 |
CATEGORY: Trends, Research, Reports |
 |
An online learning community is a place designed to help users achieve learning goals of some sort through collaborative partnerships, including varying degrees of social networking and internet-based and computer-mediated communication. Charlie Doe takes a look this month at some of the more formal versions of online learning communities—often called learning management systems (LMSs)—which are usually developed by professors or teachers to achieve academic goals via web-based services.
In this age of easy access to Google, standardized testing, and AP curriculums, why should we teach research skills? Don't students "know everything" about research and the web? Hardly! Carolyn Foote has a lot to say about this, and even more about why teaching research skills counts for even more today than in the past. What we're striving for, she says, is student empowerment.
After reading an interesting Library Journal piece by Tom Peters entitled "The Future of Reading: As the Book Changes Form, the Library Must Champion Its Own Power Base—Readers," Stephen Abram is moved to ask, Is reading in jeopardy? Personally and professionally, he says, he really doubts it, but …
The advent of the internet and Web 2.0 has significantly changed our relationship to information and personal learning opportunities outside of formal education, notes author Steve Hargadon. The technology that took this amazing change and multiplied it tenfold is an underlying theme of Hargadon's article, which ranges across social networking, Web 2.0, the emergence of educational networking, and what he sees as the first real area of significant adoption for educational networking: professional development for educators.
With these agreements, a total of more than 62,000 K-12 and public library titles are now available for purchase online through parent company Follett's ecommerce sites, Titlewave and TitleTales.
News/Breaking News - Posted 04 Feb 2010
The announcement was made late last week, and Information Today, Inc.'s news editor, Paula Hane, spoke with execs and Gale and Questia, plus with analysts and others, to quickly put together a NewsLink Spotlight story on the subject.
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 01 Feb 2010
120 ReadingA-Z leveled readers are now available for purchase at Apple's iTunes App Store as ReadSmart Edition Apps. The catalog is designed specifically for the iPhone and iPod touch.
News/Breaking News - Posted 20 Jan 2010
The AASL Affiliate Assembly requested that the AASL Board of Directors choose a title for its professionals that is clear to other educators, administrators, and the public, and that presents a common nomenclature for all publications and advocacy efforts.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Jan 2010
Sponsored by the organization's Education Division, the Vision K-20 Survey gives educational institutions an opportunity to take a short, online survey to evaluate their current technology use.
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Jan 2010
Educators have begun to shun the monolithic basal approach to teaching reading, opting for a more robust mix of specialized print and technology-based resources that provide intensive, dynamic, motivating methods that children embrace and enjoy. These print and technology tools must use student data as a cornerstone of an approach that intensifies and individualizes instruction. Find out more from Lexia Learning's Bob McCabe.
We seem to be moving inexorably toward an infinitely more complex world where specialization is necessary because there's not enough time to be good at so many things. We're also seeing the demise of many jobs that had low barriers to entry. That is, they did not require too much education or experience. Our children are faced with fewer low-skill jobs and the need for higher levels of skill to be assured of a working wage that can support an individual or family at a standard of living better than or similar to that of their parents. Scary for parents and educators? Read Stephen Abram's thoughts!
There is an economical way to introduce videoconferencing that involves inexpensive laptop computers and programs such as iChat, Skype, and ooVoo. A technology integration plan shared by a few pioneering districts in the author's area proves this point. Through it, schools have been able to make a serious commitment to the "new wave" of interactive technology at a minimal cost.
The guides offer best practices on building standards, assessments, curriculum and instruction, professional development, and learning environments.
News/Breaking News - Posted 13 Nov 2009
The Milestones for Improving Learning and Education Guide is a tool designed to help practitioners evaluate their 21st Century skills initiatives.
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Nov 2009
How does one keep up as the tools and resources for educators. Mary Ann offers both her own advice and that of a former students of her in this helpful edition of Belltones.
Samsula School has been a successful institution since its inception in 1912, in no small part due to the commitment and involvement of the Samsula, Fla., community. But the school community had to think on its feet in February 2008 when the public school district announced its intention to close the doors of the small, rural campus, along with those of several other rural and minority schools across the county. Johanna Riddle recounts how that thinking led to action … and the hammering out of an alliance with a successful charter school that kept Samsula's doors open.
In the September/October 2009 issue of MMIS, having noted (with some surprise) that most of today’s crop of elementary school students were born in or after 2000, Stephen Abram launched into the first of a 2-part series of musings on what their world will be like in the near and not-so-near term. Check it out if you missed it. And now … here’s Part 2.
Sonja Plummer-Morgan and Lisa Neal-Shaw are public librarians from Maine who have explored the use of virtual worlds with very young—and not-so-very young—children. They have found sites very helpful in encouraging curiosity and enabling tech-learning behaviors such as online communication, collaboration, composition, traditional as well as 21st-century literacies, and more, to the extent that we wanted to share their insights with our readers in K–12 education settings.
Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, Ning: How do we help our students learn the social skills needed to understand what it really means to live and participate in a global community? How do we incorporate this into our schools and classrooms? How do we keep ourselves and our students safe? Social networking sites are mainstream media for many tweens, teens, and adults. There are even social networking sites that attract kids as young as 5 years old. This is the reality of the world we live in, and schools should reflect this reality.
A recent story in the St. Petersburg Times focuses on how a local elementary school has embraced the "kids' technology" and is pressing iPods into service for teaching and learning in multiple ways.
News/Cool Links - Posted 15 Oct 2009
The virtual workspace is designed to give districts greater control of social media and allow educators to create and manage collaborative groups across classrooms, schools, districts, and around the globe
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Oct 2009
More than 200 schools, districts, states, organizations and businesses have signed the National Action Agenda on 21st Century Skills.
News/Breaking News - Posted 12 Oct 2009
Global Education: Using Technology to Bring the World to Your Students is written to provide educators with the tools they need to help students gain a more global perspective and to prepare them for an increasingly interconnected world.
News/Breaking News - Posted 17 Sep 2009
With expanded math content, improved reporting functionality, and new multimedia features, DimensionM combines technological advances in video game design with new research in math curriculum and instruction to provide an educational tool designed to increase student engagement, time on task, and achievement scores.
News/Breaking News - Posted 14 Sep 2009
There is no better way to enhance your knowledge of a topic than to teach it and engage in discussion with a diverse group of graduate students representing various age groups and professional experiences including practicing media specialists, classroom teachers, and paraprofessionals. This column reflects Mary Alice's recent experience teaching an online reference course for Minnesota State University–Mankato and discussions with other media professionals.
It is not unlikely that the corpus of information that today's learners in grade four will encounter as adults will be doubling in minutes. That likelihood should provide pause for every educator. What is their world going to look like, and what are the skills, aptitudes, and competencies we need to be facilitating, teaching, and encouraging? Here, in Part 1 of a two-part series, are some thoughts on where things are and where they’re headed.
As a kid, Mary Ann used to collect insects, setting the critters into their respective boxes and tagging them by laboriously printing information on little slips of paper. Apparently the process of classifying appealed to her deeply, and ultimately lead to … what else? … this month's discussion of tags, folksonomies, and tagging as a participatory sport and useful intellectual activity.
Information Today, Inc.'s news editor Paula Hane is monitoring and reporting on the Google book settlement and proceeding relating to it. (From Information Today, Inc.'s NewsBreaks.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 28 Aug 2009
From a scan of ResourceShelf listing in early August, we pick up on The K-12 Web Archiving Program, from the Library of Congress.
News/Cool Links - Posted 10 Aug 2009
The Best Websites for Teaching and Learning, a list honoring the top 25 internet sites for enhancing learning and curriculum development, is considered the "best of the best" by AASL.
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Jul 2009
Mary Ann Bell recently had the pleasure of attending WebWise 2009, a conference sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Miami’s Wolfsonian Museum, where one of the keynote addresses was all about “the cloud,” and other presenters used the term frequently. This month in Belltones, Mary Ann floats some ideas, definitions, concepts, and comments about cloud computing, word clouds, and more.
Any number of recent studies are concluding that reading is declining, primarily the reading of novels and longer works of nonfiction. Pundits are remarking that online reading is changing their personal reading behaviors. Doug Johnson infers from this and other observations that we are rapidly becoming a "postliterate society." In Doug's feature, you can find out just what he means by that, and learn how libraries can serve this postliterate society.
In this month’s column Stephen highlights some thinking in his home province of Ontario. He is encouraged, he says, that some of the political leaders in the educational sector are trying to move beyond testing and actually into practicing 21st-century strategies. At the end of April 2009 the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association (OPSBA) released a discussion paper titled “What If? Technology in the 21st Century Classroom”
The findings reinforce the need for increased investment, leadership, and support to ensure the nation's educational system can innovate and compete.
News/Breaking News - Posted 29 Jun 2009
The postings on the Inside Google Book Search blog, usually by folks from the Google Books Online team, are thoughtful, sometimes provocative, often featuring multiple media, and, of course, full of news about new features brought online at Google Books. They're very busy folks, so it's worth keeping up with them.
News/Cool Links - Posted 18 Jun 2009
Conspiracy Code offers an original learning environment where students can strengthen higher-order thinking, written communication, problem-solving, and collaborative skills, according to the announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 01 Jun 2009
The summit, which will take place solely online, affords education, policy, civic, community, and business leaders the opportunity to interact with one another and discuss important education reform initiatives. The Cyber Summit leads up to the National Education Summit on 21st Century Skills, which will take place on June 12 in Washington, D.C.
News/Breaking News - Posted 27 May 2009
It's the hot new ... what shall we call it? Search engine. No. Information tool? Maybe. How about "finding tool?" It's Wolfram Alpha. And as it's being written about by those in the information and search business, phrases like Web 3.0 and semantic search are coming into play. Woody Evans has written about it for Information Today. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 22 May 2009
The new study underscores the importance of aligning the realities of the classroom with school leaders' positive outlook on Web 2.0 for learning.
News/Breaking News - Posted 05 May 2009
A new, free white paper—"Best Practices for Using Games & Simulations in the Classroom"—that tackles the practical challenges teachers face when they use video games was released this past February by the Software & Information Industry Association's Education Division. In this article, Lee Wilson, the author of the paper and the co-chair of the working group that produced it, summarizes, excerpts from, and describes the main points of the report.
Today, Web 2.0 tools make collaboration easier than ever, and your public librarian is there to help you navigate through them. While public libraries have many focuses, resources for children and teenagers are a mainstay of their programs and materials. These librarians work with the same students you do, just after school—helping with homework, research papers, and math problems, as well as finding the perfect novel for a historical fiction assignment. Why not work together during the school day? This collaboration can help you assist students to understand the Web 2.0 tools that can make research fun and invigorating, and it gives you a chance to share the workload.
Newsy.com's short video stories are actually digests of the range of news outlet reporting—print, TV, blogs … the whole gamut—on selected hot news topics. Theresa Cramer has written an Information Today NewsBreak on Newsy.com that offers a description and some interesting analysis of this company and its product. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 27 Apr 2009
For one afternoon every week, Bob Hassett’s middle school library becomes a gamer’s paradise. Free snacks, loud music, Guitar Hero, and Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi. But even though it’s very much about gaming and hanging out, there’s so much more to it than that. Check out Bob’s feature to see what all the fun … and learning … is about.
There’s a sea change in how people around the world receive their news. Among other things, surveys show a strong increase in the role of internet news. When we think about our learners’ and our communities’ ability to receive and filter news on a local, national, and international scale, are we preparing them with the skills they need? Are we preparing our learners for the world that they will inevitably encounter? Stephen Abram weighs in on these questions in this month’s Pipeline.
Online “global classrooms” empower educators to leverage the power of social networking to create curriculum that is more interdisciplinary, more effective, and more relevant to students’ lives. The global classroom represents the future of learning—and the future is now! This article offers a nuts-and-bolts guide for developing a global classroom, using TakingITGlobal’s “virtual classroom” platform as a model. It begins by describing TakingITGlobal for Educators, or TIGed, and how it works; it then offers a step-by-step guide for educators who want to establish or modify their own online global classrooms.
We live in a Web 2.0 world where everyone is capable of creating content and sharing it, not just accessing what someone else has created and shared. Tools to create content are now readily and freely (or somewhat inexpensively) available to the general population. Content creation tools can aid in instruction and teaching, providing another avenue for students to access and learn material. Want some ideas and products to play/teach with? Read on as Karen Klapperstuck and Robert Lackie provide you with a great rundown and roundup.
Using the immersive characteristics of digital games, Labyrinth blends a storyline with multi-level puzzle play to build pre-algebra skills in several core areas: proportions - fractions and ratios; variables and equations; and numbers and operations.
News/Breaking News - Posted 09 Feb 2009
Searcher magazine editor Barbara Quint has another K-12-relevant NewsBreak we’d like to direct you to. She’s reported the news on ProQuest’s eLibrary interface in a January 15, 2009 story over at infotoday.com.
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 15 Jan 2009
All right, it’s not news to you that the role of school libraries is changing in the 21st century, but it’s nice to know that there are stories about this fact in the general press that reach the general public—your students’ parents. Here’s a link to one such story.
News/Cool Links - Posted 07 Jan 2009
With these agreements, a total of more than 51,000 K-12 and public library titles are now available for purchase online through parent company Follett’s ecommerce sites, Titlewave and Titletales.
News/Breaking News - Posted 05 Jan 2009
Mary Ann is on a mission to spread the word that Draconian filtering at schools is a practice that produces negative outcomes. So in this issue’s Belltones, she lays out more reasons for saying this is so ... and she challenges readers to make a New Year’s resolution to work for gaining more internet access for students and faculty members in K–12 schools.
Media specialists everywhere have stories to tell about teachers who believe they no longer have time to teach their favorite units, collaborate, or use technology in educationally sound or creative ways. The combination of NCLB and other demands have created a situation where teachers have little time or interest in using technology beyond basic instructional management and easy-to-implement instructional tasks they are comfortable with. But you can help by bringing your creative ideas to your teachers! Read about two such great ideas in this month’s Media Center.
How well are you faring with getting your technology agenda endorsed and funded by your management team or district? Is everything going swimmingly? No one is trying to block useful applications such as YouTube or blogging? Your filters aren’t obstructing useful teaching technologies? … From his conversations with many K–12 folks, Stephen Abram believes that this is the management challenge of our times. And so he devotes this month’s column to tactics and strategies for talking about tech with management—those key stakeholders, such as principals, board members, trustees, administrators, and even parents.
The potential of ebooks in schools can be forecast by the sheer popularity of ebooks in society in general. Over the last 5 years, ebooks are the only book publishing segment consistently showing double-digit sales increases. Why should librarians and other educators jump on this bandwagon? Twenty-first-century school libraries really must provide the tools and resources students need to develop technology and information literacy. Read Deborah McKenzie’s feature to learn more.
Today’s students are truly digital learners. Outside of school they are texting, using cell phones, creating social networks on the internet, and playing interactive games online; they often do all of these things at the same time—multitasking. They expect to use some of these tools when they are in school. Teachers can create new learning opportunities for students and turn classrooms into the 21st-century global classroom when they integrate technology into the learning environment. Read on to learn from Sheila Gersh just how teachers can begin to create such environments.
danah boyd, an internationally recognized authority on online social networking sites, will open the American Association of School Librarians 14th annual national conference and exhibition with a keynote presentation on Nov. 5, 2009 in Charlotte, NC.
News/Breaking News - Posted 08 Dec 2008
Searcher magazine editor Barbara Quint has done some research on the Reference Extract project involving OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington, which she reports in an ITI NewsBreaks story. It’s a much deeper and more thorough look than you may have seen yet, so we recommend the read.
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 01 Dec 2008
The survey also found that more than 70% of principals and nearly 70% of teachers expressed a need for assistance in finding resources that meet state curriculum standards.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Nov 2008
Here’s a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education—Wired Campus section that reports on a cool project for and by librarians and involving OCLC and the information schools of Syracuse University and the University of Washington.
News/Cool Links - Posted 13 Nov 2008
The report, Leadership in the 21st Century: The New Visionary Administrator, contains profiles of nine education leaders representing four school districts and three schools to highlight their success in leveraging technology in the classroom.
News/Breaking News - Posted 12 Nov 2008
Much behavior in the teacher-librarian/media specialist community is too often driven by opinion and no data. And every class, every school, every library club, every community, is, or can be, different. However, when you are attempting to empower your learners to excel, it is incumbent on you to have an informed view of their technological bent. So Stephen Abram has devoted this month's column to providing you with a starting point for checking out where your students stand in the technological spectrum.
Though it may have gone unnoticed by most K–12 users of Internet2, in the 2 years since the publication of Erika Miller’s article, “Internet2, K–12 and Librarians,” in the September/October 2006 issue of MultiMedia & Internet@Schools, the available bandwidth for this powerful network has increased dramatically. Now capable of moving along at 100 gigabits per second, Internet2 (I2) provides powerful new potential for the research and education communities to take advantage of an ever-increasing range of options for high-speed applications that change the way students and educators learn and teach.
Of our 53 million K–12 students, 51 million of them (or 93%) play video games, and neither that number nor the value the games they play should be dismissed. After all, these days there are games being produced by “a new crop of entrepreneur-developers who believe that today’s games must be anchored in more specific pedagogical design principles. They also believe that to stand the test of time, today’s games must not only engage but teach ,” says author and game developer Ntiedo Etuk. Read on. Find out more.
School districts noted that their biggest challenge is funding for technology (50 percent), closely followed by integrating technology into the classroom (40 percent). Twenty-nine percent of responding districts have explored or adopted open source technologies.
News/Breaking News - Posted 30 Oct 2008
In the new ITI book, innovators describe pioneering library and educational projects in Second Life and other virtual environments.
News/Breaking News - Posted 21 Oct 2008
The new program is intended to increase the capacity of practitioners to embed 21st century skills into classroom practices.
News/Breaking News - Posted 16 Oct 2008
The agreements bring to 46,900 the total number of K-12 and public library titles available for purchase online through parent company Follett’s ecommerce sites, Titlewave and Titletales.
News/Breaking News - Posted 13 Oct 2008
In an article in the New York Times book section, writer Motoko Rich looks into the concept of using video games to promote reading, and who’s getting on board (educators, librarians, authors, publishers) with it.
News/Cool Links - Posted 06 Oct 2008
The Pew Internet & American Life Project study asserts that game playing often involves social interaction and can cultivate teen civic engagement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 18 Sep 2008
The report identifies an inherent link between a 21st century education system and economic success, according to the announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 10 Sep 2008
The immersive educational game is intended to make learning science interesting, exciting, and fun for elementary school students, according to the announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 03 Sep 2008
Students in Mary Alice Anderson's district are benefiting from new or renovated media centers in four of their nine schools, a significant part of the district’s renewed emphasis on facilities improvements. The district opened two entirely new secondary media center constructions in 2000 and 2006; this summer a new elementary media center opened in completely renovated spaces and another relocated to improved spaces in former classrooms. In this column, Mary Alice looks at features that enhance the functionality and educational environment of these long overdue new facilities.
Our traditional practice with books is not as scalable as we and our users might want. How do we get book recommendations to scale as well in libraries as Amazon does on the web, but still aimed at our age cohorts? Traditional practice offers a personal touch with a human being. That needs to continue, but we can extend that personal touch beyond the walls. Since we really care about books (and reading), we can use the new tools on the web to put our services on steroids.
In the July/August issue of MMIS, Kelly Czarnecki started her "tour of the possibilities" of using virtual environments in K-12 education with a look at two projects based on/in Teen Second Life—Science in Second Life, and Suffern Middle School in Second Life. Here's the rest of the tour, visting Whyville, the River City Project, Quest Atlantis, and McClarin's Adventures.
From using Twitter to encourage short story writing to utilizing Delicious to organize professional development tips and favorite articles, the number of social networking tools and websites is increasing exponentially. We know educators use these 21st-century tools with students in all grade levels. The question remains, however, whether and how these tools might be used to positively affect student understanding and achievement. "Yes," says ePals' Tim DiScipio, "these tools, when chosen thoughtfully, implemented appropriately, and combined with innovative pedagogy through internet-connected communities, can teach students the skills necessary to thrive in the 21st century and expand their ability to communicate and collaborate in a global marketplace." Read on, learn more!
While many schools are blocking access to social networking applications on the internet, school library automation OPACs are beginning to provide such applications to students and staff. Barbara Fiehn talked with some library automation vendors and others about this emerging trend to see what they're up to, and with some school library media specialists to gain some insight to their hesitations and acceptance. Read on to see what she learned.
To mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, youth leaders for Global Kids, Inc. have created an online community and game in conjunction with Game Pill, Inc., AMD, and Microsoft Corp.’s Partners in Learning where young people can engage in and experience the ongoing relief efforts in New Orleans.
News/Free Resources - Posted 27 Aug 2008
What do you get when you tinker with thinking … and playing … and technology? Well, one result would be the ThinkeringSpace project, which Information Today Inc.’s Kathy Dempsey reported on recently. It’s compelling. (From Information Today, Inc.'s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 06 Aug 2008
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) releases the second edition of National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS*T) this month.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Jul 2008
The 21st Century Skills and Social Studies Map is the first in a series of core content maps designed for educators, administrators and policymakers. Other maps will be available for mathematics, English, geography, and science throughout 2008 and 2009.
News/Breaking News - Posted 17 Jul 2008
According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the skills we need to be teaching include the following: information, media literacy, and communication skills; thinking and problem-solving; interpersonal, collaborative, and self-direction skills; global awareness; economic and business literacy, including entrepreneurial skills; and civic literacy. While the context in which our schools operate today has changed, the goals have not. We can look at these 21st-century skills as an extension of efforts that date as far back as John Dewey at the turn of the previous century. The key difference is that today we have a new set of tools to apply to the tasks. Moreover, the changing economy makes it more of a necessity that our students can use technology to solve problems, collaborate, and create. Learn more on this subject in this article by Adobe Systems' Bob Regan.
The 2007 edition of the Horizon Report by the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative predicted that in 2 to 3 years, virtual worlds will greatly impact teaching, learning, and creative expression. These scalable and highly creative environments are being used by educators all over the country in a variety of settings and in a variety of ways. This article offers a look at projects using virtual worlds that are currently “happening” in K–12 schools, what we’re learning from them, and what we can continue to learn by charging full steam ahead with these fascinating educational tools.
If there’s a refrain Stephen Abram hears too often, it’s that many of us feel it’s impossible to keep up and learn all this new stuff in technology and learning. So he has devoted this month’s column to a few sites that he finds useful to quickly orient himself to some of the Web 2.0 technologies. Even when he has already played with or experienced some of these tools, he says, he always learns something new from these sites.
Early this past fall Mary Ann Bell got tired of hearing other people talk about Twitter and feeling left out. She had been mentioning it as something new to the Web 2.0 world in presentations and with students, but felt a little hypocritical for doing so without participating. So, as she reports in this month's Belltones, she paid the site a visit and signed on. Follow her journey from skeptic to convert, plus how and why Twitter won her over and what it can do for you as well.
"Building community" is a powerful phrase and a tremendous responsibility for a library, and even more powerful is the experience of stepping back and seeing the community grow as a result of what you are doing to create new groups of people and new ways to share and discover information. As the technology education librarian for teens and youth at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC) in North Carolina, Kelly Czarnecki believes creating virtual communities is an important aspect of this responsibility as participation in online communities is driven by advances in technology. Find out why, and how, in her article.
Imagine if textbooks were alive … living, changing, evolving, and improving … never out-of-date! … a textbook that would give students images, videos, and interactive tutorials about a subject, a vocabulary word, or a topic … a digital textbook that would be student-driven, a model for differentiated learning, and geared toward helping all students learn through visualization, interaction, and simulation. In the age of Web 2.0, all this and much more is possible. And it’s all at our students’ fingertips with just a click of a button. Welcome to the “Age of the Wikitext!”
Facebook is getting increasing recognition, and use, in the education community. Thomas Krivak has put an excellent primer together for you on this important social networking site. (From Information Today, Inc.'s Information Today magazine.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 07 Mar 2008
Former Senior Vice President and Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House Daniel Menaker will serve as host and editorial producer. Each episode of the show will feature four writers discussing their new books in a roundtable format.
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Mar 2008
Over 130 middle school and elementary full shows and 1,000 video clips are available in H.264 digital format, which uses the latest video compression technology to provide high quality video in a small file.
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Mar 2008
On top of reading literacy and numeracy, civic literacy, and all the rest … now we’re hearing that schools must expand the teaching of information literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, critical literacy, health literacy, technacy (yes, it’s a word) and transliteracy (and yes, it’s also a word!). And, they must do it all across the curricula. Enough already?? Well, despite the likelihood he'll encourage some slings and arrows, in this Pipeline column, Stephen Abram highlights an emerging, important, new literacy—online social literacy.
Students can easily overlook websites that aren’t filled with often changing content. Do you think you’re too busy to devote time and effort to attract users to the great resources available on your library website? If you can simply copy and paste, think again! With no coding skills you can set up your websites to continually display fresh content. Read how in Aaron Schmidt's article.
From our friends at ResourceShelf comes a description and pointers to a British Library/JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) report, "Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future," countering the assumption that today's young people are the most adept at using the web.
News/Cool Links - Posted 16 Jan 2008
Wikia, Inc., the for-profit cousin of the Wikimedia Foundation, launched the alpha release of its new search engine, Search Wikia, on January 7. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 14 Jan 2008
Digication Inc., a provider of e-Portfolios, announced that it has partnered with Davis Publications, a provider of art education textbooks, to combine e-Portfolios and Web 2.0 technologies with the content found in traditional textbooks. (From Information Today, Inc.’s EContentmag.com)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 11 Jan 2008
As you can tell, this article in Slate online has little good to say about Yahoo's answer service. It's a good read!
News/Cool Links - Posted 07 Jan 2008
The American Association of School Libraries (AASL) released the results of its first longitudinal survey for school library media specialists, titled School Libraries Count!
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Jan 2008
The study, which is part of IMLS’s initiative, Museums and Libraries Engaging America’s Youth, examined Institute-funded programs for youth aged 9-19 and surveyed nearly 400 museum and library programs about their goals, strategies, impact, and outcomes.
News/Breaking News - Posted 02 Jan 2008
Stephen Abram travels a lot. When he returned from several months of voyaging around the world in 2006, the internet looked the same as it had on his departure. The same could not be said upon his return from his fall 2007 travels, however. In this month's column, Abram recounts internet-related events from late last year that suggest things are changing ... a lot!
Mary Ann started her own blog recently and since then she has seen some comments that suggest the blogosphere may be imploding, exploding, or otherwise meeting its demise. So this month, with survey results in hand, she explores the question "To Blog or Not to Blog?"
Do you still remember the thrill of receiving a summer postcard from your teacher? How exciting it was to open the mailbox and find that personal piece of mail waiting—and to realize that your teacher was thinking of you. Perhaps the photograph on the face of the card led you to the encyclopedia to learn more about a particular place, while a handwritten line or two described a cultural experience, unusual food, or new language. Travel postcards, sent by thoughtful teachers over the years, have broadened the world of many a child. Yesterday’s postcards have gone high-tech. Weblogs, or blogs, enable today’s teachers to send a new kind of post, sharing their travel experiences as they unfold. Blogs provide an up-to-the-minute opportunity for teachers to continue to educate their students through semester breaks, to interact with their school communities, and to share experiences and locales that encourage understanding of the broader world. And those 21st century postcards come complete with the ability to upload and publish journal entries, photos, slideshows, audio, video, and educational links.
Teacher education programs for initial licensure are oriented toward preparing teacher candidates to use educational technology, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Dec 2007
U.S. student scores were below the international average in science and math literacy, according to the 2006 findings of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
News/Breaking News - Posted 05 Dec 2007
Our sister publication Computers in Libraries has a great feature this issue on Internet2 by the associate director and director of the National Internet2 K20 Initiative. (From Information Today, Inc.'s Computers in Libraries magazine.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 26 Nov 2007
The company will use the new social networking platform to enhance its teacher outreach efforts.
News/Breaking News - Posted 26 Nov 2007
The organization is moving ahead with its Billion Kids Library following the launch of a center in Nepal and the announcement of the first annual conference in London in early 2008.
News/Breaking News - Posted 14 Nov 2007
Email as a means of online communication has been around since the beginning of online communication. In fact, according to Ian Peters, it even predates ARPANET. He describes its infancy as a tool called, appropriately, MAILBOX, which was used as early as 1965 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today it is used by hundreds of millions of people. Mary Ann Bell asserts in this month's Belltone's that it's still the killer app!
There are many ways to teach information literacy—the formal classroom way, library visits, team and project-based methods, and more. No matter how you define “reference work” today, it likely involves the process of accessing print and electronic sources, understanding a variety of containers from books and videos to Web sites and serials, understanding how to ask questions of people in person and virtually through search engines … as well as questions of ourselves. It’s more than just a research skill. True information literacy has emerged as one of the defining life skills of our century. Building citizens who can learn and inform themselves throughout their lives in a new century of predictable massive change is the Holy Grail of our era.
With the growth of Web technologies, the availability of high-quality professional development for educators has increased significantly. There are numerous benefits to professional development for educators, including increased job satisfaction, career advancement, better pay, and improved student learning. However, there are significant challenges that often impede them from pursuing opportunities that will contribute to their growth, such as convenience and affordability. Professional development delivered in an online-learning environment removes many of the constraints associated with traditional forms of professional development.
With end-of-grade, back-to-basics, multiple-choice testing for the masses and mechanical instruction methods, there’s growing concern that children are not learning to problem solve as much as they are mastering memorization of isolated facts in order to answer test questions. Yet, when they get home from school, children eagerly devour new information and concepts through the virtual environments of video games. In what I call a stealth-learning environment, children develop skills that connect and manipulate information in the virtual worlds of video games without really knowing that they’re learning.
AASL hopes that these standards will provide a foundation for a strong library media program in every school, where students will research expertly, think critically, problem-solve well, read enthusiastically, and use information ethically.
News/Breaking News - Posted 26 Oct 2007
The EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's (ELI's) 7 Things You Should Know About… series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies and related practices.
News/Free Resources - Posted 22 Oct 2007
Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools, by Lynn Schrum and Gwen Solomon, provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and their use in the classroom and in professional development.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Oct 2007
By way of ResourceShelf comes this reference to an intriguing new bibliography, "It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: The Role of Virtual Worlds in Education."
News/Cool Links - Posted 03 Sep 2007
Stephen Abram has no worries about great new ideas being developed throughout libraryland, but he is concerned that such ideas are not diffusing fast enough. In this Pipeline column, he ponders why this is and how the tendency can be combatted, and also offers a rich list of creative librarians' blogs and other resources that will help you speed that diffusion yourself.
While our students might be able to click through Web sites with ease and change the layouts of their MySpace profiles in the blink of an eye, there are still many things we can teach them about the read/write Web. There are also many ways we can teach our students using the read/write Web. Underlying these opportunities is the possibility to use the read/write Web to discuss the issues of authorship, authenticity, and the production of information—all topics for rich discussions of information literacy. This article provides a review of some of the best online tools you can use to excite teachers and to prepare students to be active agents in today’s participatory culture.
The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) presents a new Internet & Education Webcast series for the coming school year.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Aug 2007
Nearly all students with online access—96 percent—use social networking technologies such as chatting, text messaging, blogging, and online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Webkinz, according to a new study released by the National School Boards Association and Grunwald Associates LLC.
News/Breaking News - Posted 17 Aug 2007
The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association, recently turned the spotlight on two recent surveys that illustrate progress in staffing and use of library services for young adults.
News/Breaking News - Posted 04 Aug 2007
The research project benchmarking the current status of public school district safety shows that safety barriers loom large and students often hinder security efforts.
News/Breaking News - Posted 16 Jul 2007
Here's a Cool Link all about librarians ... in the Fashion section of the New York Times online, no less!
News/Cool Links - Posted 11 Jul 2007
Many organizations are distributing free newsletters with timely articles and links to valuable resources. Joining a mailing list or RSS feed is easy and convenient, and it's a timesaver when you want the latest news about innovative technology and practical ideas for integrating it into your classroom. This month, Cyberbee directs you to a selected mix of educational technology newsletters and RSS feeds to investigate.
Blogs, wikis, social software, Web 2.0—it’s not really about the technologies but about the method of collaboration between users that presents some of the more interesting advantages. The goal of authors Robert Lackie and Robert Terrio in this article is to continue the discussions of practical Web 2.0 tools and social networking sites that have been brought up in this magazine and at recent school librarian conferences and to highlight other collaborative tools and exciting developments in free Web 2.0 social software, items they categorize as “Useful Collaborative Tools” and “Practical Mashups”—both very exciting and practical for today’s teacher-librarian!
Educational videoconferencing has come a long way over the years. It started out very slowly, and, in recent years, there has been a burst of interest on the part of museums and zoos in providing their educational programs via this medium. As schools find it more difficult and more expensive to take their students on physical field trips, students are missing out on the phenomenal resources that these cultural institutions have to offer. When gas prices began to rise, local museums found that even schools in the neighborhood were unwilling to spend their precious fuel budgets bussing students off-site. Those in the museum community chose to take this as a sign that they should begin to promote their distance learning efforts.
The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) released two new case studies, illustrating how school districts in Iowa and Wisconsin measured and assessed the costs and benefits of planned technology projects.
News/Breaking News - Posted 29 Jun 2007
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) unveiled an update to its National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS*S) at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in Atlanta.
News/Breaking News - Posted 28 Jun 2007
The new netTrekker channel provides educators and students with three pathways to find resources that support the core elements of 21st century skills.
News/Breaking News - Posted 27 Jun 2007
The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) released its 2007 Compendium, an annual collection of monographs on the key issues facing K-12 education technology leaders.
News/Breaking News - Posted 21 Jun 2007
The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) released an examination of issues related to digital equity in education including equal access to technology, resources and services.
News/Free Resources - Posted 20 Jun 2007
The comprehensive professional development conference for media educators will take place June 22-26 in St. Louis, offering over 75 workshops, panels, and peer networking opportunities, as well as presentations by media literacy experts from the United States, England, Canada, Australia, China, and Japan.
News/Breaking News - Posted 11 Jun 2007
For the first time, the organization is offering eight-week summer school courses online for full year courses such as Algebra 1, English 9, and English 10, subjects that many students struggle with.
News/Breaking News - Posted 23 May 2007
These new publishing partners will allow their content to be available to libraries worldwide through the ebrary platform, under a variety of pricing and access models.
News/Breaking News - Posted 07 May 2007
Mary Alice spent part of New Year’s Day setting up her new computer and putting obsolete technology in storage—floppy disks, applications for earlier operating systems, assorted wires and cables, and even old automation system disks that ran on a 48K Apple II! The occasion led to reminiscing and wondering what memories other media specialists have of outdated technologies. A quick post on LM_NET brought an instant response; apparently, many media specialists were eager to share their fond memories and favorite experiences with the technology they experienced as technologist pioneers.
Traditionally, we have defined literacy as the ability to read and write. However, 21st-century literacy has moved beyond that into the realm of possessing the critical-thinking skills necessary to delve into information or data and figure out what it really means. Students need the ability to synthesize and evaluate data and to create new information and knowledge after they have determined its quality. To prepare our students to be informed, successful citizens, we must teach them to see beyond numbers and simple functions. They must have the skills to evaluate and analyze the data put before them. In other words, they must also be data-literate. Dr. Glenda Gunter offers strategies for building data literacy and a great deal more in her article.
You’ve likely heard the numbers. Conservative recent estimates describe Second Life as a pretty huge virtual ecology. More than 1.2 million people have created avatars in Second Life, and 1,525,670 unique people have logged into Second Life at least once. Of that number, 252,284 people have logged in more than 30 days after their account-creation date. The conservative monthly growth rate is about 23 percent. Twenty-three percent growth will mean 3 million in a year’s time—a healthy number, but not hyperbolic growth. It can be managed, and we can see the effects and react—unlike other Web-based changes we’ve lived through. Stephen Abram finds this enormously engaging and interesting to a profession that thrives on being interested and making things interesting. Read on ...
You’ve read the news articles, seen the stories on TV news, or possibly heard them on the radio: Bullies have gone online, predators are lurking everywhere, and MySpace is a nightmare for kids and teens. What the media doesn’t tell you are the facts about how kids and teens can stay safe online. They tend to focus on the sensationalism and not the realism. Now you can learn what to look out for, what to advise parents about, and how to help students who may be experiencing problems online.
Technology is playing a key role in various types of communication within the classroom today, changing the way communication takes place in a way that is having a real impact on learning. A different breed of technology, leveraging the power of simplistic Web 2.0 design principles, is proving to finally break through with a real impact on students and teachers. Technology such as online learning communities is proving to offer a more dynamic learning experience, with direct benefit to students and teachers. It’s a refreshing change for educators who have struggled with the complexity, cost, and practicality of the last generation of technology tools.
NOAA has developed a government-sponsored earth science “island” in the rapidly growing online world of Second Life. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks Weekly News Digest)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 30 Apr 2007
ResourceShelf editors point to the new Pew report in this ResourceShelf listing AND add an article full of interesting and thoughtful reactions, insights, and musings about it.
News/Cool Links - Posted 25 Apr 2007
The Wired.com article we point to here focuses on social networking sites and their uses in educational settings, mainly discussing the open-source social networking software Elgg.
News/Cool Links - Posted 19 Apr 2007
Test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and mathematics software products than those in control classrooms, according to a new study released by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance.
News/Breaking News - Posted 05 Apr 2007
Cybersafety expert Nancy Willard’s book gives parents the tools to help keep children and teens safe from online threats such as sexual predators, pornography, hate groups, and cyberbullies and to encourage responsible online behavior.
News/Breaking News - Posted 23 Mar 2007
“Online Facilitator Training I - Mastering the Skills of Online Teaching” offers teachers the opportunity to gain skills in Web-based instruction.
News/Breaking News - Posted 14 Mar 2007
In recent Belltones columns, Mary Ann Bell has discussed technophobia and technolust. Now her thoughts have turned to another complaint. While not as debilitating as technophobia, which keeps victims from feeling comfortable with any technology, featuritis is a condition that keeps many users from making friends with the devices they use. Read on to find out why, and what to do about it.
In the world of education, writes Stephen Abram in this month’s Pipeline, “the best path is to start by asking ourselves a simple question: ‘What will [our students’] world look like?’” Walling tools and components of the Internet—which will be a part of their world—out of our schools doesn’t sound to Stephen like following the best path. So, being an affirmative fellow, he offer a turnaround policy!
As online learning has become commonplace at universities throughout the country, the option is now being explored to a greater degree by teachers and administrators at the secondary and elementary levels. Nancy Rohland-Heinrich and Brian Jensen take you through the state of the art of online learning in this feature, with special emphasis on the role of media specialists in supporting and furthering it.
There's a new collection of Stephen Abram's visionary writing and thinking at ALA Editions. Learn about it via this Cool Link.
News/Cool Links - Posted 21 Feb 2007
To support teachers who want to explore use of video games in education, Muzzy Lane Software has created the MAKING HISTORY Innovative Teacher Challenge, open to all high school history teachers.
News/Breaking News - Posted 07 Feb 2007
According to the report, 55 percent of online teens use social networks and 55 percent have created online profiles; older girls predominate.
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Jan 2007
This article begins with a look at some examples of the excellent smaller, more narrowly focused elementary programs available on CD and moves on to examples of some of the outstanding, more far-reaching programs available via the Web or a network of some type. As usual, Charlie Doe has the category covered in this latest roundup.
Mindful of the safety and security issues surrounding social networking, Stephen Abram nontheless has plenty of good to say about the popular phenomenon. In this month's Pipeline, he talks about, and guides readers to resources about, positiveeducational uses of social networking.
The Internet has changed the way students learn and communicate. With the click of a mouse, they can instant message one another, work together on projects, download all kinds of multimedia files, and post to blogs, Web sites, and RSS feeds. Access to people and information enhances instruction, but what happens when the "dark side of the Internet" sneaks around the corner and into the classroom or home? In this column, Cyberbee points to lots of resources that can help.
Multimedia online technologies now offer an unprecedented ability to enable every student, teacher, and even every family to "meet" the authors of books they are reading. If you have ever seen an author speak or have hosted authors in your school, you have experienced the impact meeting an author has on a personal relationship to a book. It humanizes the book, it reveals the person and personality that created it, and more. This article highlights specific ways you can replicate these personal connections to authors and illustrators by optimizing a variety of multimedia and online technologies.
H.W. Wilson announced the January WilsonWeb launch of Library Literature & Information Science Retrospective: 1905-1983, a wide-ranging retrospective article index.
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Dec 2006
Greg Notess has a full report on the launch of the beta version of Microsoft's books database. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 12 Dec 2006
Google’s Literacy Project Web site, launched during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, is “a resource for teachers, literacy organizations, and anyone interested in reading and educations … ”
News/Cool Links - Posted 04 Dec 2006
Stephen Abram offers more tricks to build information fluency in the second of his columns on the subject, this time offering teaching/learning ideas based on MySpace, Second Life, Teen Second Life, Activeworlds, OPAC or Web treasure hunts, and game show Web sites.
A mystifying or vague buzzword to many, Web 2.0 was made fashionable in late 2004 by O'Reilly Media, the foremost publisher of computer technology books and a leader in cutting edge online technology conferences. This article will provide an introduction to Web 2.0 for libraries and will also attempt to bring to light a few notable, free Web-based interactive communication tools that can help librarians and other educators seamlessly access, create, organize, and disseminate information for their library, themselves, colleagues, and friends. The resources mentioned and the references and recommended readings provided should bring librarians up-to-speed on little-known and newer techniques, tools, and thinking on this crucial topic.
That’s a long, dry article title, but the article on ResourceShelf is not long, just good and useful … and the concept it covers is cool.
News/Cool Links - Posted 30 Oct 2006
Washington Post staff writer Yuki Noguchi takes a look at MySpace and other online teen social sites in this article in the Sunday, October 29, edition of the newspaper.
News/Cool Links - Posted 30 Oct 2006
As Stephen Abram writes, "The Internet has given us many new ways to provide learners with an environment that allows them to learn through discovery, play, collaboration, and just plain having fun." He elaborates, and give loads of examples, featuring YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Blogger, podcasting, del.icio.us, and more in this month's Pipeline.
Internet2 allows unprecedented worldwide communication and collaboration on data sharing, and provides an invaluable opportunity for K–12 teachers and students. In the year and a half since her school district has been connected with Internet2, author Erika Thickman Miller has begun to explore a small part of its capacity—a taste, she says, that has made her feel she has opened a book of wonderful new adventures, and that she feels compelled both to share and to further explore.
The technology will help prevent Internet “grooming” and make social networking and communicating online safer, according to the announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 02 Aug 2006
Content providers in the partnerships include Merriam-Webster, Encyclopedia Britannica, Gareth Stevens, and Spark Notes.
News/Breaking News - Posted 19 Jul 2006
More than half of all student-used computing devices will be mobile by the year 2011 and online learning will grow at a compound annual rate of 26 percent over the next five years, according to a new study of the top 2,500 U.S. school districts sponsored by Discovery Education and Pearson Education.
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Jul 2006
In the July/August issue of MMIS, Katherine Lowe wrote about the work of the ALA Task Force on School Libraries and its preliminary report, in The Work of the ALA Task Force on School Libraries. In that article we promised an online update on the Task Force’s Final Report, which was due just as Katherine’s article was to appear in print. That final report has been completed, and Katherine has been kind enough to supply this story and links to the report itself.
News/Breaking News - Posted 14 Jul 2006
Always looking for relevance to the field in what's "now" and what's ahead, Stephen Abram notes this month that, in his view, "social networking personal Web sites are not a fad but a strong, long-term trend. Why do I think this? Fads don’t evolve; trends do. These social creations on the Web are evolving quickly." Further, he writes, "The sites contain the seeds of changes that will reshape our world. Indeed, they’re the next step in group work!" Read on!
Helping school colleagues keep up with technology trends is a function library media specialists are well-placed to fulfill. It's also a function that can further underscore the importance of the LMS at school. With that in mind, we've turned to Nancy Willard, prominent—perhaps even ubiquitous—spokesperson on the subject of online safety in the face of new Internet technologies. Nancy's feature gives you in-depth ammunition, understanding, and resources to press into service to help your staff and entire school community cope with all aspects of this important new technology trend.
Students do better academically in schools that have good libraries, but reports of the elimination of school librarians and library programs keep surfacing. This and other negative trends led the ALA to respond to “the urgent need to support and maintain school library programs and certified school librarians” by forming a Special Task Force on School Libraries last year. Read about the work that’s been accomplished in Task Force member Katherine Lowe’s article.
The scholarly Web is getting noticed more because of new digitization initiatives underway and the enormous publicity search leaders are receiving for their fledgling work. Many librarians and researchers seem to be pleasantly surprised by the continually changing face of the scholarly Web and its freely available quality full-text offerings. This article brings together pertinent resources on the free Web of interest to anyone, including librarians and other educators, who conducts research and would like to easily supplement their currently available holdings, in print and electronic formats and via commercial vendors’ fee-based subscription databases, within their own libraries.
The grants are designed to help offset a current shortage of school library media specialists, library school faculty, and librarians working in underserved communities, as well a looming shortage of library directors and other senior librarians.
News/Breaking News - Posted 30 Jun 2006
The fourth annual survey of teacher technology use indicates technology access and professional development are driving improved teacher and student performance, according to the announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 27 Jun 2006
Imbee.com is a blogging site for children ages 8 to 14. What!!??? you're saying. Not safe!! Well, with all the concern over kids posting and publishing to the Web, it's worth reading the EContent article by Jared Bernstein to see how the imbee.com folks create an environment they say is safe even for kids that young. (From Information Today, Inc.’s EContent magazine)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 13 Jun 2006
Here’s a sampling of thought about the “Deleting Online Predators Act” from some of the best known ed. tech. bloggers. If you’re not up on this, reading these posts will quickly fill you in.
News/Cool Links - Posted 18 May 2006
Students using the multiplayer videogame about the political and economic causes of World War II reportedly achieved higher test scores than students learning the same material more traditionally.
News/Breaking News - Posted 12 May 2006
Carvin writes: “This blog … will focus on the intersection of Internet culture and education. One of the primary goals is to help guide educators through the ins and outs of what’s often referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’”
News/Breaking News - Posted 05 May 2006
Flummoxed by all the references to Web 2.0, Internet 2.0, Library 2.0, etc.? Clarification is on the way. In this article, ONLINE magazine columnist Greg Notess discusses and sorts out the 2.0’s (From Information Today, Inc.’s ONLINE magazine)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 01 May 2006
Another article on filtering? Well, Mary Ann Bell writes, "Truth is, I did not go looking for this topic. It reached out and grabbed me while I was looking for information about something else. While researching general computer use in schools and libraries, I noticed the topic of filtering to be a continuing issue." There are lots of stories and further "troubling trends" she writes about in this round of Belltones.
In Mary Alice Anderson's district, the high school media center is getting a makeover. As always, Mary Alice was in the thick of the process, serving on the district committee as they began planning. In this month's Media Center column, she shares wisdom gained, particularly from the committee's tour of a dozen new or recently remodeled facilities in the region.
Stephen Abram has been following the Duke University experiment of providing iPods to all students ... and a lot more that's been going on with iPods in education. iPods represent, he asserts, a bellwether technology. In this column he discusses why and lays out a host of educational activities the technology lends itself to.
Instead of students thinking through adventure plots for their game avatar, says Patrick Greene, educators are interested in having students learn to think through real-life adventure plots that will help them acquire the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that will help them to become successful in life. Invoking the work of the likes of Roger Schank, Chris Dede, and Bernie Dodge, Greene discusses the evolution of online gaming/simulations to where it meets these educators' aspirations.
Student usage of social networking sites sites has become one of the hottest tech issues for schools this year. Clearly, social networking presents challenges for schools, and Joanne Barrett's article will help you understand the phenomenon--what it is; what it means for kids, parents, and teachers; what the benefits can be, what dangers it poses, and more.
Rainie's speech to the Public Library Association covered "the eight realities of technology and social experience that are shaping the world of today's teens and twenty-somethings."
News/Cool Links - Posted 27 Apr 2006
Esther Kreider Eash’s article is just what its title suggests: a solid primer on podcasting, including sections entitled Reasons to Use Podcasts in School Libraries and Create Your Own Podcast. Send it to reluctant colleagues and help them join the ranks of digital immigrants and/or better reach their digital native students. (From Information Today, Inc.’s Computers in Libraries)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 24 Apr 2006
The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) released its 2006 Compendium, the annual collection of monographs by leaders from the education technology community.
News/Breaking News - Posted 07 Apr 2006
The series is designed to help educators get the most from video games in the classroom.
News/Breaking News - Posted 16 Mar 2006
Over at Barbara Quint’s Searcher magazine,
information professional Paula Berinstein has written an article that delves
deeply into both these products … who uses them, who writes for them, what
they’re trying to be, how their articles are produced, their reliability, and
more. (From Information Today, Inc.’s Searcher magazine)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 03 Mar 2006
New MMIS columnist Mary Ann Bell introduces herself in her inaugural Belltones column and discusses some of her interests and plans for upcoming columns, including information ethics, technology use in schools, the principles of AASL's Infomation Power, information access, and more.
Stephen Abram writes in this month's Pipeline, "While we may be seeing some learner resistance to traditional writing and creation activities, maybe we can increase their engagement in learning good writing, editing, and information literacy competencies by aligning some of the projects with a Web-based option." Among the options he discusses are social networking, blogs, wikis, and photo sharing.
In this article, Johanna Riddle offers four elementary-level projects that use technology as the mortar of interdisciplinary and inter-literacy learning. Some of the technology applications are as simple as scanning an image or clicking a digital camera. All four of these projects spring from works of literature that are common to most school media centers. They follow a framework that includes introducing a work of literature, learning a technology process, providing reading and working time, self-evaluation, and group discussion of outcomes The communication skills garnered by the students build on each other from project to project and year to year.
Cyberbullying and Cyberthreats: Responding to the Challenge of Online Social Cruelty, Threats, and Distress provides strategies on preventing and responding to cyberbullying and cyberthreats.
News/Breaking News - Posted 27 Feb 2006
In thinking about phones, Stephen Abram asks, "So, what does it mean when I see a short video of a kid keyboarding over 40 words per minutes with his thumbs on his phone? What does it mean when I call 411 and get Silicon Sally, who is just a computer but asks me questions and (mostly) understands and answers? And what's this got to do with learners?" And then he gives some answers!
In her newly published book Super Searchers Go to School, Joyce Kasman Valenza interviews a dozen prominent K–12 educators and educator-librarians who share their strategies for helping students become effective, lifelong information users. In this excerpt, Joyce elicits wisdom that points the way toward a successful future for K–12 libraries from Ken Haycock, whose impressive professional experience includes being a school librarian; principal; school board president; president of the American Association of School Librarians; and, currently, director of the school of library and information science at San Jose State University.
Barbara Quint, editor of Searcher magazine and well-known observer of and commentator on the information industry, has written about LC’s project in an ITI NewsBreak published this week. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 28 Nov 2005
In “Shifting Worlds,” Rainie documents some of the Project’s latest findings on how … and how much … the Internet is affecting our lives.
News/Cool Links - Posted 10 Nov 2005
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) recently hosted a Summit on Educational Games in Washington, DC.
News/Breaking News - Posted 04 Nov 2005
Always peering ahead, Stephen Abram discusses e-paper and e-ink technology this month, including a "here and now" form of e-paper from Sony, in his Pipeline column.
Will Richardson, supervisor of instructional technology at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Fleming, N.J., and now a well-known speaker on cutting-edge educational uses of the Web, has written a book to be published by Corwin Press in February 2006 entitled An Educator's Guide to Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Cool New Tools That Are Transforming the Classroom. This article is adapted from a chapter of that book, with permission from the publisher.
Barbara Quint, editor of Searcher magazine and well-known observer of and commentator on the information industry, has written about Microsoft’s MSN Book Search and placed it in the larger context in an ITI NewsBreak published this week. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 31 Oct 2005
Bowker has released a variety of new resources to assist library professionals with the operational changes necessary to transition to the new global ISBN-13 standard that takes effect in 16 months.
News/Breaking News - Posted 07 Sep 2005
Much has been written about the challenges “digital immigrant” teachers—those who have come later to technology—face as they work with digitally native students. But what’s it like to work with digitally native teachers? Mary Alice Anderson has noticed some consistencies among this first generation of educators to grow up with technology. This article reflects insights from other media specialists and educators as well as her own experiences working with new teachers and innumerable university students each year.
In recent months, there’s been a revolution in interactive technologies—both in their design and in their cost. In this month's Pipeline, Stephen Abram takes a look at some of them, laying out an area in the free Web playground where learning can happen. "The swings are IM," he says, "the teeter-totter is podcasting, the slide is Skype, and the merry-go-round is JYBE."
While the March 2005 report “Fifty Years of Supporting Children’s Learning: A History of Public School Libraries and Federal Legislation from 1953-2000” from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics shows gains to libraries, the American Library Association (ALA) sounds a cautionary note in a recent announcement.
News/Breaking News - Posted 17 Aug 2005
Since last month, when we steered you toward information on online collaborative and role-playing games and what they may mean for current and upcoming generations of learners and researchers, we’ve turned up a Library Journal article and a 30-minute streaming video with more on the subject.
News/Cool Links - Posted 27 Jul 2005
These days, students are creating reports, portfolios, presentations, or other works that need to incorporate—legally, but without enormous hassles—multiple media “objects” such as music, voice, video, images, and more. Laura Gordon-Murnane’s Searcher article explains how “librarians now have a useful tool they can use to help identify content that patrons might want to use in a podcast, a mash-up, a collage, a video contribution to a blog, a document, a presentation, or whatever.” (From Information Today, Inc.’s Searcher magazine)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 25 Jul 2005
MDR’s report features the latest data on purchasing practices and preferences and on teachers’ use of e-mail.
News/Breaking News - Posted 06 Jul 2005
Media specialists enrolled in the online graduate course Mary Alice Anderson teaches are required to create electronic portfolios. They begin the process feeling uncertain and overwhelmed. They finish the process proud of their portfolios and of their accomplishments as media specialists. Even without the requirement of a class project, an electronic portfolio is a worthwhile pursuit. Mary Alice tells why ... and what, and how ... in this issue's Media Center.
Stephen Abram recounts several stories--under the headings "Tiny Gifts," "Tiny Libraries," and "Tiny Apps"--around the theme that small actions, or small technologies, can have a very large impact in the library and information world, and in the broader world as well.
This article—Part 2 of Barbara Fiehn's two-part series on a group of library systems vendors that are active in the K–12 realm—reflects interviews with vendors who work with a wide range of library environments: Mandarin Library Automation, The Library Corporation (TLC), Innovative Interfaces, and Sirsi Corporation were asked to talk about current and future developments in library automation.
For this article, Audrey Church surveyed a number of e-book providers about their offerings to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the free and fee-based e-book content that's available today, as well as the sophisticated ways that content can be presented, searched, and otherwise worked with. Read on to see what's available from Project Gutenberg, Bartleby.com: Great Books Online, International Children's Digital Library, Gale Virtual Reference Library, Greenwood Publishing Group-eBooks, Follett Library Resource Company, Questia, and more.
We’ve been following in background mode the subject of “gaming” and what it may mean for current and upcoming generations of learners and researchers, and we recommend that you keep an eye on the field as well. Here’s both an introduction to gaming and a rationale for knowing about it, in an article by librarian Heather Wilson.
News/Cool Links - Posted 17 Jun 2005
The LOC will connect to one of Internet2’s high performance networks; one benefit will be to its educational outreach programs. (From Information Today, Inc.’s NewsBreaks)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 31 May 2005
You’ll like Gary Hartzell’s 2002 article, and you’ll love the consolidated collection of education- and library-related articles from the defunct ERIC Clearinghouse now housed on ERICDigests.org.
News/Cool Links - Posted 09 May 2005
ONLINE magazine columnist Greg Notess has taken a sophisticated and up-to-date look at new, free full-text search choices offered by your favorite search and book sites … search choices that enable you to get inside e-books, and not just those in the public domain.
(From Information Today, Inc.’s ONLINE magazine.)
News/ITI Cross Links - Posted 04 May 2005
Scholastic’s Text Talk is a research-based program intended to build oral vocabulary and comprehension skills through language-rich “Talk about Text.”
News/Breaking News - Posted 02 May 2005
School administrator Scott Hannon sets forth ways and means for building a strong partnership between the library media specialist and the principal, which he sees as the cornerstone of an effective library media program. "If both parties--the principal and the LMS--'get it,'" he writes, "then we have the beginnings of a good relationship. Together, these two people comprise a powerful partnership that can take a school to new heights, maybe greatness."
For this article, author Dr. Barbara Fiehn spoke with four vendors—Follett, Sagebrush, Companion Corp., and Dynix—to determine what, in their estimation, would be "coming soon," what would be coming "within five years," what the salient trends to watch might be, and what else mattered in the world of library automation for K-12. (Note that she’ll be speaking with another group of automation vendors for their perspectives in Part 2 of this story, for the July/August 2005 issue.)
Recognize the need for information to solve problems and develop ideas; pose important questions; use a variety of information gathering strategies and research processes; locate relvant and appropriate information ... These are some information literacy benchmarks listed by the Canadian Association of School Libraries. "Seems simple enough ... But what does it really mean in grade 1? grade 3? grade 9?" asks Stephen Abram as he re-examines this all-important topic for educators in general and librarians in particular in light of 21st century realities.
On NPR’s Morning Edition is a story on students’ ability, or lack of ability, in the areas of information and computer literacy, sparked by the fact that ETS is piloting an assessment test for those skills.
News/Cool Links - Posted 26 Apr 2005
The report indicates that student achievement has improved, but that the growth rate for that improvement has declined.
News/Breaking News - Posted 18 Apr 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 16 Mar 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 15 Mar 2005
Can learning be achieved effectively by the standard measures, via e-learning, or through some blend of technological and classroom strategies? When added to the issues of the digital divide, you have a problem of gargantuan proportions. With effort, thought, and money, however, it is possible.
The free Internet, subscription databases, and e-books make information available outside of physical library walls, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With the proliferation of information in electronic format, virtual school libraries must be entities of the present, not the future. We must provide access to quality resources and instruction in how to use them, virtually! Learn more and discover virtual school libraries that represent Best Practices in the field in Audrey Church's article.
News/Cool Links - Posted 28 Feb 2005
News/Cool Links - Posted 24 Feb 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 24 Feb 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 23 Feb 2005
News/Cool Links - Posted 09 Feb 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 09 Feb 2005
News/Breaking News - Posted 27 Jan 2005
How you lead depends on what you read! Knowledge of best practices, current research, and useful ideas will help you do the following:
* Plan and develop an effective school media/technology program.
* Be an effective, efficient, and credible communicator.
* Support your own professional writing and presentations.
* Be a leader in your school and district.
Among my reading favorites are the books, journals, and Web sites I turn to frequently for reference or inspiration.
To start the new calendar year with a trends and expectations story from a school librarian's point of view, we turned to library media activist, writer, conference presenter, and school library "presence" Pam Nutt. We asked Pam to query her colleagues and herself to find out, well, what's on their minds! What's affecting them and their profession, particularly--but not exclusively--in the area of technology. Read this feature to see what she told us.
We now have some pretty good track records on some new technologies that make access to information—both physical and intellectual access—simpler and, therefore, we hope, better. Hurdles to that access exist in both the physical and virtual worlds. Requiring a PC or specific browser to access information sets a hurdle in place in the virtual environment. Requiring information to be used within a library during specific hours is a hurdle of sorts too. Here are five key technologies that improve access in one way or another, or both.
I have a theory. I think we have to prepare our students for the world they will encounter—not the one we suffered through. Sounds obvious, but so often we seem to forget. This came home to me in a recent experience that reminded me of my own school life.
|