the media window

I’ve been pretty busy updating this blog and creating some new blogs as well lately. It’s time consuming, and I’m not sure the effort will pay off for some of them, but we shall see.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Finally added this post to my Media Window blog.
• Updated Ms Dahl’s Media Shelf blog that is linked on my school website. Right now it is chock full of information on the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award program.
• Created the Maud Hart Lovelace Readers Book Club blog. This is designed to allow fourth and fifth grade students who are participating in MHL reading to write comments and later to post about the current Division I titles they have read this year.
• Since I maintain the Maud Hart Lovelace Book Award website, I also added a blog for that organization as well. This is the one that I’m not sure will survive, as adding content regularly may prove difficult for me timewise.

Here are just a few of the signs that my mind is coming back to the media/teaching world and summer’s end is not too far away:

I read a thought-provoking blog entry today at Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog titled Censorship by omission. It has to do with internet filtering by school districts and how it affects teaching and learning in our classrooms in very real ways. This was evidenced by several twitter responses Dr. Johnson quickly received when he asked for examples of the effects of internet filtering from his colleagues. He asserts that the constant erosion of intellectual freedom is “because individual teachers, librarians, techs, student and parents don’t speak up, take action or ask questions. Internet censorship is a sin of omission because too many of us are just willing to let it happen”. For me, one constraint is the time factor. If it isn’t easy to fix, it stays broken and I usually move on to something else. Food for thought as I near the start of the next school year.

I was checking out the call for volunteers for the K12 Online Conference 2009. The theme this year is “Bridging the Divide”. This is a fantastic resource for any educator who wants to learn more about integrating technology into their classroom. It is free, and the conference is run entirely online by volunteers who are on the cutting edge of new thinking in the digital education world. Here’s a clip from the conference home describing the offerings: “This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of November 30, 2009. The following two weeks, December 7-11 and December 14-17, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view.” One summer I received graduate credits for attending the conference and then writing and reflecting with others on the great presentations that year. This is an amazing and extremely worthwhile event! You will share ideas with people across the globe!

I shared a great resource I came upon recently with a good friend and colleague Sheila ,  called James Patterson’s READKIDDOREAD.COM. While there are many talented people involved with this great resource that is “dedicated to making kids readers for life”, the two that I immediately recognized were James Patterson (Maximum Ride series)  and Judy Freeman, a well known children’s literature consultant. Definitely worth checking out this website for excellent book suggestions for boys and girls, author interviews as well as a social network component that all can join. Good stuff here!

I took another class on Dreamweaver at TIES last week, and then made plans to get together with another media specialist to explore ideas, tips and tricks to develop and improve our school websites.

Finally, I’m writing a post on my media window blog, but lucky for me I am lounging in my porch swing on a perfect summer Sunday while doing it. Thankfully, summer is not completely over!

Amplifying the possibilities! This is the theme for the K12 Online Conference. I participated in the conference for the first time last year. This past summer I earned graduate credit for “attending” the conference months after it had finished. The beauty of K12 Online is that it remains online well after it actually happens! Here’s a link to an earlier post I wrote about taking the class for credit. I learned so much doing that, and would highly recommend it to anyone thinking about it. Remember that you can do it later, you don’t need to enroll for the course until you are ready to do so. Here’s the link to the information on attending the conference for credit.

FotoViewr is a cool new tool that I ran across while reading the contributions from the  diigo educator’s group I belong to. Fred Delventhal contributed this link, and it’s a visual treat so thanks!
You can create a variety of 3D slideshows from your Flickr sets or tags, and then email a link for friends to see or grab the code to embed in your blog. Here’s what the “floor” effect looks like. Just click on a photo to view it:

Here are some brief comments on recent School Library Journal articles that I have read.
Copyright Questions?
One excellent feature of School Library Journal is the column Carrie on Copyright. In it, the author takes reader’s real life copyright questions and helps them to determine whether they are copyright compliant or not. In education there is the “fair use” component of copyright, and that is also taken into consideration. As a media specialist who comes across many “gray areas” that make me wonder whether they are legal or not, it is really helpful to be able to read her thoughts on these issues as she writes them so clearly and in language that “regular” people can understand! Carrie Russell is the American Library Association’s copyright specialist, and SLJ is careful to note that “ Carrie’s comments are not to be considered legal advice.”

Election 2008!
In the current issue of SLJ there is an article titled Fab Websites on the 2008 Presidential Election. What more teachable moment could you have? This election will be historic no matter what outcome it has, so I really appreciated Eric Langhorst’s article that suggests several good websites and resources for teachers to use before the November election.

Picturing America (NEH)
The article in SLJ is to notify public schools and libraries of a program from the National Endowment for the Humanities called Picturing America. They are expanding this program which gives 40 posters depicting American art and history to schools and libraries around the country. The link to apply to receive the posters is here. You may also see the wonderful artwork that is included in this project at the NEH website. Hurry, the deadline is October 31st, 2008.

You may already know of these websites, but even if you do, I have discovered lately that it really can pay off for me in terms of my own educational knowledge base to find new websites to learn from and also to revisit those that I already know about. Good educational websites are dynamic and change with the educational times! With that in mind, I am taking a look at four particular websites today to see what they are about currently and to possibly locate good information for me as a media specialist and teacher in an elementary setting.

International Society for Technology in Education
According to their website “ISTE provides leadership and service to improve teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK–12 and teacher education.” It is a resource place for many useful publications, finding jobs and job seekers, getting technology education, and learning the recommended standards in technology for students, teachers and administrators. ISTE is a nonprofit organization and benefits from becoming a member can be found here. I have appreciated this organization for the guidance NETS provides, and as a place for me to learn more about education and professional development throug their Second Life presence on ISTE island.

Library of Congress
According to James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, “The Library of Congress is the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections.” It is a vast website that you can wander around in for hours. I love best the Digital Collections area, where you can find old newspaper articles, wonderful collections of historic photographs, maps and so much more. There are separate resource areas developed for kids and families, teachers, librarians, publishers, researchers and visitors in this website and each of them is specially designed to meet the needs of that particular group.

American Library Association
The ALA website is getting a makeover and you can see what it look like here. As they complete the changeover this fall, you can still access their old website. The ALA’s mission is “to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”
the ALA has provided many scholarships and awards over time, including the prestigious Caledecott and Newbery awards that are given to authors and illustrators each year. I use it professionally as well when making careful purchases from my media budget as I usually scan  the Children’s Notable Lists for good ideas for our media center.

School Library Journal
SLJ is not only a wonderful print journal, it also has a great online presence as well! All of the current school library news, current trends, interviews with authors and illustrators will be found here. As a media specialist, SLJ is one of the resources that I can rely on for excellent reviews of current titles that I may purchase for my media center. It’s just one of the best!

Recently, I took some time to explore Edutopia, another super website for educators. The George Lucas Foundation is the host of Edutopia. If you would like to read a little more from George Lucas himself, here’s a link to his views on the purpose of Edutopia in education.
It was really easy to find several videos of interest to me by narrowing my search to technology integration.
One of the videos I found of interest was titled Learning Landscape: Kids Monitor Terrain with Tech. It was about a classroom without walls project at  J.A Hughes Elementary in Red Lake Falls, Minnesota. Their school is near Glacial Ridge Wildlife Refuge, a recently developed prairie restoration project of the Nature Conservancy. Through the partnership of the school, a technology grant and the Nature Conservancy, the students of the school are now involved in monitoring the emergence of the prairie and sharing what they learn with scientists at the Nature Conservancy. This is a fantastic project that involves the students in real life, hands on learning with the right kind of technological equipment needed to do the job.
Each student is paired to particular plants and animals and they become the “go to” person or expert on them. Others rely on them to know their stuff, so it gives the students real incentive to learn. Another nice feature of this program is having the oldest students become the leaders who then pass on their knowledge to the lower grades so that the project can carry on from year to year.
Another very interesting video from Edutopia was in keeping with the vision that George Lucas has for the future of education. The title is No Gamer Left Behind: Virtual Learning Goes to the Next Level and it is an interesting bid for today’s schools to step up and embrace the idea that gaming can be turned to an advantage if students were allowed to learn through “playing games”. Some of the points that were made in this video were interesting, particularly the idea that when learning in a virtual world (in a medical field for instance) it is possible to “make mistakes without risk”. Rather than practicing on real patients, the simulations can provide realistic situations for students to learn and take risks without harm. One part of this video showed how a virtual game called Civilization engaged ten and eleven year old students so thoroughly that their grades in social studies improved considerably. Another feature was of a high school that changed its focus to bio-technology and digital media. The students there were not only designers but they also helped scientists to de-bug virtual programs that they were working on! This video is well worth checking out. I see the direction that education can take, and wonder sometimes how it can possibly all happen!

According to their site guide “the New York Times Learning Network is a free service for students in grades 3-12, their teachers and parents.”  I decided to take the guided tour of the website, and I am glad that I did because it made me aware of useful features within the website (such as linked vocabulary and geography terms) that I might not have noticed on my own.
Each weekday, in addition to many other cool things, this website highlights a news article from the New York Times and provides a related lesson plan for it. The articles are full text, recent articles and a very nice feature for students and teachers is the “Knowledge Tools” that can be turned on to highlight difficult words and geographical places. By a simple click you can get the definition of a word or see a location on a map. The lesson plans are constructed by educators and they focus on a different subject area each day, so for instance, on Thursday you will find a lesson plan related to technology and/or economics, math, journalism, while Tuesdays are devoted to science and/or health. They are also standards based, and it is easy to link to the standard the lesson relates to. One thing I did notice is that the lessons are actually for grades 6-12, so it would appear that this is definitely a middle school and high school resource as far as lesson plans, although I can see using several of its features in the elementary setting as well. Word of the Day, and  Student Letters to the Editor would work in the upper elementary grades.
One technology related lesson plan that I came across was called Internet Seek and Find which is designed to help teach students better ways to use the Internet search engines. I am always happy to find information and lesson plans related to this topic, as I think that doing searches on the internet is one of the most difficult tasks for students (teachers too!).

The Scholastic website offers a wealth of materials for everyone. Here’s a quick look at a few areas of their online presence.
Lesson Plans: Right away I saw a lesson plan for a book that I love to read to students but have not used too often as I have never developed a lesson plan of my own for it. The teacher who wrote the lesson plan for David Shannon’s A Bad Case of Stripes, Gayle Berthiaume (a distinguished teacher from Becker, MN) suggests that it be read during the first week of school as an avenue for discussion about worries that students may have, concerns about feeling different, or even being bullied. She then has the students draw pictures of themselves in the manner of the girl in the story. They can decorate their portraits with worries or concerns that they may have or with something that they love doing. I like this simple idea and may try it with the 2nd and 3rd grade classes that I see.
Next I decided to search for possible lessons using graphic novels.  We have a number of graphic novels that I have purchased already and the students are interested in them and enjoy checking them out. There will be an artist in residence coming in awhile who is helping students create their own graphic novels, which is why I offered to introduce the genre to the students.  My search proved fruitful as I was able to print a discussion guide titled “Using Graphic Novels with Children & Teens: Including BONE by Jeff Smith“. I will be able to read this and learn from it and can also share it with the teachers in the building whose students are working with the artist in residence. I also found that Scholastic has a wonderful interactive website called Amulet that I am looking forward to sharing with students, as it allows students to create their own graphic novel stories with the characters who dwell in the world of Amulet.
Teaching Strategies
If you click on the Teaching Strategies tab in Scholastic, you will be able to link to a series of short articles that relate to using digital cameras in the primary grades. The first article gives you good suggestions on what price and type of digital camera to buy, and the next is a handy reminder for teaching your young students ahead of time how to care for and be careful of the digital camera. A third article gives some great ideas on actual activities to do with your students. One that I would love to share with the first grade teachers in my building is an alphabet activity, where the students make their own ABC book from digital pictures they take. The final article had suggestions on how to involve students in altering their own digital images. The author suggested that even third grade could use Adobe Elements, so I will consider that. I usually have my fourth and fifth grade students use that digital imaging tool, but I am certainly open to the idea. One tip that I truly appreciate is having the youngest students use KidPix after taking their pictures. I had never thought of using KidPix as a digital imaging tool, so I was really interested to see that as a suggestion for working with younger students after they took the pictures, and had to do something with them. I will definitely be trying that out with first grade this year. All in all, some good ideas here in Teaching Strategies!
Librarians:
Since I’m an elementary media specialist, I decided to see what there was for me in the Librarian’s area of Scholastic. You need to click on the More tab to find it in the drop down menu. I’m somewhat familiar with the business end of the Scholastic website for librarians, so it was interesting to explore what else was there for me. The Weekly Web Finds by Kerry Prendergast offered links to various items that caught the eye of the writer of this column, such as government papers and cute animal pictures. I then linked to another column called Kid Lit Kit: Your Toolkit for Teaching with Books. You will find plenty of interesting author and book links to read about. In the entry I read, Jeremy Brunaccioni (the author of Kid Lit Kit) revisited Jan Brett’s website and reminded us that this ever generous author has tons of new things for teachers to use in their classrooms. He also mentioned 39 Clues, which is a new series by Scholastic, so I will be checking that out soon as it looks very interesting. I decided to subscribe to this blog as it really looks as if there are consistently good links here.
Last but not least, I grabbed the widget for Scholastic’s Teacher Book Wizard and put it on the media center website for my school. It’s a nifty online tool that helps you to “find and level books for students”. What’s nice is that it searches for books from all publishers, not just Scholastic.

Education World has been around on the internet since 1996. This great website has been recognized with many awards for its timely offerings of lesson plans, professional development and technology integration for busy teachers and administrators. One valuable feature (among many!) of Education World is a search engine right on their home page that allows you to search for ONLY education related websites, which could be quite a timesaver as you may know if you have ever made a fruitless search on the internet that produced countless hits for non-education sites. According to the “about” information on their website, “Education World’s goal is to make it easy for educators to integrate the Internet into the classroom. With 98 percent of the nation’s public schools connected to the Internet, the need for a complete online educational guide is evident.”

Here’s a quick look at a few recent articles from three areas of Education World:

Professional development:
Teachers Must Earn Students’ Respect by Professor Joe Martin.
This article deals with an issue that is a concern of many teachers, mainly how to earn the respect of their students, or more to the point, how to have your students behave respectfully toward you as a teacher. It is Professor Martin’s contention that you cannot expect today’s students or parents to go along with the idea that a teacher is to be routinely respected without question. I am from and era of students that did follow that idea, so it is still surprising to me when I see behavior in today’s students that is less than respectful and is sometimes more than difficult. As teachers and educators, we have all learned that there can be many reasons for any particular student behavior in a classroom and we have become adept at helping students to move forward and become better able to become good citizens of this world. Frankly, I think today’s classroom teacher’s are amazing people, considering the situations they face on a daily basis. I truly appreciate the efforts that my co-workers put forth each and every day to help their students achieve in every way that they can.
That said, I appreciated Professor Martin’s suggestions for gaining respect in this article. It is good to be mindful that students who are meeting me are also “sizing me up” when we meet in the classroom.  If I want a student’s respect I must assure him or her that I am going to teach something that is important and that I mean what I say.  I especially agree with his contention that “as teachers, others should want what we have.” With this statement, Professor Martin is talking about good character, which in his words is “something money can’t buy, but everyone admires and respects –even if they don’t like you personally.” We all recognize the teachers who are genuine, and students do as well. Good food for thought here.

30 Ways to Show Students You Care! by Marty Kirschen
This article was written by a career television executive who became a teacher of autistic children in LA. I am a media specialist who sees pretty much all of the students in my building every three days. I appreciate the reminder here that it is important to show students that you do care about them, as I do not see them each and every day, but I do get to know them quite well over time. For me it is the hectic switch of classes every 45 minutes during any given day that can often hinder the “caring” process. Here are some of the “takeaways” that came to me from this article.

Professor Martin suggest that compliments are good, especially for students who do not get noticed positively very often. Acknowledge effort, try to remember little things about a student, take time for a student who is upset. Small gestures, such as rewards for no particular reason, accommodations to particular needs and personal contact with parents are all positive goals to have.

He also suggest that you show your caring in non-verbal ways, and that you should pause when ending a conversation with a child and make eye contact so that child knows you aren’t just rushing off to the next thing you need to do. Wow, this is an area I could work on. I often feel as if I have a stack of kids lined up for my attention, and it would be wonderful to actually attend to each student and give them the feeling that their needs were met.

The suggestion to “seek and express the good” was helpful as it reminded me to check in with the classroom teacher for more information about challenging students before a negative pattern develops with that student.

Lastly, I appreciated the suggestion that you should “allow your weaknesses to show”. I think that it’s always a balancing act with students, but I agree with Professor Martin that when your students know that you are a person who can make mistakes, just like them, it helps to create a climate of caring in your classroom.

Technology Integration:
Sites to See: Falling for Autumn
Here‘s another timely website for busy teachers. What I like about it is that it has links to autumn-related websites for primary and intermediate grades that allow the students to do research and have fun. What better combination could there be?
Autumn Leaves had printable templates that helped students identify types of leaves while making their own booklet. Very nice. Awesome Autumn looks perfect for some guided leaf research with grades 3 and 4, and Primary Games-Fall Fun had interactive games and some cute fall stationery that you can print out and use for writing activities in your classroom. In addition to highlighting these websites, this column listed several more autumn related websites to visit and use.
FIVE for FUN by Doug Johnson
Doug Johnson had a column in the Technology Integration part of Education World, and his name immediately caught my eye as he is a well respected technology director (and media specialist at heart I believe) from my state of Minnesota. It was great to read his column and try out the free online image generators that he recommended for online “fun”.  I am fortunate to have Adobe Elements in my computer lab, and I am able to at least introduce my students to some of the aspects of digital imagery and editing. Doug Johnson presents five FREE online tools that help you to do interesting things with digital images, that as he says in the end “perhaps it’s enough that they are just plain fun!” That said, it might be best to go directly to his article to read his take on each of the tools, but I will also list and link his favorites here:

Motivator allows you to quickly and easily create motivational posters. OK, I love this one and want to use it soon. I can think of so many ways to have students use this online tool. It allows you to upload photos and create your own motivational text to go along with it. If you want to put out a few dollars, you can also purchase a professional poster print online. It’s not terribly expensive either.  Here is a photo from a trip I made this summer, just to try it out.

ImageChef is another multimedia offering. There are a variety of effects to achieve that have some similarities to the Fodey Generator.

Cameroid is great for all kinds of special effects from your webcam. I did try a few different images, but the alien head me seemed compelling somehow.

Use the BeFunky Cartoonizer to create cartoons from photos.
The Fodey Generator is similar to ImageChef and allows you to add text to your images. I had some fun creating a newspaper banner at this site. All of these websites are new to me, and I look forward to trying some of them out with students who will also benefit. Thanks Doug!

Lesson Planning:
Constitution Day
Ever since I read that it is a mandate for teachers to teach about the United States Constitution on September 17, I have felt a responsibility as a media specialist to be sure that I have provided materials for the teachers in my building to do just that. I already had some books, but I did buy a few more at  different grade levels, and I also purchased two videos, one at the primary level and another at the intermediate level. So, it was really nice to see this column in Education World on Constitution Day, because if offers internet links to even more constitution related information that teachers can use to teach this topic, and it also reminded me to tell the teachers in my building about what is available to them. For the first time, I am also thinking that this would be a good lesson for me to introduce or teach at some grade level. Particularly with the election coming up in a few weeks, I think it’s just an excellent opportunity to expose our students to the current events of the day and the important foundations that our country is built upon.

Hurricane Watch!
This lesson planning article caught my eye because it is inevitable that I get requests for help from students to find books about hurricanes, storms, tornadoes, lightning–well you get the idea. It’s so important to have them readily available and at hand. One thing I’ve noticed is that if there is any other student  in the vicinity of the “seeker of storm or hurricane information” they will then be drawn to the subject as well. Do I have enough for them? Funny how that happens! Our 2/3 grade level also does a unit on weather, so it’s good to have a variety of weather related information when they are involved in their unit of study. So many reasons to key into this lesson planning activity and I am happy to have found it. I will most surely use some of the hurricane tracking, mapping and especially hurricane naming activities with them during the coming school year.