Four things every student should learn and primroses

From eSchool News this week, an article from Alan November who is known to me mainly as an advocate of teaching students how to be discriminating web users e.g. his well known 1998 article Teaching Zach to think. In the present article, November highlights what he sees as 4 things every student should learn, and adds that not all schools are teaching these 4 things. OK, you cynics out there might argue that he wouldn’t write about things that every school was teaching. His 4 things are: global empathy; social and ethical responsibility on the web; the permanence of information posted online; and critical thinking about the information found online. November refers to the importance of teaching students how to ‘tear apart information on the web’ and I think he’s right. Maybe no great surprises in this article for many TLs. Get your teachers to read it!

Spring has not sprung yet here in the south east of Scotland and the cold winter we’ve had (lots of older people saying ‘It’s nice to have a real winter) continues. I should explain that this means that day temperatures are about 4-5 degrees this week – that may or not be cold for you, depending on where you are in the world. However, the crocuses are out, albeit that they stay closed nearly all the time. What is adding a nice splash of colour to my garden are the primroses in different colours (see photo below) . Primroses mean ‘prime’ or ‘first’ roses as they flower in the winter/early spring. If flowers have characters, maybe these ‘prim’ roses are well behaved and dress conservatively, and maybe ‘wild’ roses cavort about in the dark when we’re not looking. If you can absolutely prove that they don’t, let me know.

Primroses in February

TL or SL? and The Road

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has recently decided that the person managing the school library should  be called the school librarian, as opposed to the library media specialist  or teacher librarian. The article on this decision quotes the AASL as arguing that the term school librarian ‘reflects the role of the 21st century library professional as leader, instructional partner, information specialist, teacher and program administrator’. Some USA librarians in schools (note the subtle difference) would have preferred the term teacher librarian and one is quoted as stating that teacher librarian  ‘would have moved us over to the essential core group in school instead of under the list of non-essentials..’. I think that most Australian and North American TLs would agree. What is interesting of course, is that the term teacher librarian is used in parts of the UK – but not in Scotland – to denote teachers who have no school library qualification but who are given some hours to run the library. In Scotland and in many schools in England, the term school librarian is used as these professionals are qualified librarians but not qualified teachers. Does it matter? Have a think about it.

Last week, I went to see the film The Road. While many reviewers limited their generosity to 3/5 stars, I thought that the film was excellent. I admit bias here as I am a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and the film is an interpretation of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name. The film, set in a post-apocalyptic USA is by turn chilling, terrifying, uplifting, hopeless, hopeful and  heart-rendering. My attitude to films of books is that there is no need for a film to be a replication  of a novel, as it is an interpretation i.e. a different artefact. No two people read a book in exactly the same way – we all interpret the story and envisage the characters in our own way. See the film and certainly read the book.

Branding the school library and swans

I was reading an article the other day about how Barack Obama had turned the presidency into a brand and it set me thinking what a school library brand might look like. A brand gives a product an individual identity e.g. a Volkswagen Beetle car or Starbucks coffee shops. The idea is that people can recognise certain qualities from the brand name. So if the brand is the school library, what is the brand? Books, access to the web, the teacher/school librarian, knowledge, information literacy? Branding is alluded to in Valenza and Johnson’s article which is very worth reading as it may make you think about how you would like to brand the library and how you think you might go about persuading your school community to recognise that brand e.g. seing the school library as a virtual as well as a physical space.

Out walking on Sunday last, 3 groups of swans took off from a wee loch at St Abbs Head and conducted a flyover, swaying above the cliffs and down through the valley where the loch provides them with nesting cover. You could hear the wings flapping and the constant calls from each group. Were they discussing what they could see as my wife and I were discussing what we could see? Improbable but not impossible, methinks. The photo below was taken from a distance but if any of you can lipread swans, then let me know what they were saying. 

No blog next week as I’m on leave. Blog back in wb 1st Feb 2010.

Swans at St Abbs Head

E-books and garden bird

I was doing some reading about learning in schools and went on to the CSU Library and discovered (yes, to my shame, I should have known this) the extent to which the collection of e-books  has risen over the past couple of years. I’m quite comfortable with reading e-books as, because I work at home for most of the year, I tend not print out material in the same way as I might when I’m on campus in Wagga Wagga. The fact that you can download e-books i.e. borrow them for up to 7 days, is a great help and download times are not all that onerous – you do need to have broadband of course. The extent to which e-books have become more prevalent in school libraries has not (I think but correct me if you know otherwise) been the subject of empirical research but anecdotally, there does appear to be more TLs who are encouraging the purchase and use of e-books.

Sitting at my laptop a couple of weeks ago – when the snow was still on the ground – I was alerted to a fluttering on my windowsill and I looked round to see a plumpish bird with a speckled, reddish breast, sitting on the windowsill outside. Of course, by the time I got my camera ready, it had flown off. I assume this was because the bird saw me as some kind of ornothological paparazzi who would splash the photo all over the web. OK, maybe I just moved and it took fright. Despite this, two more of these birds appeared in the garden and I managed to snap them through the window. Not ideal but if I had open the front door and tried to catch them directly, I’m sure they would have flown off. I think that the birds were fieldfares which come here in winter from Scandinavia. See the photo below and if you are more ornithologically observant than I am, let me know.

Bird in the snow

TACCLE and James Ellroy

Thanks to Luisa Marquardt for posting information on IASL-LINK about the TACCLE (Teachers’ Aids on Creating Content for Learning Environments) project. TACCLE seeks to ‘help teachers [TLs and school librarians also] develop state of the art content for e-learning in general and for learning environments in particular’. The project has produced a handbook which you can download after registering or you can register to be sent a printed copy. E-learning is coming to a school very near you and very soon, if it’s not there yet. The TL as resource creator will become more important in schools as we move towards digital libraries in schools where students have e-learning as a normal part of their curriculum.

I’m reading James Ellroy’s new book ‘Blood’s a Rover’. This is crime/political thriller at its very best. It’s not for the fainthearted as the book features a series of extremely flawed characters living in the late 1960s and 1970s who are involved in subverting mainstream government and politics. There are also appearances by real people – J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes and Richard Nixon – and there is much speculation about the plots to kill J F Kennedy and Martin Luther King. There is some gratuitous violence in the book and much political machination. If you like your fiction to be enthralling, sometimes funny, sometimes gruesome, and always fast paced, with a language of its own, then this is for you. Miss Marple is certainly is not.

2010 predictions and snow

Firstly, a very Good New Year to all readers of this blog. Thinking about a new year and how people make predictions, I came across a reference to some predictions for 2010 in relation to educational technology. The article highlighted 5 predictions i.e. 1) e-books will continue to proliferate 2) NetBook functionality will grow 3) More teachers will use interactive whiteboards 4) Personal devices will infiltrate the classroom and 5) Technology will enable tailored curricula. So no great surprises there although it is interesting that no. 4 uses the word ‘infiltrate’, a word usually associated with secret and possibly illicit activities. The fact that some students will bring their own web connectivity on their smart phones is commented on in economic terms in the article. If you had to make 5 predictions about your school library or your role as a TL or school librarian in 2010, what would the list include? Think about it as it might help you identify your priorities. No need to make the predictions public of course.

Here in the south of Scotland, we’ve had the first real winter for nearly 30 years. It  has snowed and the snow has stayed with us for at least a couple of weeks. Where I live in Dunbar, I’m right on the coast, so the salty air tends to keep the temperature up and less snow falls than, for example, on the hills a couple of miles away. I’ve put a few snowy photos – taken at the golf course nearby and put them on my Flickr site. I’ve included one below as a starter. The snow has gone now and the crocus bulbs have sprouted – no flowers yet. As the poet Shelley wrote ‘O Wind/If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?’.

Snow on the golf course

Google monopoly and summer/winter

If you are interested in the future of books, in either print or digital form – and you should be – there’s an intriguing article in the New York Review of Books and reprinted at the weekend in The Guardian. The article by Robert Darnton dissects the legal and moral arguments in relation to Google’s attempt to digitise the world of books. What  is particularly interesting – and potentially scary, depending on your viewpoint – is that Google could well end up with ultimate control over our access to digitised books and could, in theory, limit our access to certain books. Darnton writes fluently and comes up with an intriguing idea i.e. that the US government should replace Google as the controller and provider of digitised books in a kind of universal public library. His article is aimed mainly at north American readers and I’m sure that suggestions of a more international body for digitised books would find favour across the world. The legal process goes on and we need to watch it.

Here in Scotland, it’s winter. This time of year is often referred to as ‘midwinter’ although technically this is not the case as December is the first winter month. Many of you reading this will be in summer and perhaps enjoying, or getting ready to enjoy the summer holidays. This is the final blog entry for 2009. So I wish you all best wishes for whatever festive season you may be celebrating- if indeed you are celebrating one. Back in 2010.

Futurelab newsletter and Through the Square Window

The biannual newsletter sent out by Futurelab is always worth dipping into. This edition has a range of articles and podcasts which relate to innovation. In the vision Magazine, for example, there is an excellent article on Tim Rylands who has used games to increase student engagement with the curriculum, but has also introduced other innovations which combine high tech and low tech, with the emphasis being on student learning and creativity. We can’t all have Tim Rylands’ commitment and energy but we can learn from some of what he does in the classroom. A second part of this newsletter is the podcast on new technologies and learning e.g. prezi which is an advanced presentation tool, giving students a wider range of choices than PowerPoint or animoto which promises to deliver ‘beautifully orchestrated video pieces’ from photos and videos. It is also, according to the website, ’shockingly easy’. Try it out and see what you think. There is much more in the Futurelab newsletter to whet your ICT appetite.

The new Poetry Book Society Choice dropped through my letter box recently and it is a book of poems by the Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey. The book is called Through the Square Window and contain a wide range of poems on topics but she is particularly good on landscape, including the nearby lough, which is an Irish word for a loch (Scotland) and is pronounced the same way, and lake (England and elsewhere). For example, ‘A liner in the foreground of the Lough… white as a tent in Plantagenet France’; or, in the same poem, ‘Ducks were tugging each other out to sea./they rode each wave the liner sent percussively.’ Stimulating poetry.

Rich tasks and festive running

I was at my local school today, interviewing the headteacher/principal about students on work experience and how they experience different information environments in the workplace than at school, in many cases. We also talked abut the school’s Rich Tasks programme which is a cross curricular initiative which involves year 7 students in a range of skills and activities, including information literacy. The Rich Tasks programme has its origins in Queensland and has now been adopted in a number of Scottish education authorities. In one area of my local school – Dunbar Grammar School, which I attended in my youth – students are engaged in modern languages, ICT and art and in another area, where they look at a disaster area in the world, they are engaged in craft, design and technology and  geography. One of the elements of both projects is the development of students’ information literacy skills as they are engaged in collaborative research and the school librarian is an active member of the team. I will learn more about this in 2010.

On Sunday, I was involved in doing timing and taking photographs for Dunbar Running Club’s  annual Festive Half Marathon/10K (which turned out to be 7 miles i.e. 11.34K). Every year, different runners turn up dressed in festive costumes to do the runs and this year, there were 2 fairies, an elf and a Xmas tree. What was worrying was that husband and wife team Santa Claus and SANDRA Claus did not turn up for either run. What the implications might be for children across the world on 25th December is anyone’s guess. The information has not been released to the financial markets, in case shares drop dramatically because of fears of non-delivery. Visit the club’s website for photos of festive runners. The photo below shows a fairy on the bridge and a man in a red top – SC in disguise?

Festive runners

21st century skills update and pigeons

From eSchool News, comes a report that the MILE (Milestones for Improving Learning and Education) guide for 21st century skills has been updated from its launch in 2003. The new guide was launched at the AASL National Conference ,which I have attended once and it’s huge, with over 2200 delegates milling around everywhere and it’s one of these conferences where if you meet people once, don’t rely on seeing them again. Despite that it’s a very invigorating experience. The updated guide to 21st Century Skills includes a poster which you can download. The article in eSchool News states that new guidelines on implementation have been included e.g. “a visual mapping and self-assessment instrument”, to allow authorities and schools to gauge implementation. So it looks very useful. Of course, we all must question whether there could possible be a discrete set of 21st century skills which our students can use effectively and accept that many skills, e.g. higher order thinking skills have been around for many centuries, in both oral and written cultures.

If you like pigeons - look away now and do NOT look at the photo below. If you think cities should protect their public sculptures from pesky pigeons, then you may admire the strategy I saw recently in Abu Dhabi. I was walking back to my hotel down a street with lots of public sculptures (see previous entry for example) and this man appeared and started laying down handfuls of grain on the pavement. At first I thought he may be an eccentric bird lover and I wondered if he’d be allowed to do this. After the pigeons flocked off the nearby monuments, I noticed that there was a metal diamond around the pigeons. I then saw a wire going from this diamond to a man, about 20 metres away, holding a wire. He pulled the wire and a net closed over the pigeons. I snapped (see below) the man approaching the netted pigeons but left after that. As to the fate of the pigeons – who knows. In Scotland, pigeons are known as doos. So this paragraph has been about the Abu Dhabi doos (with apologies to Fred Flintstone).

Pigeons.net