eBooks!?

I wrote the following article for the October 2013 edition of the MSLA Forum:

(photo by Robin Cicchetti)

e-Books eXplained:  eXploring eBooks for School Libraries.

Notes from the MSLA Workshop on September 21, 2013 at Concord-Carlisle High School

I started the day confused about ebooks, I ended the day confused about ebooks BUT with a whole new understanding of the unique challenges and exciting opportunities they present.  We’re all in this together; vendors, publishers, librarians, educators, consumers. No one has all the answers and No one is getting it exactly right, but lots of people are trying.  It’s a good time for us to jump in, to make sure the voice of K-12 education is well represented in the discussion.

My Take-aways from the conference:

• Research is Online! (goodbye Informational Print, been nice to know you).

• But many students still prefer print for fiction and pleasure reading

• Tablets have taken over the eReader market
• don’t invest in Nooks, Kindles, etc - except maybe for classroom sets
• Not every title is available in eBook format - and even titles that ARE available in eBook format might not be available to LIBRARIES in ebook format
• Publishers are still trying to figure out how to make a profit in the digital world.
• Librarians are still trying to get a handle on ownership rights and fair costs in the digital world
• Rights and rules vary widely depending on publisher, platform and vendor.
• Vendor rules sometimes contradict the rules of the publishers they represent.
• Regulations are targeted to individual consumers; library and school use is often unclear .
• Libraries have been demanding ‘Ownership’ of ebooks,  but this is probably a mistake:
• Leasing is actually a cost effective solution, when you do the math.
• You can’t OWN Digital content anyway (no right of first sale)
• Consortium, Consortium, Consortium
• ebooks are much more cost effective when purchased by a consortium and shared across multiple libraries.
• Consortium members contribute money and a wish list of titles. (collection development by crowd sourcing?)
• MASSACHUSETTS IS ALREADY PILOTING AN EBOOK CONSORTIUM which will support all types of Libraries!! 9 School Libraries are currently participating in this project.
• School libraries have our own needs.
• Unlimited, Simultaneous Access for curriculum based reference materials.
• Downloadable books that students without Internet can access at home.
• All the annual downloads of a single title may happen in a short period of time.
• Databases can be a better choice for informational resources because the content is kept up-to-date.
• But: Database, pay subscription fee or lose access.  eBook: pay once, keep the content.
• Don’t purchase an eBook if the content is available in a database you already pay for.
• The eBook discussion has been focused on Licensing issues,
• the next hot topic is “Discovery” .  (how a patron/consumer ‘discovers’ ebooks, print books and databases that meet his/her interests or needs)
• Christopher Harris is very funny
• and has helped make his school library consortia in rural western New York into a model system of ebook and electronic resource sharing that the rest of us can learn from.

Next steps:

Keep an eye on the Massachusetts Ebook project!  If we play this right, our whole state could become a role model for the next generation of libraries.  It will take effort on all our parts to succeed.  We will need to contribute both money and collection development expertise. We will need to promote the use of ebooks among our patrons and educate our K-12 school communities to assure that the transition from print to electronic goes smoothly.

Get the ebooks infrastructure in place at our schools. The challenges vary. Each school must determine its own priorities. An elementary school might want to focus first on Interactive ebooks that work well with Smart boards. (PebbleGo, TumbleBooks), while a high school’s priority might be to supply students with a diverse selection of nonfiction that students can download to their own devices.  A middle school might choose to start with curriculum-related, simultaneous access nonfiction and perhaps try some downloadable fiction too (especially for popular books with long hold lists).

Last year  the librarians in my district successfully campaigned for individual patron accounts for our students. This is an important first step for supporting any sort of limited access ebook. Our next challenge might be to revisit the ban of ereaders and tablets in school - or maybe we should focus first on increasing teacher comfort with the statewide databases and online reference books.  Whatever priority we choose, we are moving our schools closer to the future, and that is a good thing.

A "Research Help Center" by and for Middle School Students

Skip back to June when I wrote the first (and second) blog posts.
One of my summer goals: Make the Blanchard Library website:
more user-friendly, more interactive,  more focused on student created content.

Well, I have a PLAN!

I got to to thinking about how I learn new skills; I might read (or watch) an overview, but then I generally just jump in and rely on online help to bail me out if I get stuck.

Maybe school should work that way too: Let students explore on their own but provide help files (or videos) for students to access When and IF they need it.

AND then I also remembered one reason I wanted to move up to Middle School was because the students are old enough to be independent and capable producers of information.

SO Why not  have the students create an online RESEARCH HELP CENTER where they (and their peers) can find answers to their Frequently Asked Questions AND get practice producing and authentically publishing information?

Over the course of a school year, I teach 30 sections of a 10-session “Research Class”. The class is not graded and is not taken by every student.  All students do, however, complete graded research projects each year in their core classes. (the subject teachers often, but not always, collaborate with me on these).

IF the research class students TEACH the other students the skills they’ve learned, it’s a win-win situation: The research class kids LEARN the skills better than they might otherwise, and ALL students have access to the topics we cover in the research classes.

I started the Research Help Center. (take a look and let me know what you think; it’s a work in progress!) The only page right now is “Cite Sources” which is populated by screencasts that I recorded. (these can be switched to student created content later)

My short term goal: Have this Fall’s 8th grade research classes populate the  “Find Information” section of the Research Help Center.  Their goal will be to share tips and tricks that help other middle school students master the Curriculum Benchmarks: Find, evaluate and select appropriate sources to answer questions using various relevant resources, including databases, and the online catalog”

Students in the grade 6 research classes will judge whether or not each contribution is “Worthy of the World”.  Only those that pass muster of this peer panel will actually be published.

If this goes at all smoothly, we will add other sections later. Possible topics include: “Successful Note-taking”, “Organizing Information”, “Curation”, “Collaboration tips”, “Publishing tools”, “Evaluating Information”..

For more information, see: the project overview -

or the write-up with WPS curriculum standards.

or (best yet) take a look at the project the way the students will access it.

TedEd makes it Simple to flip a lesson!

Thanks in part to a summer class, "Teaching and Learning with Online Tools" taught by Stephanie Gosselin at Westford Academy, I have experimented with some really cool tools this summer.

One of the most awesome is "Find and Flip" from TEDEd.
This user friendly tool walks you through the process of finding a curriculum related YouTube video and then creating associated online quizzes, discussions, and follow-up activities for your students. When you are done, you have a 'flipped lesson'!
 
Once you are happy with your lesson, make it public so that other teachers in the TEDEd community can copy and modify it for their own classrooms.

An exemplar lesson and great introduction to the process is 5 Historical Misconceptions.

I used TEDEd's Find and Flip tool to create a lesson on Notetaking

(target audience: Middle School students in my "research classes")

Here is a short overview of how it TEDEd Find and Flip works

Google Apps for Education? Yes!

I’ve been touting the advantages of Google Docs* since I first used it in the spring of 2008. The main attraction back then was that I could easily collaborate with my graduate school classmates. We were sick of dealing with wikis where accidentally deleting someone else’s work or getting locked out of the page you needed to edit were common occurrences. Google Docs allowed us to all edit the same document at the same time. We could see what others were adding, pretty much as they added it. And, like a wiki, there was a history feature to keep track of who added what and when, and allow us to easily revert to an older version. We also liked the comments feature which allowed up to ask questions of each other or leave notes to ourselves. Perhaps best of all was that because of its web-based storage, we could get to the document from any computer (at home, school or library), no downloads required.

The features in 2008 were very limited and the only elements were  ‘documents’ and ‘spreadsheets’. I used Microsoft Office (or Apple iWork) when I needed sophisticated formatting, and I used other tools such as Voicethread for presentations.

The product has become much more robust and extensive over the 5+ years that I have been using it. Even features such as WordArt and slideshow animations that were sometimes handy NOT to have (if you work with kids you’ll understand why) are now included. As are lots of choices for templates, fonts, clipart etc.  I hardly ever find a reason to use Office or iWork.

The user community is HUGE (425 million in June 2012); bugs or glitches are reported quickly and generally resolved promptly. The product is still free, still runs in the browser without download, but now also works on phones, tablets and other mobile devices and (with free app) will store local copies of all your files so you can continue to edit without Internet access. (It will synch with the web-based version the next time you are connected).

I have gotten so acclimated to the Google Apps/Drive environment that Microsoft Office is starting to feel clunky. I forget to enable features such as ‘track history’ and ‘autosave’ because in Google Apps, they are always on.  I get frustrated that different versions of the Microsoft Office are not compatible with each other (even within my library) and that upgrades cost money (which we don’t have).  I hate that the students (and staff) have to re-initialize the software whenever they sit at a computer they haven’t used before and the process of saving to the active directory (which is only accessible within the school environment anyway) is not intuitive and mistakes are common (files end up on the local disk instead).

Google Apps handles collaboration MUCH better than our current setup with Microsoft Word. Not only does Google Apps allow multiple people to edit the same document at the same time, but it also has features such as chat and comments to help collaborators communicate with each other AND it always keeps track of who added what and when. This last feature is very important in middle school.  Last year (prior to Google apps implementation) I asked students to save their files into my “Collaborate” folder so that other students could view them. Unfortunately, this also meant that other students could edit them... and some did. Although this provided a good opportunity to discuss “Digital Citizenship”, the problem persisted because there was no way to see WHO added the comments. In a Google Apps environment, only users logged into our school’s custom domain will be able to edit shared files and all editors will be able to see who added what. (administrators will also be able to view the activity of individual students).

Google Apps includes products beyond what is in the Microsoft Office package. There are tools for creating blogs, websites, slideshows, videos, calendars, mail, etc. Google documents are also seamlessly integrated into the third party applications that we use, such as Noodle Tools.  

I often use Google “Sites” to organize information from many different aspects of my life and it has really changed the way I run my ‘classroom’. I have been describing it as an incredibly easy way to create websites, but the Google description: “Shared workspaces for classes, faculties and clubs” is perhaps even more apt. It is definitely worthy of its own blog post. (coming soon?)

So, YES!  I am happy that our school is jumping on the “Google Apps for Education” bandwagon this year... and it is not just because I (a librarian) like the company’s Vision:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If you need more convincing, check out:  Benefits of Google Apps for Education

If you are a Technology Administrator, take a look at the new Change Management Guide

This Blog post is part of a summer class assignment in which we (the students) need to demonstrate at least some proficiency with certain aspects of Google Drive/Doc/Apps.

Here are my examples:

Document - Online newsletter article about the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award

Audience - primarily parents

Form - Google Expertise Survey (note: feel free to fill it out. This is not the actual copy I will use)

Audience - BMS staff and students

Presentation - Introduction to Google Apps

Audience - BMS staff and students

Collaborative Presentation - Flipped Classroom

Audience - teachers

Drawing 1 -  Blanchard Library Door Sign

Drawing 2 - Book Return Sign

Audience: students

*A note on names: Recently, “Google Docs” was rebranded as “Google Drive”. “Google Apps” is basically the same thing, but includes a whole bunch of other Google applications and (importantly for K-12 education) hands control of the environment to local administrators who can customize the product to suit their community’s needs.

Trajectory of Learning

I did not attend the ALA conference in Chicago, and was not one of the lucky ones who heard Mark Edwards, Superintendent of Mooresville Managed School District in North Carolina speak - BUT my friend and mentor Judi Paradis WAS there and graciously shared her notes and thoughts in a blog post “Loving Kids, Having Fun, Using Digital Resources” My favorite quote: “Students track their own learning, and from a young age have an awareness and a responsibility for their trajectory of learning. “

What a powerful goal for all of us! “awareness and responsibility for our own trajectory of learning”

But how do we teach it? and are today’s kids too complacent or unmotivated?

I was in my hammock musing over this, when I realized that the group of young adults gathered at the rope swing across the lake, were effectively demonstrating the concept in action.

The Rope Swing: A demonstration of Personalized Learning in Action:

“students” take charge of their own “trajectory of learning”:

• The more adventurous climb up the wood slats nailed to the trunk and grab a knot high up on the rope. They swing out far above the lake, where the more skillful perform showy flips and twists on the way down.

• Others grab the rope at a midpoint near the base of the tree. Somersaults are out from this starting point, but graceful dives are possible.

• The most cautious grab onto the rope at the bottom of the bank. Sometimes it take a few swings out and back before they find the courage to let go of the rope and drop into the water.

“Collaboration” is very much part of the equation.

• No matter who is on the rope, their friends cheer them on and offer tips and encouragement.
• Multi person games and challenges help create a fun learning atmosphere for all.  

“Differentiated Instruction:”

Although Everyone has the same overall goal:  “improve rope swinging skill”

Each person picks his or her own starting point and personal plan.

Some examples:

• start at the highest rung and execute a full somersault ending in a perfect dive
• climb to a middle rung, swing out, let go, and catch a ball tossed by a friend before hitting the water
• start at the bank, swing out and let go at the apex of the swing

We can apply this philosophy to all kinds of learning!

As Carol Ann Tomlinson says "All big ideas have a kindergarten version and a PhD version"

To take control of our learning trajectory, we need to determine our starting point on the “kindergarten to PHD continuum”  (this will vary depending on the topic) and we need to be aware of our own learning style:

Do we thrive when we have an audience cheering us on? do we do better when we work collaboratively? do we like to observe others first? or jump in and develop our own style?

School librarians have responsibility to find and curate information resources that give  students and teachers a palette of sources to choose from. Some people do best with the simple linearity of a print book. Others benefit from the scaffolding and hyperlinks provided in the online environment. Some may need manipulatives; real or virtual,  to learn kinesthetically. Videos, images, diagrams, maps and charts, practice exercises, games and simulations can all be effective learning tools.

Here is a Prezi I created for my Middle School Students. I hope it will help them develop some strategies for finding information that meets their own unique needs:

The Flipped Classroom - a powerful new teaching paradigm?

"Flipped Classroom" in a nutshell: the lecture part of a lesson is viewed at home so that class time can be primarily devoted to student projects. The goals: 1. The teacher will be more available to work with individuals and small groups because he/she is no longer spending signficant time in front of the whole class. 2. The students are empowered to take charge of their own learning because they can fast forward or skip lectures on topics they already understand and repeat or supplement lectures on topics they find challenging.  They can get personalized guidance from the teacher without having to stay after school.

In many ways the "Flipped classroom" is nothing new. It is similar to the well established paradigm of assigning students text to read at home, so class time came be devoted to discussions and follow-up activities. The 21st Century twist is that it is easy for a teacher to record a lecture and share it with the students and to tap into the multitude of free online resources already available. (Educational games, videos, simulations, Virtual Worlds, etc.).  Even teachers who don't ordinarily spend a lot of time in "lecture" mode, may find it a time saver to record short instructional videos which the students watch at home or at school, as needed, instead of repeating the information over and over. ("how to format a paper", "presentation rubrics", "discussion etiquette", etc). 

Flipped Classroom can be a path to personalized learning.  Instead of requiring all students to read the same text or watch the same video, the teacher can give the students a learning goal, self-assessment tools and a variety of appropriate information sources from which to learn the topic.  These could include videos, slideshows, practice exercises and text at multiple reading and content levels. This approach guides students to take charge of their own education and develop the habits and skills of "life learning learning.

Two major assumptions of the flipped classroom are problematic in our current school environment. 1) All students have 24/7 access to high speed Internet (home and school).  2) All students complete the ‘at home’ piece before coming to class.

We can not assume that all homes have high speed Internet nor that all students have their own devices with which to access it.   We can not even assume that students have constant access to high speed Internet while they are at school!  My experience from the 3 school districts where I have worked: Internet-enabled devices (personal Smartphones, tablets, eReaders, laptops from home, etc) are banned, the availability of computer labs and laptop carts is very limited and, even with these restrictions, the network gets so bogged down that video streaming is generally not feasible during the school day.  There is no easy (or cheap) fix. But, the ‘real world’ has changed and education should start anticipating a day when High Speed Internet is a universal utility (like electricity),  every student is required to have his/her own device, and the school networks can handle Internet traffic on a scale orders of magnitude greater than the current capacity.

 The Flipped classroom approach assumes that students (and parents) have bought into the concept that the ‘at home piece' must be completed before class. Motivated students will comply because they will not want to feel lost or ‘look stupid’ during the ‘in school project’ time. But what about the rest of the students? The ‘at home’ piece will have to include some sort of activity (an online quiz, a discussion thread, a monitored interactive) where the student demonstrates that he/she actually did the assignment, but this is tricky. You don’t want to assess a student's understanding of a new concept until after he/she has had a chance to ask questions in person and to work on learning it in the classroom.

The Flipped classroom approach has merit and could be one of the ideas that transforms education, but the infrastructure for full implementation is not in place at most K-12 schools.  We can, however, start transitioning to this pedagogy by setting up online learning environments for our classes and making our lectures, 'how to' videos and supplemental materials available online. 

Here is an Infographic from Knewton, published 2011:

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
The following video from the Delaware Schools provides examples of the connection between

Personalized Learning and flipped classrooms.