A is For Angst- Barbara Haworth-Attard

In choosing materials for my Young Adult shelf (for grades 7&8), is the dilemma of appropriateness versus interest. I believe that balance can be achieved by authors and I think has been successfully melded in A is For Angst. Although the theme of coming-of-age for a young woman and all that implies is still foremost, it is handled in a sensitive, humorous and realistic manner. Teresa is ready for love- or thinks she is- but is love ready for Teresa? Even a condom is too embarrassing to be called by its name- she calls it a condiment. As she learns in health education, it’s better not to peel the banana before practicing putting on the “condiment.’ There are lots of humorous moments but also realistic looks at sibling interactions, best friends vs boyfriends and the love and embarrassment often felt for other family members.

This never becomes overly graphic in its content and I would certainly recommend it for the more mature readers.

An Unusual Book

Once again, I am on the selection committee for next year’s Snow Willow awards. I just finished reading one of the strangest books I’ve ever read and needed to comment on it somewhere. Polly Horvath, award-winning Canadian author has written a book that bewilders me. I loved her Everything on a Waffle, which won a Newbery Honor. I haven’t read anything else, but am aware that several of her books have won multiple awards. Her books are quirky with unusual characters, but in The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane, my question would be, who is going to read this? Told from multiple points of view, which I love, immediately makes this book less accesible to a number of students. One of my good readers told me that the flashbacks in After were confusing for her. Although The Corps is a very clever book, with many eccentric characters all trying to come to terms with grief in their own way, I was at times hard-pressed to continue reading. It just all seemed too unbelievable, and yet not fantasy. Then at the end, all the loose ends were very quickly woven together, and even the normally taciturn uncle spills his heart suddenly. My question to you, Polly Horvath, is,” Who were you writing this book for?” We tell our students to understand who their audience is. If this is for young people, which ones will read and enjoy it? I actually find it difficult to write this because I hold authors in such esteem and you are certainly a very capable author. I am going to read The Canning Season and The Vacation and see if I can make some sense of this for myself.

Breaking News!!

Keturah and Lord Death is a National Book Award finalist- didn’t I make an excellent choice? Actually, I love all the Snow books, but I thought this was kind of neat. As an aside, kids at my school dressed up for Halloween. One of my favourite Grade 6 boys was dressed in a long, flowing black cape. When I asked him what he was, he said”Lord Death,of course!” He was the first to read this book and absolutely loved it. It is now making the rounds in that grade 6/7 classroom as are many of the others. Hats off to the Willows!

Last Post??

No, probably not, I just thought it sounded good. Actually, my hope is that people will continue to contribute their great ideas about how they are incorporating Web 2.0 into their teaching. I’m also hoping people might have time for reviews of some great books.

Even though the formal part of this course is over, and sometimes it felt like climbing a steep hill, I am very thankful for all the possibilities that have come about as a result of it. Thanks, Carleen and Donna. I am amazed at my own enthusiasm. I am also pleased with my teachers, who although I am often speaking a foreign language to them, are willing to take risks with me.

My last assignment is indeed taking a fairly easy route. Several teachers have agreed that incorporating the Snow Willows into an independent reading assignment for Language Arts will work. So I have created a link to the Willows web-site for each of the nominated books; in particular, to the activities which a committee has come up with. Therefore, I’m not doing any re-inventing. Their assignment is to read one book, create a blog response on our library blog, and choose one of the activities to complete. That assignment will then be added to the blog for others to see. If they choose to create a visual, we will add a picture of it, and so on. I’m just in the process of putting together an evaluation sheet, so they will know what the expectations are.

So that’s easy. But next year, I’m already prepared to take a page from Chris’s and Diane’s ideas. I think we’ll have a wiki for the Snow books next year- I like the ease of creating discussion. I also work with older students and Literature Circles a lot, so a wiki will be a great way to go- in fact, probably later this year.

Assignment aside, some other practical applications of my learning are coming about. At one of my schools, the teachers would love to have a list of books to support their teaching in Mathematics. One of our teacher-librarians recently set up a wiki to share great new titles of books that we are reading. So I thought- why not for Math. So instead of working on my looming book order, I set up a Wiki with categories and listed some of the books I knew. Then I showed it to one of the teachers who wished to have this and suggested that this format would allow any and all of them to add to the list as they became aware of, or used titles. She was impressed with the ease of it, and I’ll be showing it at a staff meeting soon. I think it’s also a great way of dividing up the workload.

So hats off to all of you and our fearless leaders who have shown us the way.

By the way, if you subscribe to LibrarianInBlack, you will have received this. A great place to check out many image generators.  http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/     I added it to my del.icio.us account- something else I wouldn’t have bothered with 6 months ago. So we’ve come a long ways and I know there are more challenges ahead but they seem just a little less scary than they used to!!

Ideas

So my mind is working on this next project and I am a bit befuddled. I think my main goal at this point is to bring some of my technology learning into one of the units I’m doing with teachers. The possibility that comes to mind is a class of grade seven students, with whom we are practicing some of the reading stategies. Working under the umbrella of inferencing, we have been modelling and using the Probable Passage strategy. After trying several sessions together and sharing our gist satements with the larger group, we read the story and see how close we have come. We have been using Patricia Polacco’s books as a basis for this work. So my question is- how do I incorporate technology into this unit? I thought about a Wiki, where students will add in their gist statements for other passages we encounter. We hope to have them all create a Probable Passage with key words from a picture book of their choosing, which they would then exchange with a buddy. It might be of value to add these into the Wiki so others could read and comment. Or am I better off to just add a section to my library blog for this? Mayhap I’m still a little confused as to when to use a blog or wiki for a classroom.

Then my other thought was in regards to the Snow Willow nominees. Several teachers have agreed that part of their Language Arts assignment will be to read one novel and respond on the blog. In re-visiting the Willows site, I remembered that they have already come up with activities for each of the selections. So why re-invent the wheel? Perhaps I could create a link for each book to the activity page and they could choose to complete one. Then we could post their written or visual activities on a wiki. Does anyone have any feedback for me or am I simply blithering in a daze? This particular teacher is not familiar with a Wiki so do I want to take that on as well as my blog?

Help- I need somebody!!

Just kidding- you’re all too busy to think about my problems. Now I must work on my order!!

Back to Books

So here I am- getting back to what for me is still the best- books. I just finished reading John Wilson’s Where Soldiers Lie. Not normally a fan of war stories myself, I have come to appreciate this excellent Canadian author. This book looks at the Indian mutiny in the mid 1800’s. In no way does this glorify war, but is a compelling look at the issues and horrors involved through the eyes of sixteen year old Jack. Allow your mind to be enveloped with the smells, sounds and sights of this old civilization and put it out for your boys to read. Last year I read Four Steps to Death by this same author and was stunned at his ability to provide 3 separate viewpoints on the Battle of Stalingrad. This book has made its way from hand to hand in one of my schools. Historical fiction- what an amazing way to bring our past to life! I know he has written a number of other books as well. I think these would compare well to Arthur Slade’s Meggido’s Shadow, a riveting tale of desert warfare and one of Saskatchewan’s Snow Willow nominees for this year. I also think of Charlie Wilcox by Sharon McKay. I believe these are the books our students need to read- to maybe take away any of the glory of war and bring home the grim realities.

Safety- an issue

In response to Chris’s post on this subject, I don’t think we will actually err on the side of caution. I have watched videos and seen many pictures on blogs of people’s children and my heart always does a little-uh-oh!I understand that simply posting these things is not unsafe but the idea of just ANYONE seeing them is a bit unnerving. It reminds me of a colleague who posted something on her blog that seemed rather condescending to those who were not yet up to speed on Web2.0. When I brought it to her attention, her response was: “But I thought I was writing just to my fellow Web2.0 buddies.” There we have it- informed, intelligent beings who also forget that what you put out there is for everyone to see.

So I just watched the slide show again and once again, it strikes me that, we the teachers, have largely taken on the role that rightly belongs to parents. I don’t mean in its entirety but in partnership. And there is where the difficulty comes in- how to educate the parents! We can easily block sites at school or at the very least, moniter what they are doing on the Web, but it is at home that many of them are involved in socail networks. I read(somewhere) that about 66% are careful about what information they post. Not bad! But what about the other third of our children who may be putting themselves at risk? How do we reach them with the enormity of the conseqences of revealing too much to who knows whom?

A lot to think about- a lot to care about.

Another paper-bag book talk

Download

I also took some stills with the digital camera of the scenes we used for the movie and after some serious fiddling around, was able to produce them as a movie using Movie HD on my Mac at home. So if students (or we) don’t have access to a video camera, this would be another and perhaps simpler possibility. I think I’ll put this on my library blog as well for the students to view and see what kind of feedback I get.

D0 I seem a little hooked on all this? Maybe just a little!!

Citation Generators

Oh, am I loving this!

I used the one that Ruth recommended some time ago, “Bib Me” and found it amazingly easy to use.

But the question still remains- when do we want students to use this? There are still certain skills and understandings about a bibliography creation (or Reference List as we call it in Saskatoon Public) that we would wish students to have. i think of the obvious ones:

• alphabetical order
• locating publisher, place of publication, copyright date
• practicing a prescribed format
• recognizing copyright demands

I believe that I would still teach the grade 3’s and 4’s to learn how to make a basic list with author and title. In the higher grades, when they have successfully shown that they are able to follow correct bibliographic format, I would be inclined to introduce them to an online Citation Generator.

But for me- yes, I’ll be using it. I’ve already practiced it enough.

Okay- how do I link my bib to this? I’ve tried a few things and they don’t work. I can save it to my own drive at work but this blogger does not support uploading it. Any ideas?

• 

  “Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online..” Gliffy.com - Create and share diagrams online.. 26 Oct 2007 <http://www.gliffy.com>.

• 

  “ImageChef - Customize Photos, Clip Art.” ImageChef - Customize Photos, Clip Art. 26 Oct 2007 <http://www.imagechef.com>.

• 

  Leavitt, Martine. Keturah And Lord Death. Asheville: Front Street, 2006.

• 

  “searchCrystal.” searchCrystal. 26 Oct 2007 <http://www.searchcrystal.com>.

• 

  Copyright Matters!. Canada: Canadian Teachers Federation, 2005.

Copied and pasted it in- that works- couldn’t see where to save it any other way onto my drive.

Copyright- What matters?

Well, after reading as much information on this as I can process at this time, I probably have more questions than answers. When we were dealing primarily with books and encyclopedias, it was relatively easy to know how to teach about the importance of copyright and what we could and could not do. Since the advent of the Web, there seems to have been a bit more haziness around the issue, with many assuming that its public format meant it was free to be used in any way we saw fit. Cutting and pasting made writing those term papers all too easy,Google images are copied freely and there seems to be many who are not aware that copyright of any work must always be assumed. I read recently that pictures from Flickr were used without permission for commercial gain and that person is being sued. Yet many of those pictures are posted (I believe) with the understanding that they may be used with certain provisos in place. Creative Commons, which I was unfamiliar with, allows persons to license their work for sharing purposes. It also becomes clear that even if sharing is allowed, acknowledgement must still be made. What I do see, though, is that very few people are able to keep up with the changing rules, least of all busy teachers, who still sometimes allow students to “surf” the Web and use whatever they find.

I think what students need to understand is that all published work is copyrighted. They need to know that their own original work is copyrighted. They need to know how to determine if work can be used because of Creative Commons licensing or other sharing privileges. They need to know that the use of any information must still be credited.

I had a brief discussion over lunch today with some of my staff about copyright in regards to the internet. Certainly, very little thought has been given to this issue- in fact, I would say it appears to be more of a non-issue for adults and students alike. Some of the questions raised were in regards to pictures or graphics. May we still use a portion for our own use and may we still use 10% if used for educational purposes?

 I read through Copyright Matters again and the bottom line for me is that I NEED to become more aware of the rules surrounding copyright; for as the booklet states “you are educating the copyright owners and users of tomorrow.”