What did I learn?
Most obviously, participating in Cool Tools For School keeps me informed about new educational technologies. Our principal is excited about Flipgrid and is encouraging the teachers to use it. As part of Cool Tools for School, I explored Flipgrid as an audio tool and used it with second graders to culminate a William Steig author study. The students recorded themselves talking about their favorite William Steig book. Shortly thereafter, a teacher came to me for technical support using Flipgrid. Being able to support the teachers as they implement technology increases my value. Perhaps even more importantly, Cool Tools for School cajoles me into tackling important topics that I would like to avoid and ignore such as the New AASL Standards and Evidence-Based Practice. Our district had to make budget cuts this year and some librarians might lose their jobs. Evidence-Based Practice is truly timely and important as our profession changes and comes into question. I found the information on EBP to be surprising practical and doable. What's next? Now I must follow through mainly by getting in the habit of curating evidence of how my work helps improve teaching and learning. Specifically, I want to do an exit interview with a group of sixth graders to learn what instruction they perceived to be helpful and engaging. Also, I started a new blog on Edublogs that I will use to curate lesson plans and artifacts of student projects. Did I like learning this way? For me, the format of Cool Tools for School is perfect. I appreciate all the freedom of choice to pursue what interests me and meets my needs. This reinforces to me the importance of offering my students choice, too. I love being able to work from home on my timetable. There are always so many wonderful things to learn under each subtopic that I have revisited some of them one or more times. I am truly sorry to see Cool Tools for School coming to an end!
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Fran Bullington said in a blog post, "School librarians are often so busy teaching that they forget to assess the learning taking place. Can you imagine a classroom teacher NOT assessing student learning?"
This statement certainly resonates with me as I do often feel too busy to fit assessment into the 40-minute block of class time that includes both a mini-lesson plus a book exchange. Classroom teachers are given curriculum and assessments to use (on top of regular state testing). Librarians have to develop their own lesson plans and assessments. We are both library administrators and teachers who are often expected to teach all day and to perform library administration tasks (without a library aide) with whatever time is left. So, time management is a genuine challenge. I agree that assessment is important because it helps inform my instruction and provides data to prove that I'm impacting the teaching and learning at my school. However, my experience has also taught the following:
In addition, I use a bulletin board in the hallway to display student work. In the past I have also sent a survey to faculty/staff to solicit their feedback on the library program, bribing them with a gift certificate from the book fair! As a result of this study on the topic of evidence-based practice, I have done or plan to do the following:
The Danielson Framework for Library-Media Specialists is the current way that school librarians are evaluated in the Rochester City District. Component 1f states that a highly effective "librarian's evaluation plan is highly sophisticated, with imaginative sources of evidence and a clear path toward improving the program on an ongoing basis."
Researching evidence-based practice seemed like a good path to improving my evaluation plan. I started by reading Joyce Valenza's article, "Evolving With Evidence: Leveraging New Tools for EBP." I was challenged by her essential questions:
Seems like lots of people at my school at talking about Flipgrid (including the principal!), so I decided to check it out. I like that you sign in with Google and it's free. I started by reading The Educator's Guide to Flipgrid. Honestly, this 38-page PDF felt a little intimidating, so I read what I needed to get started and know that I can go back to it as I try new features. In library class, second graders have been reading books by William Steig. I created a Flipgrid to enable the students to talk about which William Steig book they liked the best and why. Our Cool Tools for School class began with an opportunity to introduce ourselves using Flipgrid, so I also tried that out to get a feel for what the student view looked like. Each new Flipgrid automatically adds the "topic" of students introducing themselves to their classmates. I think it's a good idea to let the students introduce themselves as the first experience with Flipgrid to get used to using the platform. Our sixth-graders do a debate each spring, and Flipgrid would be a great way to prep them for the debate. The challenge would be in moderating the posted videos and responses and providing feedback in real time, but I think it would engage the students.
The video AASL Standards - Evolved and Familiar is an excellent overview of this topic. After watching it, I felt validated as a librarian and eager to dive into a deeper understanding of the new standards. It helped me to understand that The National School Library Standards:
The School Libraries Transform Learning Message Box provides talking points for justifying and explaining school library programs. I think it would be a great tool to review when prepping for a job interview, too.
Sometimes when I talk with teachers about collaborating, I get a blank stare in return. What School Libraries Mean to Educators is a handy document that quickly states tangible possibilities for relevant collaboration based on the six shared foundations. However, looking at it made me feel a bit overwhelmed as I thought about delivering on all the promises it makes! So, I was relieved and thrilled to discover Allison Mackey's Tech Tools & Resources: AASL Standards for the Learner. What pure genius to create it as a Google Doc so that I can make a copy to learn from it then edit it to suit my purposes and student grade levels! For my learning activity, I followed Paige Jaeger's advice to identify what I am already doing well and what needs improvement. The results are below: Needs improvement:
Adobe Spark enables you to create a graphic, web page, or video either from a template or from scratch. So I tried my hand at each format, and the results are below.
Graphic Web Page
Video
It was fun playing with Adobe Spark. The interface is clean and simple. I think the students would enjoy using it.
When working on the "glideshow" on the web page, it was easy to import images and Spark automatically created a list of photo credits from the images. I wished that I could see more information about the images as I was selecting them. I found it hard to edit the glideshow. There is no undo button that I could find, so I accidentally deleted my whole presentation one time and had to start over. The video feature was my favorite. I love how easy it is to add narration and royalty free music. Quizlet and Kahoot are game platforms that I've enjoyed using with my students, so I decided to explore Quizizz because it integrates with Google Classroom, and I wanted to compare it with Kahoot. Tony Vincent thoroughly compares and contrasts Kahoot and Quizizz. Both Kahoot and Quizizz are fun, useful platforms, and I expect to use both of them going forward. Which platform I choose will depend on the intended purpose of the quiz. Up to this point I have used Kahoot to introduce a topic such as the Amazon Rainforest in an engaging way. I use it to activate background knowledge and pique student interest in the subtopics we will be researching. For this reason, I like Kahoot because we play the game briskly as a whole group in a competitive spirit. I tell the students ahead of time that the classroom teacher and I do not expect them to know the answers. If they knew the answers, we would not need to do a research project! Only the scores of the top players show up on the screen. The students really get into the competition with lots of cheering. One down side to Kahoot is that the students are not allowed to create their own Kahoots. However, they can randomly play Kahoots solo as long as the Kahoot is recommended for their age level. In contrast, Quizizz allows students to create quizzes. I plan to use Kahoot for a quick formative assessment after a lesson on tone and mood to see how well the students took in the information. What I like about using Kahoot for formative assessment is I can quickly see how many students answer each question correctly, and stop to discuss any concepts that need reinforcement right then and there while skipping over content that the students got right. It's rather like using plickers. Quizizz seems better suited to individualized assessment. I created a quiz on Tone and Mood to use as a summative assessment. Quizizz makes it a snap to create my own quiz by borrowing and merging my favorite questions from other existing quizzes. Also, the "homework game" feature allows me to quickly link to Google Classroom and create an assignment for my students. One thing that I have learned about online quizzing platforms is that the existing quizzes vary widely in quality and accuracy. I need to read all the questions ahead of time before using a pre-made quiz.
Quizizz is a great discovery! First, I like the fact that students are allowed to create quizzes which is a powerful way for them to learn and review content. Secondly, it is very handy that Quizizz lets me assign quizzes to my students through Google Classroom. Finally, Quizizz allows between 2 and 5 answers compared to Kahoot that always requires 4 answers. This means that Quizizz works for true and false questions but Kahoot does not. Teaching students about plagiarism, creative commons licensing, and how to find, download and cite copyright-friendly images for research projects is an important part of what school librarians do :
Finding good images for student projects is complex not only because the pictures need to be copyright-friendly, but because image sources are not always appropriate for elementary student use. For instance, Pixabay users must be 16+ and Unsplash and Pexels 13+. Our school district flat out blocks some image sources such as Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons. And then there is the step of explaining how to cite the source! How do I address images, copyright and creative commons in my school? First, I sometimes build the students' background knowledge with the following YouTube videos: Next, because students usually go to Google for their images, I demonstrate how Google images can be sorted by license. It seems good for them to know how to do this. However, Google is still not a great source of images for students because often the websites which are the sources of the images on Google (e.g., Pixabay) are blocked, making it impossible to download the image or create a robust attribution. Sometimes we take screenshots of the images from the Google images page and use the link found in the "share" feature for a jury-rigged attribution. I figure it shows a good-faith effort and does point back to the original source. The best source for creative commons license images that I have found is Wikipedia (not Wikimedia Commons since that is blocked). I can tell the students with confidence that the images used there are creative commons licensed and expect that the images will be appropriate for their consumption. Best of all, Wikipedia makes it easy to download an image and attribute the source. When teaching on sources of copyright-friendly images, I usually push out a list in my Google classroom of the following places students can look for images. (FactCite, a subscription database, explicitly grants students permission to use their images for class projects with proper attribution.)
The first thing I explored related to Google drawings was Eric Curts' Create Your Own Story Cubes with Google Drawings. It was a cinch to download his templates and incorporate them into one of my already existing lesson plans about the basic elements of fiction. I can easily push the templates out to my students through Google classroom and give them a choice of words, pictures, or emojis. The story cubes make it easy to differentiate learning for non-readers, non-writers, and English Language Learners. Students can either write or verbally tell a story with prompts from the cubes which have either words or pictures. Next, I looked into creating badges in Google drawings that I could award to my students through Google classroom. Michelle Luhtala and Brenda Boyer have successfully used badges to help motivate students and provide feedback, but they use a feature embedded in Moodle. To assign digital badges to students through Google Classroom involves a two-step process of creating the badges in Google drawings and awarding the badges through a Google sheets add-on called "Magical Digital Badges." Creating the awards in Google drawing is not too difficult, although I had to Google some steps to get the job done. The Google sheets add-on is very cumbersome at this point. I don't think most educators will take the time to figure it out. Hopefully, Google Classroom will have this feature embedded in the future. The Information Management & Technology department at the Rochester City School District is rolling out a new platform that will make it easier than ever for students, faculty and staff to access databases and other frequently used resources! Users can sign into ROConnect and automatically get into a myriad of platforms without having to enter a second set of usernames and passwords. These virtual dashboards are tailored to each school so that a subscription paid for by my school (e.g., PebbleGo) appears here but not when someone from another school signs in. I expect we will see a bump in usage for our databases because of this very handy tool. Also, the ability for students to log in to Destiny and use additional features has been made much simpler! I chose to explore this topic because I wanted to pick up some pointers for helping students understand what databases are and why students should use research databases. Also, I hoped to find some lesson plans ideas for teaching databases and discover new databases to use with my students.
What databases are, why we should use them, and how to teach them
I explored the full list of Databases for Elementary School Students on the NYPL website, but I found the Flix series to be the most useful for my purposes.
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