The SurRural Librarian

Last week my junior high students tried to determine which of these sites where legitimate & which were not. This is always a fun couple of classes, because some of the sites are hilarious, and the kids enjoy it.I have to dig up new ones every couple of years because word gets out – they’re all big Tree Octopus fans. I like finding real sites that might trip them up. It was really fun breaking the news to them that the OLPC program was real. They were convinced that if there was a laptop that cool in real life, they would know about it.

It’s an excellent lesson for me every time as well. I’ve been working with these same students for a while now and I’m still surprised to see how hard this is for them. They know all the steps (find out the author, Google them, read the fine print, etc.) but they really do not yet have the life experience to pick out the fakes. It’s a good reminder of how young they still are, and how much help they still need navigating life online.

Here’s this year’s list.

• Vasco Nunez de Balboa @ All About Explorers

• Cryptomundo » Snake Longer Than School Bus Discovered!

• Google Gulp

• Dog Island Free Forever

• Carnivorous Sea Squirt !

• Tambora

• One Laptop per Child (OLPC)

• Republic Of Molossia – Official Website

• The Ova Prima Foundation

• DreamTech International [CLONES-R-US]

• BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mysterious mammal caught on film

• buydehydratedwater

• McWhortle Enterprises, Inc.

• Stick Insects

• AFP: SKoreans clone cats that glow in the dark: officials

• Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches

• Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division – dihydrogen monoxide info

• Promachoteuthis sulcus

Update – see the comments to find out which of these are legit, if you want to test yourself.

I’ve made a new page (see above) with links to materials from some of the presentations I’ve given recently. The latest is the DCF Conference session I did yesterday in Stowe.

“Using Fun Technology to Promote Student Engagement”

As usual I talked far too much and for too long, but the audience was great and had excellent input & questions. We have so much fun at school with these DCF projects, I was so jazzed to share it all. Thanks to Grace Greene for inviting me to speak!

This is the form I use with students for evaluating websites. After much tweaking and borrowing I find this works pretty well for most of my students as well as teachers I work with. I don’t share things like this often enough because I’m never satisfied, but I saw a request on a listserv for evaluation forms, so thought I’d post mine. Anyone should feel free to borrow/edit at will.

site_evaluation_pburke.pdf

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The 5/6 are hard at work on their DCF projects. Everyone is working on a project using at least two computer applications and a good amount of creativity inspired by their favorite book on the DCF list. We’ve got comics, book covers, bookmarks and posters galore to share at the DCF conference in May.

A number of my students were swept away by TuxPaint & Comic Life. They really worked hard creating comic versions of their chosen novels, squeezing in computer time whenever they could.

The Kindergarten and Primary classes greatly enjoyed Max’s Words by Kate Banks, a Red Clover book. We took inspiration from Max’s huge piles of words cut from magazines to sort our own collection of words (much thanks goes to the kindergartener at home willing to help with the cutting). Students came up with their own sorting schemes, including number of letters, first letters, vowel sounds, even width of font. The results look like nonsensical ransom notes. (If you’ve got the time, get the students to cut out their own words.)

The book is a great read-aloud and the project was a fun & simple literacy lesson. Yay, Red Clover!

My 3/4th graders are seriously fired up about writing book reviews. First I asked them to write reviews of picture books for the younger grades, keeping their kindergarten reading buddies in mind as an audience. That went well enough for me to continue on with the project.

Now that I’ve opened it up to any book at all (if we don’t have it in the library, I’ve pledge to buy it) – they’re really into it. They’re excited to post them on the web, and I like helping them develop opinions and their own voice.

For inspiration, I’ve been playing them some podcasts and videos of book reviews, preferably those written by other students. We like these podcasts from the John D. Runkle School in Brookline, Ma. and these from Voices from the Inglenook. And the videos at Bookwink are very convincing. They’ve been so popular I’m now on the hunt for others.

Vermont Librarians! Get your students posting on the DCF Blog. The creation of yet another wonderful Vermont librarian.

Opinions, I want to hear opinions. Voting time will be here too soon.

My students have started composing posts in Word so we can talk about them, and spell check, before posting. They’ll start appearing online soon. I would love for these kids to be able to respond to each other and share their thoughts about these books. One vote is not enough, I want to hear what your kids have to say.

My Junior High students are writing a Wikipedia entry on our school. It’s a great way to get them involved with the content creation side of things, good editing practice and fun.*

There are so many good ways to use Wikipedia and to teach it. It’s crucial to address it early and often. Wikipedia is often the first entry in any Google or Ask search, and people often use it without knowing what wiki is.

I hear adults say many silly things about Wikipedia. I hope the frenzy dies down soon, but in the meantime I need to get this off my chest. Here are a few things I’d like adults to remember when they talk about Wikipedia with students.

Wikipedia is a wiki, not the other way around. The word wiki isn’t synonymous with Wikipedia. That’s like saying all cheese is wiz.

Wikipedia is not out to get you. It’s a huge effort and there are many good-intentioned people working to make it a very informative site. It’s just a wiki, not a plot to disseminate inaccuracies.

Please do not intentionally add erroneous information to Wikipedia to make a point. This is vandalism. It’s not very good modeling.

If you find erroneous information in Wikipedia, change it!

Of course it shouldn’t be your only source of information. And of course it shouldn’t be in a bibliography. Not only is it written by anonymous folks on the internets, it’s an encyclopedia. Last time I checked, an encyclopedia wasn’t a valid bibliographic entry.

Everyone should read at least these two pages before using or teaching Wikipedia:

Ten Things You Might Not Know About Wikipedia

Researching With Wikipedia

And if you take the time to teach Wikipedia use to your students (and I hope you do), I recommend sharing this classic video clip:

Stephen Colbert on Wikiality
(I embed the video in my site to avoid the distracting adds & links. I also skip the first minute to avoid the silly drug reference. It’s worth it, a brilliant piece of comedy.)

*If you’re curious, here’s how we’ve structured the Wikipedia project. Everyone is responsible for one section, then we’ll be swapping sections to go through an editing process. We’re using Google Docs to co-write the entry for now, so we don’t have to be “live” with the material until we’re ready. Our principal will also have access to our document to lend a hand with the big picture. So far the toughest part has been keeping the pieces neutral and without personal narrative. Once we post to Wikipedia, it’ll be fun to see other people come in and edit (I’m sure we’ll get some townspeople interested). I wonder if it will be hard for the students to let go.

This is a fun way to exercise those problem solving skills. It requires a little math and a little understanding of how websites work. I showed this to the Junior High and asked them to figure out how to site worked. They were freaked out by it and the teacher was flummoxed, so they really had to work as a group to figure it out. It took some time. I did the same exercise with the teachers to start a prof. dev. workshop, they liked it too.

Flash Mind Reader

Need a hint? Pay attention to the final number in each equation. 

Flotsam, by David Wiesner, Red Clover book and recent winner of the Quill award was a real fun read with the primary grades. First, we went through the book together (Wordless books are a challenge for read aloud. What works for me is letting each student narrate one page as I project it. Elmos are fabulous for this. )

Then, inspired by the wonderful illustrations and the fun ideas in the book, we made some great art.

We made our own versions of under-the-sea fantasy worlds and took photos within photos over time, like those in the book. It was really fun helping the kids figure out where they would be in the finished product. The last kids often said – aw, we’ll be so tiny! Then, after some thought they’d realize it went backward, and the most recent photo was the largest.

Oh, and there’s a beautiful book trailer at this site that might come in handy for anyone booktalking Flotsam.

I’m usually not one to get all mushy and anthropomorphize animals. But since Owen & Mzee is on the DCF list this year, and since I’m doing non-fiction informational texts & animal research with my 3/4 grade right now, I thought it would be a good read-aloud. It was.

Plus, there’s a nice video on the book’s website. I showed a segment in class and the kids enjoyed seeing the animals. They also have some fun animated shorts.

And then wouldn’t you know it? This little gem was sent to me today.

It’s part of a talk on animals at play by Stuart Brown. A great story about a polar bear playing with a husky, with amazing photos. Wow, wow!

I can’t wait to show them tomorrow.

I don’t use much video in my lessons, it’s not a popular medium at my school and I really don’t like to encourage too much screen time. But this short video from Google does such a good job of explaining how they collect information on their users that I think I might just try it out on my JH kids.

I’ll certainly show it to the teachers, I get many questions on privacy and search engines.

Link to the Google Video On YouTube

Well, it’s been quite a whirlwind, what with school starting and all. I have more hours this year, and they seem to have filled up quite nicely, thank you. I’ve made a number of changes to the library schedule, curriculum and even decor, so I’m trying to catch up on some of my favorites here.

More Time for the Primary

I’ve scheduled book check-out for the 1/2nd grades to be at a different time than their library class. The teacher sends them to the library in small groups, while the whole class is working on projects or choice time. This makes it so that I have real time to talk with kids and help them choose books. It also means we have time to do more activities with our “story time”. And this means that where I once spent 45 minutes a week with this classroom, now I get to be with them for more than twice that. It’s a luxury our small school, flexible scheduling and wonderfully supportive faculty makes possible, and I’m once again thanking my stars to work in such a great school. I got this great idea from Andra at Oak Grove, thanks Andra!

DIY for the Upper Grades

I worked all summer on a large supply of what I’m calling DIY Information Literacy Challenges. With dual-grade classrooms, keeping everyone on the same page has always been a challenge. So now as students work on their assignments, I’ve got more waiting for the kids who finish early.

I’ve got them classified into categories like “Using Search Engines”, “Creating Bibliographies”, “Finding & Citing Images”. As we cover a topic, I make them available to the class on their website as pdfs they print out (if necessary) and start working on. Many of them are internet scavenger-hunts in the form of crossword puzzles, wordfinds, etc. Already the kids are showing enthusiasm for the variety and the chance to move on at their own speed.

Fellow Comic Life aficionado Tom over @ Bionic Teaching asked for examples, so here’s mine. It’s part of a unit for the primary grades on story telling, using Gooney Bird Greene to illustrate telling stories from real life. I kept the software segment extremely simple, having the students draw on paper& scan in their images, just adding text with Comic Life.

I’m planning units next year using Comic Life in almost all of my grades. It’s so completely, totally fun. I sit giggling to myself every time I create a new lesson with it, thinking this can’t possibly me my job.

Here’s a new best practice for me this year. I had great collaboration with the 3rd grade classroom teacher on this project.

Along with a research project on trees that included a lot of good hands-on scientific investigation & drawing, we had the students condense their research into a one-page document to be included in a class field guide to the trees of Vermont.

What really worked was showing the kids what it would look like when they were done, then handing them the empty template on paper to be filled in first by hand. This way they could easily which sections they still had to complete. Once they were done, they sat down to the computers and typed it up in the template.

The (slightly) professional look of the document really gave the kids a charge. I could see the difference in their attitude once they saw it coming together on the screen. Scanning and inserting their drawings was the final wow for them. They were very impressed with themselves.

On my end, it was a ridiculously simple project. I didn’t even have it together to create the template myself, I just used a Word template. (The teacher and I came up with the idea 15 minutes before class started – my typical work day.)

The only drawback to the project was using Word. The template was insanely buggy, and the classroom teacher really needed me around for all of the word processing sessions to help out. It was a real mess, and I’ve been looking for a replacement ever since. I like many of the other online & open source word processors, but it seems none have cool templates – yet. I am eagerly awaiting hearing otherwise.