Happy Easter Holidays!

We here at the Mothership wish you all
a well-deserved long weekend,
as well as bouquets and a here-to-stay Spring!

(free photo in the public domain from morguefile)

It's spring -- when the world is puddle-wonderful!
-- e. e. cummings

GiggleIT Project

In need of a little fun for your students between now and June? Have a look at the GiggleIT Project, and join educators from around the world working with children ages 10 to 14 who are searching for fun. Have your students meet Gigglecritter who loves to laugh and searches the world for tall and funny stories, gags and jokes, limericks and tales of the weird and wonderful.

Let's help make Vancouver the first funny young Canadians! To register your funny class, click here. And some of you may remember Australian TL Pat Carmichael, hard at work behind the scenes here, for her session about Sproosejoos and "just doing" collaboration during the 9-day conference in February!

World Digital Library

Also on the world scene is the anticipated launch of the World Digital Library on April 21, 2009. The project, co-sponsored by UNESCO and several national libraries, "will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

Writes California TL Tom Kaun (whose wonderful Bessie Chin Library at Redwood High in Larkspur, CA, I toured last summer), it looks as though there will be some cool tools -- translation, audio transcription, etc. -- of the documents in the database. We can all be looking forward to exploring what looks like a really rich resource for the international community.

Interesting Bookmarks, Libraries, and Bookstores

Thanks, Donna, from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, for this lovely link that, besides surely being the most comprehensize site ever on bookmarks, provides links to stunning photographs of the world's most interesting bookstores and libraries. Now that I have viewed these and found none in Italy, I will simply have to scout out Italy's most beautiful bookstores and libraries. Mercifully, one library in the photo gallery doesn't require a lot of travelling for us here in BC. And thankfully, these ventures to magnificent libraries are always part of the IASL Conference agenda. Anyone coming along to Padua (near Venice) this summer with me and Chris?

Bulk Buy = Digital Storytelling by Jason Ohler

Maryann is compiling a bulk buy for the Digital Storytelling book Dr Ohler introduced us to at Technology Day in February (see also blog entry, March 8). Did you get a copy of the order form sent out to Pro D chairs and administrators? I can fix that. Are there staff members in your school who attended and who wished they had picked up a copy of this book? Perhaps you need to see your Pro D chair about purchasing one for your school library's Professional collection? All orders, with COA numbers or cheques, are due to MK in MLST by April 29.

Meet Phil Bradley

From Jo Anne at Tech comes this recommendation: Feb 1 09 issue of Booklist identifies Phil Bradley's weblog "where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development." The first sentence of the review reads:
"There are plenty of people blogging about technology, but Bradley, librarian and Internet consultant, reports on developments as they relate specifically to libraries." Notes Jo Anne, it looks fairly extensive and very useful.

On looking this week (April 7), I found that Bradley features a cool looking tool which, if you like words, you'll love playing around with. It's called Visuwords, ... a graphical dictionary. Type in your word and you're more likely than not to end up with a graphical creation. You can hover your mouse over each definition and click to re-search the dictionary. The coloured links indicate useful information about the word and its relationship to other words. It uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers.

There simply cannot be enough ways to engage our students and selves with text, right? Thanks, Jo Anne. So now we can all follow Phil now as I am adding him to the Related Blogs (left hand sidebar here).

Social Networking Sites
How Much Access? Who Decides?

Schools and Online Social Networking by Dr. Nancy Willard, Director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, as posted to Education World, provides some really helpful advice about approaching student use of social networking sites with educationally sound principles. You can also check out Nancy's Centre site.

Article Abstract: Most educators working with middle and high school students are aware of the explosive involvement of youth on social networking sites. Few are prepared to deal with it. Internet safety expert Nancy Willard discusses the risks and benefits of such sites and offers schools a comprehensive approach to addressing student Internet access. Included are advice for parents and teachers as well as online guidelines for students.

Wikipedia generation is lazy

Toronto Star Education Reporter Kristin Rushowy created quite a frenzy of comments in response to her article "Profs blast lazy first-year students" this week: TheStar, April 6, 2009. It's one thing for our high school students to avoid databases in favour of finding the "good enough" answers of Google (a technique called satisficing) as the only search tool of value and Wikipedia as a citable academic source. It's quite another to imagine our students heading off to do academic research not knowing how to find a book or even how to ask for help. Oh dear. Things, the article would suggest, are going downhill rapidly as students' skills are poorer now than three years ago.

What might be the causes of this decline? Do today's students' have a sense of entitlement, also called attitude issues? Are we seeing the effects of underresourcing in the public secondary school system? Is society inculcating leisure values and concurrently a poor work ethic? Have recent structural changes in Ontario's education system -- students are now coming a year earlier than before -- created this "blip," which would suggest the same is not true for other Canadian loci such as BC? Are we graduating students who lack critical thinking skills and the ability to work independently?

Interestingly, at a SLRCCC last Fall, we had asked our UBC and SFU academic librarians to survey those who work with our "undergraduates" in the university libraries. What, we asked, are the ten things our graduates need to know if they are to succeed with the demands of academe? The first drafts came in this week quite coincidentally as Toronto assessed its own dilemma. We are saving the answers for the Secondary TL May 28 pm Update at the UBC Ike Barber Learning Centre, formerly the Main Library and still that in part. Have you registered online for this event yet?

Assessment Webcasts are Now Archived

Should your teacher colleagues or administrators want to follow up (catch up?) with the Ministry of Education's Assessment for Learning Webcast series of three presented this year, they are now fully archived with print materials including handouts and powerpoint presentations for taking notes. While over two hours long, I think they are really worthwhile. Also archived in the same format are the six Informed Assessment Practices webcasts from the previous two years.

Virtual Bookmark

Looking for some professional reading this weekend? Have you checked out the Virtual Bookmark lately? Al Smith, TL extraordinaire from Kelowna, keeps us all up to date with news and features relevant to thinking educators who work in BC's school libraries today. Could be good for a quiet few moments over the holiday weekend.

A Month on the Pro D Circuit

.

The End of a 9-Day Conference?

For some of us, it has just begun. It was hard to get into the Transforming School Libraries Online Conference, to find the time to stay current on the presentations, and to learn our ways around. We will be in much better shape for the next one, I can assure you. Occasionally as I popped in an out of places, I virtually ran into people I knew. Thankfully, the conference will remain "up" for us to poke around and consider the artifacts for a month or two longer, and I found some fascinating things.

.

But first, you just have to listen to and watch this beautiful international/global video version of the song Stand By Me where, performing together but in vastly separate stages, are artists from around the world. There is a youtube version of this, but the original and other songs performed on the global stage and the articulation of a vision of peace through music are found on the Playing for Change website. I found this, as I wandered through information about various conference presenters, on Edmonton TL Arlene Lipkewich's short-lived blog. She challenged her students to consider the youtube version (both blog and youtube are Web 2.0 tools) and the way in which it was created.

.

As I started to say, some of us were just a little overwhelmed by arriving just-in-time at the very complicated Sosius platform and the various places and formats in which information and conversations were happening. I really enjoyed Arlene's voicethread presentation on various Technologies for Learning, old and new. In this Web 2.0 presentation, we looked at how hardware, software, and 'webware' can be used for both teacher and student learning. Now there remains no evidence I attended the session as I didn't actually log in, just observed and kept an eye on the discussions ... but you will find others we know there, like Pat from Gladstone and Karen from Victoria too.

.

Arriving at a presentation a few days late didn't matter as participation was asynchronous. Notice that some of the participants in this discussion presented themselves in text and others used audio features. This was my first ever voicethread discussion; I think it offered a great learning opportunity for many of the conference attendees and you will see and hear their learning as they go along. While this is ultimately a long presentation and discussion, it is really interesting: how might this format be useful for working with teachers as well as students?

I also participated in a regional meeting of the westcoast conference attendees using a webtool new to me called Mobee. Needless to say, it cannot be accessed through our district filters as it is a chat program, or so we discovered at the TL Studio this week ... but you can enter the chat rooms at home using any chat tool. That is, you don't have to be using the same tool. I don't chat much but my gmail has chat capacity, so in I went to the "tsl" (transforming school libraries) chat room for a fun two hours of library-chatting one evening. James Henri and Sandra Lee were there too. I will have to go back as there were some fantastic "library" videos added to the discussion wall.

Not all the sessions are accessible from the outside but I am happy to be able to show you some of the tools being used for TL discussions and professional growth. Another open-access site within the conference is Coquitlam TL Judith Comfort's online consideration of the seamless and blended nature of collaboration between Ts and TLs at bestlibrary for online learning support, both for Ts and for students.

I also went to Anne Robinson's Librain blog of the online conference. Anne is in the UK. I think you will find lots here to think about from Anne's report and I see no need to repeat, only to recommend you peruse her discussions of the event at this link. Thanks, Anne, for this.

Does social networking produce cognitive side effects?

Facebook and Bebo risk ‘infantilising’ the human mind

Posted to IASL listserv by Gerald Brown, Winnipeg, from The Guardian (U.K.), Feb. 2

British physiologist Lady Susan Greenfield warns that social-network sites risk infantilizing the 21st-century mind, leaving it characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity. Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College, told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social-networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance ...."

Here is the audio link to Lady Greenfield speaking on social networking and your health.

BCTF Conference for New/er Teachers

What? These don't look "new/er" to you?

I stopped by the Radisson Hotel to see how Janet, Katharine, and Michele were doing in their presentation at the BCTF New/er Teachers' Conference about the ways they could collaborate with TLs. Put on out in Richmond on Friday, Val H was on duty for the provincial association at the BCTLA table. I scored lunch which was fantastic. So was this presentation. Thanks to all for the work that went into the session, as well as the commitment, to promoting collaboration with our teacher-colleagues to create meaningful learning experiences and enjoyable learning communities.


Did you know?

The Very Hungry Caterpillar is 40 years old!

From Twitter / School Library Journal: "Librarians and other educators are encouraged to download an activity kit,which includes a free commemorative 40th anniversary poster featuring classroom activities on the back, and a booklet with cross-curricular lesson plans, booklists, and arts and crafts projects such as a make your own Very Hungry Caterpillar mobile."

Posted from IASL: Manitoba - Brown / Stinson

And that, dear collagues, was quite a month of professional development, wasn't it! Don't worry if you couldn't keep the pace. I never quite caught up to the pace. Needless to say, we all have lots to learn. We can perhaps claim ground as leaders in modelling teachers-as-lifelong-learners!

See you next week.