The SurRural Librarian

Just back from swimming lessons where I sat by the side of the pool and thoroughly enjoyed an article by Jill Lapore in the July 21st New Yorker on Stuart Little, the history of children’s libraries & children’s literary criticism.

To top it off, there’s a podcast about the piece with Jill Lepore & Roger Angell - whose mom Katharine White had a big role in the story. Seems as though getting yourself into a twist over kids books has been a hobby of librarians throughout the ages.

Listen to the podcast here, read the article here, and learn what made Tonstant Weader fwow up.

Brief note - it’s been a while since I last posted, what with end of the year madness & lovely vacation travel. Tragically, while away, my hard drive died - passive aggressive behavior for not bringing it to the beach, no doubt. It was a great wake-up call when I realized how impossibly dependent I was on all my little apps, bookmarklets and spreadsheets.

A word to the wise…get yourself a fancy external drive and backup your entire machine. Like - now!

It’s the time of year when I start getting very excited about next year’s book budget. I try to get the bulk of my collection development done before September, because I simply get too busy after that. Now I’m diving into my stacks of torn & annotated SLJs, notes from the suggestion box and archived emails form various journals & listservs. But my favorite book buying pastime of all is searching through the archives of my favorite book review bloggers.

If I had the stamina and discipline, I’d be blogging every good book I read this year. Alas, it doesn’t see to be happening. How do they manage it?

Here are my favorites, I’d love to hear if you have other recomendations.

Everyone should read the truly wonderful Planet Esme: planetesme.blogspot.com

The Hip Librarians Book Blog: hiplibrariansbookblog.blog-city.com

Abby the Librarian: abbylibrarian.blogspot.com

Picture book of the Day: http://6traits.wordpress.com

Browsing through their fun & informative reviews makes me realize just how super duper my job is. Looking for great kids books to buy - how much fun IS this?!

Last week I went to a talk in Second Life by Doug Johnson on copyright (you all should have been there, great talk.) I’ve been playing around with 2nd Life just a bit - in fact, I even held a class in there for my graduate students one night. I am not a gamer (Well - there was one weekend in the 1989 with the Mario Bros. But just one, I swear!). I think Second Life is pretty silly. But - I’ve got to tell you - I really like this idea of having conferences & talks in there and I would love to encourage more people to check it out.

Here’s why. Here’s a short list of conferences for Vermont school librarians:

Vermont Library Conference
VSLA Fall Conference
Red Clover Conference
DCF Conference
VITA - Learn
Dynamic Landscapes
Vermont Open Source and Education Conference
Windham County Reads Annual Breakfast
Materials Review sessions

And that’s just the local organizations!
Then I’ve got
NEEMA
AASL
ALA
& other cool places I’ll just never get to - that national conference for IT in schools, Computers in Libraries, the conference for picture book artists, children’s book authors, author talks at book stores, local chapter meetings of various organizations, etc.

Even at MIT I couldn’t take this much time off. Missing classes more than once or twice a year just does not seem OK to me, especially when I truly can not make the argument that it’s integral to my professional development. As much as I enjoy talking with other school librarians, the benefit I’ve gotten from the presentations has been variable.

And then there’s the expense to myself & the earth in terms of travel. Most Vermont happenings are over two hours away from me. Here in Green Liberal Vermont, it’s frustrating that so many groups are encouraging so much travel. District-wide professional development is a 45 min drive, with no fuel reimbursement.

So - I ask you. Can we just think about this 2nd Life thing a bit? I know it’s a little odd. The avatars are usually pretty racy. Figuring out how to move around and not accidentally take off your garments can be tricky. But there are plenty of (professionally legitimate!) ways to safely try it on…

www.iste.org/secondlife

And check out the links here at the Blue Skunk Blog

Extra cred if you can find my avatar in that screen shot on Blue Skunk. Hint: I’m the freaky one.

(cc. image by Roberto Rizzato)

One of my first graders was over for my daughter’s birthday this weekend. She left this message for me on my fridge.

I had a lovely walk Sunday with the dogs and this week’s On The Media podcast. The entire show is about books. There is a fun segment on the new Espresso Book Machine, which prints and binds a paperbacks as you wait. Coolest part? There are only six in the world and one will be living at Vermont’s own Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.

The NYPL had one for a while. Here’s an article from SLJ. With beasts like this on the premises, libraries could get immediate access to books for loan. Could it finally (finally!) finish off interlibrary borrowing? I’ve got my fingers crossed.

So far, it sounds like the majority of works they offer are in the public domain. I hope more publishers see the potential soon, I want to order up a Double Grande Trollope. Oh wait - is that - hey! cool, I’ll see you in Manchester.

I was just setting up a new blog over at Edublogs for a teacher friend of mine. Edublog is a free (with optional upgrade) blog hosting site targeted specifically at educators. It runs Wordpress blogs and they offer a nice array of pre-loaded themes, plugins and widgets, I was pretty impressed.

Since I host my own blogs, I’m used to complete control over how things looks (I find the inability to edit themes on Edublogs particularly nettlesome) but for someone without the ability, time or interest to host their own, this is a nice alternative. And it is a joy to let someone else worry about upgrades and administration for once.

I checked into it because a colleague has a school-related blog on Blogger and was wondering about the ease of students to stumble upon less savory blogs there. That’s a great reason to use education sites, that whole “go to next blog” thing. Some folks are more nervous about 2.0 applications in the classroom than others, and I think it’s a good idea to do what we can to put them at ease.

Checking out the widgets I saw they had one for Picasa, so I thought I’d try that out too. It’s yet another very nice service from Google. They have a simple uploading utility, you can just drag in pictures (even from iPhoto - which I find doesn’t work well with all applications) and click upload. Using the widget, they appear on the blog immediately, which should work nicely for my friend while she’s traveling.

I did have a bit of a fight with the Google Maps plugin, and decided that just linking from a static picture of my map to the one I saved on Google was a more elegant way to go.

And considering that the spam filter on this blog has caught over 23,000 spams (!) I’m glad Edublog is offering that plugin as well.

I love Wordpress, and I find the themes so much prettier than Blogger. I definitely recommend checking out Edublogs if you’re thinking about starting your first blog.

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 had a great time at the VSLA fall conference yesterday. What a super bunch of librarians there are in this state.

My page of links is here, for anyone interested.

I have HUGE windows in my library, and new curtains have been on my “to buy” list for a long time. On a trip to Philadelphia this summer, we stopped by the South Phil. Ikea and picked up these great curtains for $40 per window. That’s more than half what I was afraid it would cost me. The compliments have come in droves, including from the kids. I also picked up some cheap throw rugs that jazz up the picture book corner.

*mwah!* Ikea.

They also have a great set with a dragon, but alas, they were out of stock when I was there.

I’ve been lugging these old typewriters around for all of my adult life, and I’m not sure why. These things are heavy to move from apartment to apartment. Fortunately, they have now found a new home in my library. To the kids, they are antique, hand-attracting curiosities. Interactive signage for a new era.

Thanks to Shonda on LM_Net for pointing out this great, fun puzzle making tool from Flash Gear. I’m embarrassed to say how long I spent trying to find good puzzles that fit in with classroom curriculum for my students’ free computer time last year. Now, I can easily make my own, in seconds. Perfect for those last minute teacher requests.

Here’s a puzzle of my current summer project…

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.

Yesterday in the library my 5th & 6th graders made a model of the internet using cardboard boxes and yarn. Each one had to pick a role out of a hat - some kids were LANS, others ISPs, Search Engines
Commercial Websites, etc. They each had a list of computers they had to create, and they were challenged with getting them all “wired” (yarned) up properly.

They made routers, switches, firewalls, DNS & DHCP machines, printers, airports and desktops & laptops. The kids who made websites made servers with data transactions databases (complete with little paper credit cards inside, their very cute idea). We took about two sessions making the computers and one stringing them together.

I can safely say that they really grasped the whole shebang. All year we’ve been working on troubleshooting computers. (I have the rules I try to enforce that they have to check all wires and reboot at least once before they come and ask me anything, we’re working on it). And we’re always talking about and using the internet. I figured this kind of exercise might help make more concrete some of the abstract topics we’ve discussed. Seems to have worked, I’ll have a recap before school gets out to see how much they’ve retained.

This might not seem like a library lesson. But look at it this way. Many librarians teach their kids how books are made. So why not the internet? I’m hoping that understanding the inner workings of networks will impact their understanding of how everything fits together in their wired world.

And, we had fun. (Look at those IP addresses, aren’t these kids cute?.)