The Innovative Educator)’s post, Advice for Choosing Pages, Groups or Profiles When Using Facebook for Education. It’s a great post - chock-full of information for educators sorting through the “to friend or not to friend dilemma.” By the time I reached, 500 words, I realized my comments had evolved into a blog post. So Lisa, here is my “comment.”

World of student responses (click to enlarge)

I am collecting information about students' perception of the instructional value of social media in school. So last night at about 10PM (we are on vacation this week), I posted an inquiry, "This is for students! I am collecting the top ten reasons you NEED access to social media in schools - what does it TEACH you?" Within 90 minutes I had a collection of genuine, thoughtful reflections (click link to read student responses!) from seven students for my project.

Last week, we had two student groups submit video contest entries in a national contest with 1st prize cash award of $3,000 (for the school library). Naturally, students procrastinated until the very last minute. Both projects were completed in two days. The entire effort for both groups was coordinated through Facebook.

Students at Ivy League Model UN Conference 1/29/11 Philadelphia, PA

When I chaperoned the Model UN trip to Philadelphia last January, we planned everything through Facebook - snow day arrangements, meal times and preferences, dietary restrictions, meeting times, locating students, documenting their achievements, etc...

I am faculty advisor to a very small international virtual co-curricular club for students with an interest in collaborative video and web design projects (it is still in its infancy and if you have a candidate for the club, please get in touch!). We tried coordinating our communications in three different platforms before finally settling on Facebook. It is our club’s only hope for survival.

When our juniors start working on their research paper for English, we instruct them to log their research process in Facebook groups. I follow their process, and add suggestions here and there, but they also need to reflect on their peers' process. It is a collective learning experience, not a teacher-directed one. We developed a rubric for this to guide them through the process. Over the past three years, we have experimented with a number of platforms for this exchange – none of which engaged learners as Facebook has.

What people seldom mention in all this talk about whether or not teachers should "friend" students is how it changes productivity. Not one of the aforementioned experiences would have been possible if I wasn’t Facebook friends with hundreds of students.

I also write about “Facebook friending” in my Open Letter to the Westport Board of Education.