Are Dewey’s Days Numbered?: Libraries Nationwide Are Ditching the Old Classification System By Tali Balas Kaplan, Andrea K. Dolloff, Sue Giffard, and Jennifer Still-Schiff on September 28, 2012 Illustration by Victor Juhasz Join the authors for a Twitter chat, Thursday, October 11, at 9 p.m. Pushing between snack time and reading group, Zack, a third-grade boy, ducks into our school library while another class is beginning to check out books. With only a moment to spare, the librarian suggests that Zack look above the shelves for the big “Making Stuff” sign, and then search the labels under “P” for paper. Zack’s “Aha!” Has Metis made a difference? Students aren’t the only ones who are enjoying the ease of navigating our collection. Winter of our discontent Certainly there was no lack of order back in the old days, in 2010, when we still used the Dewey decimal system: our shelves were labeled and organized; the online catalog was accessible; students were taught the basics of searching from the earliest grades. Ditching Dewey Articles of belief The grand plan Springing forward
Chapter 4: Curation in School Libraries | Valenza | Library Technology Reports The school librarians featured in this chapter describe the value of curation to a school’s learning culture. Their efforts ensure that their investment in e-books, databases, and homegrown instructional content is scaled, embedded, and discoverable whenever students need it. Their efforts support flipped and hybrid learning. They use new strategies to display and juxtapose books and other media face-out in imaginative genre gatherings perhaps never before physically arranged. Most important, the school librarians we spoke with shared the importance of curation as a learning activity. They described helping learners connect more easily with appropriate resources and saving teachers instructional time. Curation for Students Shannon McClintock Miller, Van Meter (IA) School (May 22, 2014) Teachers and librarians see the value of developing and modeling the creation of dashboards of resources or launchpads for their learners. BB: How do you define curation? Why reinvent the wheel? Brenda L.
Email Marketing, Content Marketing and Content Curation Tool The Great Question Press Why should teachers nurture potent questioning skills and behaviors? As a practical matter, students need to be able to read between the lines, infer meaning, draw conclusions from disparate clues and avoid the traps of presumptive intelligence, bias and predisposition. They need these thinking skills to score well on increasingly tough school tests, but more importantly, they need these skills to score well on the increasingly baffling tests of life . . . how to vote? how to work? how to love? Drill and practice combined with highly scripted lessons stressing patterns and prescriptions amount to mental robbery - setting low standards for disadvantaged students so they end up incapable of thought or success on demanding tests. This approach contributes to high dropout and attrition rates - early school departures and millions of children left behind.
Ditching Dewey: Making the Move There was quite a lot of moving in the gentrification process for me! We rearranged/moved the fiction books, then the nonfiction books, and shortly after we moved the entire library into our new facility. After all of our fiction books were tagged with their tinted label stickers, it was time to make the move. We decided how we wanted the genres arranged (yes, we did this planning on a napkin!) As usual, was ready to throw myself into the moving process without thinking about it for too terribly long. Although this wasn’t the most complicated part of the process, I found it to be the most overwhelming. I used a different approach with moving nonfiction. My next post will detail the changes made in the catalog, so I won’t get into that now, but I often get the question, “How do your shelvers know what subcategory books belong to?” Just looking back at these pictures overwhelms me! I’ll talk more about this in a future post when I talk about Signage & Arrangement.
App Smashing: 5 Apps for Student Learning Image courtesy EdTechTeacher and Greg Kulowiec App smashing. What’s that, you ask? Take a photo with your phone or tablet. Save it to the camera roll. Import it from the camera roll to an app and draw, highlight, and comment on it. Using multiple apps to build and create content, app smashing is a great way for students to use mobile devices to share their learning. What are the best apps for app smashing? Paper 53 (free, iOS) is a notetaking and sketching app. Popplet ($4.99, iOS) is a mindmapping tool students can use to organize their ideas and thoughts. Book Creator (price varies by device, iOS, Android, Windows) allows students to individually or collaboratively create books with their mobile devices. Explain Everything ($3.99, iOS, Android, Windows, Chrome) is an interactive whiteboard app. TouchCast Studio (free, iOS) is a free video creation app with teleprompter, picture-in-picture, and split-screen capabilities. Use apps that can save work to the camera roll. App Smash Examples
37 Ways Teachers Should Use Pinterest Posted on Sunday February 5, 2012 by Staff Writers There are a lot of great technology tools out there for teachers that can make it easier to connect with other educators, get ideas for classroom activities, and find inspiration. One of the newest and best of these online tools is Pinterest, which has quickly become a favorite among educators. Educators who are curious about Pinterest should sign up for an invitation today (it’s still invite only, but it doesn’t take long to get an invitation) and start creating their own amazing collections of pins. Inspiration Pinterest is ideal for getting inspired on a wide range of topics. Get inspiration for decorating your classroom. Lessons You’ll find a wealth of lessons and ideas on Pinterest to look through. Swap lesson plans. Professional Develop your teaching skills and connect with other professionals using these Pinterest ideas. Collaborate with other teachers and educators. Fun Pinterest doesn’t have to be all business. Find inspiration.
*The Art of Weeding | Collection Management Getting rid of books can feel uncomfortable and look bad to community members, but careful weeding is key to the health of a collection. There’s an uncomfortable truth about library stacks that most librarians know but many don’t like to admit: those shelves hold a lot of junk that has to make way for the new titles getting published every day. Considering the volume of material libraries deal with, and the span of time over which those titles have been acquired, it’s not surprising. Pulling that chaff from the collection can be time-consuming for librarians with no dearth of other projects needing their attention. So why go to the trouble? Meanwhile, freeing up physical space devoted to books that never leave the stacks makes more room to buy new materials that will circulate—and sometimes cash to do so, when weeded materials are resold. Slow and steady Dumpster dismay “Even if all the weeded books meet the weeding criteria, the sheer volume can get people worked up,” says Hibner. Step 1
Why it’s important to smash a few apps (or what’s on your palette?) Lately when I think about how I am going to accomplish a digital task, I find that I automatically consider the task as a creative process, a process that makes me dig into my digital toolkit or examine my digital palette, usually more than once, to discover new synergies. I’ve come to discover what I’ve been doing is commonly called app smashing. Roughly defined, app smashing refers to the act of using multiple digital tools or apps to achieve a creative goal. The term is generally attributed to Greg Kulowiec (@gregkulowiec) of EdTech Teacher who explains and demonstrates the concept in this video: Intro to App-Smashing from misterkling on Vimeo. So you might take a bunch of photos on your iPad during a field trip. Why share this concept with learners? App smashing encourages learners to: curate their own dashboards of optionsunderstand app categories/genres and affordances For inspiration, try a Pinterest search or search the hashtags #appsmash or #appsmashing. #whatsonyourpalette
Digital School Library Leaves Book Stacks Behind