Term 4 has seen about 200 class groups of Kindergarten and Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2) students, across NSW and beyond, participate in the Bear and Chook Books Rap. A book rap is a discussion between schools about a selected literary topic, conducted via a blog. This particular book rap focused on two picture books, Bear and Chook and Bear and Chook by the sea by Lisa Shanahan and Emma Quay, who contributed generously to the blog discussion as special guests.
In NSW, book raps are hosted by the Department of Education and Training’s School Libraries and Information Literacy Unit, and are supported by online programming and teaching notes and a concurrent Teacher Rap. This rap also featured a streamed video of the creators reading Bear and Chook by the sea. Students, their teachers and teacher librarians, enjoyed exploring the relationship between the written and visual texts of these excellent picture books, and the theme of friendship. Groups of students created digital stories based on the main characters, and posed questions to the books’ creators.
The book rap is “wrapping up” this week, but the discussions are archived for viewing at: http://rapblog6.edublogs.org/
Last week, a few minutes using the search engine of TaLe uncovered a great game on trading (buying and selling) for Stage 2 students. It works wonderfully well on the IWB, and the students loved it!
Bear and Chook’s space adventure: fun with Kindergarten book rappers in the school library today, as part of the Bear and Chook books rap. During Circle Time, the students created three new adventures for Bear and Chook and we uploaded the photos as a Flickr slideshow:
On Friday, I added a “ClustrMap” to the blog, ie. the little rectangular graphic of the world map. This “free” widget (on the right, below my avatar pic), automatically tracks visitors to the blog site and gives a cumulative tally. Little red dots appear to represent “hits”, and will grow larger every ten visitors. (It’s free in that, if you want a wider range of services, you can upgrade with $$$. But the free version, despite tossing in a few advertisements deemed relevant to my readers, seems to be informative enough – and a fun diversion.)
By clicking on the map, you are taken to a larger version. To see the breakdown of “Country totals”, click on that hyperlink. So far, the figures show mostly Australian hits, but there have been visitors from seventeen other countries! 102 unique visitors over the weekend.
Of course, me being red/green colourblind, red dots on green landforms aren’t terribly helpful (for me), but if I really concentrate I can eventually notice a difference.
It will be interesting as the little red dots continue growing across Europe, the Pacific islands and the USA mainland, as Internet surfers the world over encounter the blog page through Google searches, etc. I know from my other blog, over at Blogger, upon which I have a “Sitemeter”, that these days many visitors seem to find my sites via a Google Images search, and this has been a changing trend in the past year. Either Google Images is more efficient than it used to be, or simply more people are using it to surf the ‘Net. Of course, that’s not to say they find what they’re looking for once they arrive. One of the mysteries of the Internet!
ClustrMaps is a great reminder that the Web 2.0 world is always watching!
NSW schools are almost ready to break for a well-earned two-week vacation, but there is already activity over on the “Bear & Chook” books rap blog site. This book rap, based on two picture books, “Bear & Chook”, and the newly-released “Bear & Chook by the sea”, is aimed at students in Early Stage 1 (Kinder) and Stage 1 (Years 1 & 2). It officially commences Term 4 Week 2 (26 October, 2009). But please, by all means, drop by rapblog6.edublogs.org/ and have a look around any time.
Several schools have already introduced themselves, there are some great comments turning up on the Teachers‘ section, and there are already things to look at in the Gallery. This book rap will also feature participation by the author, Lisa Shanahan, and illustrator, Emma Quay. An online video, of Lisa and Emma reading “Bear & Chook by the sea” at Caddies Creek PS, and answering students’ questions, will be an exciting addition to the usual teaching resources. The rap is being coordinated by Jenny Scheffers (TL at Caddies Creek), “Scan” editor Cath Keane, and yours truly. Interstate and international schools are welcome, and there is no cost involved in book rapping.
Please join us, and spread the word! Don’t forget to bring your warm honey toast!
The topics of today’s students and Internet access (and the current roll-out of laptop computers to all students in Year 9) and its effect on literacy, are being hotly debated again on the various education listservs, and it was reminding me of a previous argument in the public arena in the 60s and 70s, and I just happened upon a quote that might put some of the current issues into perspective.
From Saturday morning fever: growing up with a cartoon culture by Timothy Burke & Kevin Burke (St Martin’s Griffin, NY: 1999, p 200):
“Whether it was [Spiro] Agnew or [Bob 'Captain Kangaroo'] Keeshan, or some other untrustworthy person over thirty, the basic message was the same in the late sixties and early seventies: Blame television and you get an unlimited license to condescend. Then you don’t have to explain exactly why it was bad that kids were in the streets protesting against war or why exactly dropping out and turning on was a terrible thing. The wheel keeps on turning: in the mid-seventies television got blamed for making you passive, and then once again in the eighties, it was creating violence. It’s the excuse that keeps on giving. Amazing thing, television: it can make you passive and aggressive at the same time. If you don’t like whatever it is that young people are doing, it must be television that’s to blame.”
This term, groups of Stage 2 students at my school have worked with me, during our PSP literacy sessions, to create and upload Powerpoint presentations of the “Bear & Chook” adventures, explanations and procedures they wrote up as storyboards.
We hope that other schools enjoy their work as much as we enjoyed creating them.
Using the many clever functions of PowerPoint this term has been my own steep learning curve! Today, with only five minutes left of the lesson, and as a Stage 3 class descended upon us from across the playground (library bags at the ready), one group of eager Year 3 students was guessing how to add a series of pale, white, special-effect curved lines to one of their sequences of photos. And we did it! Exhilarating!
I’m often asked to explain what a wiki is, and I usually liken it to an electronic communal scrapbook.
I’ve seen the following snappy little video a few times now, but I’d forgotten all about it until I was re-investigating the preliminary “how to” pages over on PBworks, in preparation for my sessions on wikis at Saturday’s TESOL conference at the University of Technology Sydney (Broadway).
“Wikis in plain English”
When one displays a Common Craft video on a site, creator Lee LeFever asks for a link back to be provided to the Common Craft web site. Free versions of Common Craft’s videos are for “non-commercial” use. (This means that commercial organisations can’t display the videos without their express permission. For example, if you owned a podcasting company, you could not display “In plain English” series videos internally or externally, without permission.)
This is the section I’ve put off answering because, really, I find it quite daunting. We, as educational practitioners in school libraries, can spout off about how we should be listened to until we are blue in the face, but helping to provide the necessary statistics as evidence for change – in an organised way, that can be trusted and accurately interpreted – is so difficult.
When governments do attempt to initiate national testing of students, to gather that hard evidence of the value being added to learning, we look at their motives with great suspicion – and rightly so, when we all know how statistics can become such a powerful weapon for cost-cutting and false advertising. After all, teacher-librarians spend a lot of time teaching students how to analyse data and texts to detect their authority, validity and reliability.
Ross mentioned that “one of the critical challenges in terms of continuous improvement and personal capacity building is keeping up to date with the vast body of research”.
Having just attended the two-day NSW DET “Connected Learning 2009“ conference (and presenting in a session last Wednesday), I’m internalising a lot more than just “research and carefully looking at how this can be interpreted and translated into daily professional practice”. This year’s conference was subtitled “Transforming Learning and Teaching” (even the order of “learning” and “teaching” in the title was examined!) and it made me think back to this blog site on more than several occasions.
Some of the points raised by the keynote speakers were so important, thought-provoking and challenging. The presentations by Mark Treadwell and Peter Blassina, particularly, were quite mind-blowing. If you haven’t seen the TED talk on “The Sixth Sense” by Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab), as discussed by Peter Blassina at the conference, it’s a must-see: http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html
After that video, we were all feeling more than a little inadequate, and yet incredibly excited by the possibilities. As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, here I was thinking my iPhone was pretty clever, and a harbinger of how students of the future would still be needing the help of teacher-librarians to plough through our information world. If “The Sixth Sense” becomes a commercial reality, the learning curve starts anew before the current one is even finished. Are any of us ready for the next paradigm shift?
Ross also mentions how “often teacher librarians claim that much research is so remote and disconnected from their professional practice. This is an important challenge. In order for research and practice to be more intricately connected, how can this be done? What would you like to see?”
Colleen Foley and I were pleased we had plenty of school principals at our session! But there was so much information to convey in a 50 minute session of a two-day conference – at which all attendees were giving up two days of their vacation. Thus “strategies / initiatives / support at the practitioner level” depend upon practitioners giving up their own leisure time to keep pace. Which is hardly ideal. How else can we ensure that principals are empowered to act in the most effective ways? And will every teacher-librarian be comfortable and capable of providing the local research data being asked of them, and then interpreting it, and internalising the research from further afield, and making it relevant to their day-to-day educational encounters?
At my school, I’m probably very fortunate that we are part of the Priority Schools Program (PSP). In order to keep getting our funding, compiling statistics of our evidence-based practice is embedded. As teacher-librarian, I made sure I was part of the PSP committee, but I can see that setting up something similar – regular, planned pre-testing, post-testing and evaluating – is not easy in non PSP schools.
The time (and funding) needed to analyse results, particularly, and prepare reports that convince all stakeholders that certain changed practices are achieving, or not achieving, outcomes is substantial.
Essential “Strategies / initiatives / support”: Hasn’t it always been about this, and don’t we always complain there’s never enough planning, reflection, money, time and training?
