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My Scoop.it!
I'm trying to stay tuned in what's happening in the field of information literacy, learning and school libraries. I'm working on my PhD degree in this same issue. By curating I'm also trying to bring up some of the latest discussions to my colleagues in Finland and abroad. Let's get inspired! "For more than twenty years, school librarians have focused the largest portion of their advocacy efforts on individual principals, superintendents, and board members, struggling to convince them that libraries should be integral and institutionalized elements of K-12 education. It hasn’t worked.
This is the direction that should be taken in Finland as well! Via Karen Bonanno, Tania Sheko 
"This reality should be a warning to all educators that we must prepare our students to make meaning from the overwhelming amount of information at their fingertips, and we must guide their ability to create and publish new information worldwide. To do this effectively, we must return to the basics of what it means to be a good researcher—but at the same time, we must look at the new tools our students have access to." Well argumented! Via Joyce Valenza 
"Google just launched its new Search Education hub. The site offers access to leveled lesson plans for K-12, search activities from AGoogleADay, and an archive of previous webinars.
The site notes that the lessons are designed to support a slow-and-steady, integrated approach to search literacy. They include plenty of detail so that multiple teachers across a school or district can teach different elements as fit into their curricula, even if they start with different levels of experience with Search." 
"The best managers have a fundamentally different understanding of workplace, company, and team dynamics. See what they get right." 
"A new breed of library warrants a new breed of librarian.....Correction — media specialist. Hall County staffs a media specialist at each school throughout the district, charged with not only running the media center, but acting as a facilitator to incorporate new technology into the classroom. Even five years ago, school libraries were just that: a place to check out books. Now schools boast media centers, making them the technological and informational hubs of the school." Via Karen Bonanno "As a pilot program, the district purchased 206 digital books for the 2010-2011 school year and measured how often the books were read. Dopierala says the results blew her away. By the end of the school year, those 206 books had been accessed more than 101,000 times by K12 students all over the district. One Title I elementary school had accessed the books 58,000 times.“The kids were basically voting with the mouse, and they were voting for digital,” Dopierala says. “I realized that this is the medium for their generation. It’s the medium of the future.”
Greta reading about inspiring reading with digital books! Via Jim Harmon 
"It disturbs me that we are not seriously thinking about the future of school libraries. This statement will receive incensed objections; teacher librarians are, after all, talking about changes in what we do and how we do it at conferences and in their own libraries. We talk about some of these changes in my own school library – delivering ebooks, providing transferable skills such as critical literacies to our students, delivering online resources. Well shoot me down if I upset you but I still think we’re not getting it." Changing the school librarianship... Via Donna Watt "Based on unwavering support by the municipalities, the Swedish public and school library systems can look back on a long history of fruitful collaboration. The libraries often share premises and cooperate to varying degrees, both with and without formal agreements. Statistics for 2010 indicate that 43 per cent of 1,214 Swedish public libraries were integrated with their counterparts in the schools." Via Lourense Das 
E-books aren't just becoming increasingly popular. They also appear to be promoting reading habits among American adults. Via Tom D'Amico (@TDOttawa) "In this thoughtful Harvard Business Review article, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson asks us to see beyond Jobs’s legendary roughness with people and appreciate the leadership qualities that made him one of the most successful innovators of our time. “The essence of Jobs, I think, is that his personality was integral to his way of doing business,” says Isaacson. “He acted as if the normal rules didn’t apply to him, and the passion, intensity, and extreme emotionalism he brought to everyday life were things he also poured into the products he made. His petulance and impatience were part and parcel of his perfectionism.” Here are Jobs’s deeper leadership qualities. How many of them apply to K-12 education?" 
"21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them." Yet to be seen in Finland... 
"Inquiry" is defined as "a seeking for truth, information, or knowledge -- seeking information by questioning." Individuals carry on the process of inquiry from the time they are born until they die. ... Unfortunately, our traditional educational system has worked in a way that discourages the natural process of inquiry. Students become less prone to ask questions as they move through the grade levels. In traditional schools, students learn not to ask too many questions, instead to listen and repeat the expected answers." |
"The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings. Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information." Via Anne Whaits, Dennis T OConnor "How can students learn to think for themselves, make good decisions, develop expertise, and become lifelong learners in a rapidly changing information environment? How can students learn, create, and find meaning from multiple sources of information? These are fundamental questions facing educators in designing schools for 21st-century learners. Guided inquiry is a practical way of implementing an inquiry approach that addresses these 21st-century learning needs for students." Via Monica Nilsson 
"Think less about a book room and more about an information resource was the first point. If a library is simply a place for books then it has a very short timeline ahead of it indeed. Think more about the library as a service, having a teacher-librarian who can act as a filter, a connection maker, an information expert for learners. Someone who can support inquiry learning through the development of information literacy competencies in addition to the development of children as readers."
New thinking, good blog post to initiate new kind of discussion about shool libraries in learning environment!! Via L2_S2S Rutgers University Center for International scholarship in school libraries has released the second part of their research into the impact of school libraries on learning. Critical reading for school leaders Via L2_S2S "Diigo is a powerful information capturing, storing, recalling and sharing tool. Here are just a few of the possibilities with Diigo: Save important websites and access them on any computer. - Categorize websites by titles, notes, keyword tags, lists and groups. - Search through bookmarks to quickly find desired information. - Save a screenshot of a website and see how it has changed over time. - Annotate websites with highlighting or virtual "sticky notes." - View any annotations made by others on any website visited. - Share websites with groups or the entire Diigo social network. - Comment on the bookmarks of others or solicit comments to your shared bookmarks."
Via Karen Bonanno "The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) provides a definition of 21st Century Literacies specific to this challenge. They write, “Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable.” The NCTE website suggests that necessary contemporary skills include the ability to - Develop proficiency with the tools of technology - Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally - Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes - Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information - Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts - Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments"
Interesting reading, I warmly recommend! Via Karen Bonanno, Lourense Das "There is a new issue of Library Trends out which might be of particular interest to information literacies researchers, as the theme is Information Literacy Beyond the Academy" 
"Most librarians are educators in one sense or another, even when the role is not explicit. The best teachers learn from others and learn by doing. This is a good rule for improving at virtually anything: Seeking inspiration and accepting criticism makes your work richer and more well rounded."
"This article, adapted from Char Booth's book on Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning (2011), presents her ideas based on her own method expanded through mentorship, coteaching, online forums, and other collaboration channels: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/03142012/reflective-teaching-librarians"
Via Fe Angela M. Verzosa, Ann Vega, Dr. Laura Sheneman, Donna Watt, SCIS 
"Recent brain imaging studies reveal that sections of our brains are highly active during down time. This has led scientists to imply that moments of not-doing are critical for connecting and synthesizing new information, ideas and experiences. Dr. Michael Rich, a professor at Harvard Medical School put it this way in a 2010 New York Times article: “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body.” Via Beth Dichter, Aki Puustinen 
"Here's a megalist for my fellow media specialists/teacher-librarians. It's taken a while to gather all the information and I will continue to add to this page. Currently there are close to 160 sites listed. There is SO MUCH information out there! Please feel free to add your suggestions!" Good listing of sources of many kind, check out! Via Joyce Valenza 
"Many schools that have adopted a 1:1 program have made the mistake of forgetting the library. The library is the cornerstone of every school and is in a current state of flux. No one knows what to make of the library and some feel it is a relic in the context of schools. New information technologies emerge and the library is soon forgotten or pushed to the side, however, the library has never been more important." Via Lourense Das |
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