TL Under Construction

Photo Courtesy: fotologic on Flickr Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotologic/268608256/

Just like any other journey it is always helpful to have a guidebook to consult. It makes things that little bit more pleasant to have some information from someone who’s been there ahead of you and knows a bit about what it’s like.

So I was pleased to come across this wonderful and concise Guidebook to Internet Searching.Everything is explained in laymans’ terms and in highly readable format.

The Introduction covers the basics of search commands then covers the big search engines before going into specific types of searches including: people, products, images, videos and several others including one I’d never thought of before – real time searches which picks up on ‘buzz’ as it happens online!

Each section has screen shots, explains how the search engines work, advantages, tips and often has links to articles that explain further.

A great guide to dip into when you’d like to try something new.

And as an aside and a word of caution: I read about it on MakeUseOfGuides on  MakeUseOf.com — before you click on the MakeUseOf.com link be prepared to re-surface hours later — it’s one of those fascinating sites!

This is a follow-up article to a previous blog post – Hope’s Sister, Faith.

In the above 2009 blog entry I set my reading goal  for the school:

to turn every one of the children at our school into a ‘reader’; each student, a child who enjoys books and stories no matter what their literacy level is.

and began looking for pathways to that goal. I had decided to start at the lower end of the school and work my way up.  So in collaboration with the new Prep Teacher (who started in Term 3, 2009) we started the Bookbag Program. Little did we know what changes were in store!

Here’s how it went –

There were 12 Prep students in the group so we purchased 25 canvas bags and let the children decorate them with fabric paints. Each bag was numbered then filled with two picture books. We met with parents and explained the program and the purpose. (For the sheet we passed to parents explaining the program procedures, click here)

The process ran smoothly for the most part though one child/family did accumulate 6 bookbags and so hampered the swapping of bags at one stage (we’ve increased the no. of bags for this year). But that is only a minor technicality.

The real reading revolution came when the Preps began to refuse to do their take-home readers. They didn’t want to read them any more – they were’ hard’, they were ‘boring’. They would much rather read the book-bags with their parents. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? Parents were confused!

Luckily the Prep teacher and the TL were not confused. As Ann Dillon so brilliantly argues in a National Literacy Numeracy Week conference paper (2006),

… real books have a more important role in reading success than the trite and linguistically inferior home readers

Quality picture books provide what Dillon names as the ‘essential building blocks for reading success’ — motivation, purpose and vocabulary.

She goes on to argue that parents have traditionally read  to their children, instilling a love of stories, books and literature in general, and by placing responsibility for formal reading instruction into the hands of parents (who normally have little training) , the quality book time  is replaced and circumstances may eventuate where children struggle and begin to resist reading entirely.

This became the opportunity to retire the home reader program (started by the previous teacher) and to open discussion on the goals and strategies for real reading success. Parents relaxed and continued with the program, pleased with their children’s sustained enthusiasm for the bookbags.

The book bag program will continue in 2010. We’ve already met with the new parents and gone through it all. The bags are filled and hanging on their hooks.

Let the excitement begin!

For my 2009 end-of-year report to school council, I re-worded the goals and pathways into a more academic format:

Goals for 2009 —

1/ Library’s reading goal:

To provide the resources and the environment (physical, academic and emotional/motivation) to maximise reading achievement.

Purchasing priorities: ; books appropriate for the bookbag program; books appropriate for Lexile levels of students

Result

• Bookbag program – program was introduced (in collaboration with Prep Teacher)  to parents at home-group meeting then initiated in Term 3. Reviewed in Term 4 and borrowing procedures refined for Term 1 2010. Children’s interest in taking the books home and reading each night remained high.

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Dillon, A. (2006, August 29).  Don’t be gentle! Conference paper presented at National Literacy Numeracy Week “Reading the World” Literacy Conference, Mackay, Qld.

https://www.learningplace.com.au/deliver/content.asp?pid=15433

This is a follow-up from a previous post — TL’s “L” Under Construction.

The work on the renovations for the new library have continued over the fourth term of 2009 and are now nearly complete.

Here are a few current photos:

Library Exterior - After

Library Exterior - Before

Library Interior - After

Library Interior - Before

Overall, a pleasing transition from drama room/general space to library. We await the shelving which will take up much of the space and then the move!

For the complete story, you can check out my flickr stream here. As always, any constructive comments and/or suggestions are always welcome.

Photo courtesy: Ayashok Photography via Flickr Creative Commons

In this last week of our summer holidays I thought I’d catch up on my blogging. There are several blog items that needed to have postscripts added to them.

Firstly my ETL 501 assignment incorporating the research cycle into an electronic pathfinder.

I ended up going through the whole research process devised by Jamie McKenzie in an effort to ‘practice what I preach’. Not only did I end up with a very satisfactory result but gained real insight on the way. Not unlike learning to drive, the research process felt strange and I better understand the strong urge to ’shortcut’ stages but by sticking to the process and with practice, it truly becomes second nature and the results are much higher quality. I’ve also gained a new and deeper interest in Guided Inquiry and have purchased Carol Kulthau’s new book, Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. You can read the preface to the book here.

You can view my pathfinder here. Constructive comments are always appreciated. =)

As I work through the planning phase of my assignment it strikes me that these first steps in the information literacy model could be boring for kids and seem to take up a lot of time. The temptation to just dive in and start looking for stuff would be strong. How can we convince them that planning is worth the effort?  Require them to hand in a mind map or research plan as part of their assignment. It suddenly has importance; it is part of the assignment. As a TL in a collaborative planning effort I think I’d push for this to be included in every single project. Still so much emphasis on product out there!

My second thought was to modify the environment — a very powerful tool that’s often overlooked and something I learned from my children’s kinder teacher many years ago.  In this case, the environment is the format of my pathfinder wiki.  I’ve named the pages to reflect each stage of the information process (although the final ones mightn’t be so relevant to the pathfinder).

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As far as my other subsidiary questions in the planning phase – ‘What are my information literacy needs?” and “What are my information organization needs?” I’ve pretty much got them covered. I’ve been reading though my planned readings and using my Inspiration software again. Inspiration now has Webspiration online in Beta so this makes it easy for student use.

I’ve set up a wiki on Wikispaces. This is the sixth wiki I’ve built. I love the useability of PBWorks but have gone with wikispaces because it has a much cleaner look to it even if it is a bit inflexible. Many of the ‘tricks’ mentioned in the Getting tricky with Wikis article I’d read I had trouble with. I’ve dabbled with html code before but many of the sample shots didn’t match my screen so I’m wondering how long ago it was written. The long/short of it was a classic instance of time-wasting for little gain. Side-tracking on the ‘pretties’ rather than focussing on the plan. (Ahem, doesn’t just happen to the kids).

I’ve also spent a lot of time looking at other peoples Pathfinders. I’ve found most of them to be boring in layout and boring in their writing. Some have not been boring, they’ve been an assault on the eyes and some have been gold nuggets. But like gold, hard to find. Here’s a little article with some tips on design/page layout. There are many more articles on the right side-bar on the site, well worth a read.

I also continue to use my NoodleTools for note-taking and citations. Couldn’t live without it.

Onto Step 3 -Gathering Information