Info fluency
Joyce Valenza and her colleague Ken Rodoff are going to share ideas for tools that you can immediately use in the classroom or library.
They are colleagues at Springfield Township High School, and she also runs Teacher Librarian Ning. This presentation was excellent and one of those that makes the whole conference worthwhile.
The slides and links for this presentation can be found at www.informationfluency.wikispaces.com
There’s a need to blend the ideas of information fluency and web 2.0 tools. Students need an understanding of the tools but also a new understanding in terms of fluency.
Joyce sees herself as in perpetual beta (she made a slide with a clever flickr badge showing her as a learner)—version 1.8.
Information fluency is an old thread that we need to weave in with these new tools, and we need to bring it into the classroom, and into the students’ lives.
Comparing web 2.0 tools to web 1.0, you can see that
Horizon Report from educause identifies “user-created content” and social networking.
Recommends the themes in these books:
Starfish and the Spider—leaderless organizations
Wikinomics—how mass collaboration changes everything
Whole New Mind—right brain thinkers
World is Flat
Starting with the story Stone Soup, which celebrates that creativity “rocks”, collaboration, etc. But she was troubled by the approach that the soldiers in the story took.
Changes—and Fluencies
1. Being able to access information appropriately (IMSA slide)
Is it really a good enough/why bother world? Ask students to have energy.
Her goal is to be a window on each of her students desktops to help them, and for them to be able to find all these different collections.
She owns the problem of students not using good information, and so do her teachers. Create pathfinders. But use a wiki so you can share the work and share the responsibility, and employ faculty and student leaders.
Librarians need to own these problems, use terms that users understand, and teach them how to use these tools better, like Google advanced search, and Google’s directory.
OEDB Online education database lists the 25 best search engines.
Put wikibooks on your pathfinders.
OER Commons is site universities are using to put up entire curriculums.
Blogs are resources for our students too, and we should direct students to them, and we shouldn’t be blocking them.
Asking students to do original research—zoho polls, surveymonkey, surveyscholar, zoomerang, responseomatic—are all sites they could use to do this. They guided students in creating the polls before putting them out in public, made sure they were well crafted, etc.
One student did their research paper on content in blogs.
The idea is that letting students see that others validate what they themselves have to say.
Also helping students use RSS feeds; next year global studies students will set up global feeds for the region they are studying. Speaking of that, news is not just local, and not just English.
Students pushed her to get JStor because it comes up on Google; but her students value them because teachers value them and know them.
2. Evaluate
She quotes Jimmy Wales—that telling kids not to use wikipedia is like telling them not to listen to rock ‘n roll—reminds me of the earlier presentation which said we can’t change a whole demographic group—we need to change our practices.
She creates tools on evaluating blogs, evaluating wikis, which is an excellent idea, making the evaluation tools specific, not just about the “internet.”
A surprising site that I hadn’t been familiar with—conservapedia…encyclopedia with a conservative viewpoint.
Ken—
Assignment with Hamlet
Students were assigned a character prior to even beginning Hamlet, and each group was a character and created a blog. As they read the play they tried to convey their character’s personality through the blog, and applied a deep level of analysis, which came back into the classroom discussions.
Kids posted comments in the voice of their characters on the other characters’ blogs in the same voice. Joyce suggested that you could imagine at the elementary level blogging Charlotte’s Web.
The teachers moved the literature circles onto blogs. They set up tags for the themes of the discussion so you could keep track of it thematically or by chapter.
Of course you spend time in class discussing ethical behavior. Ken points out that you talk to students about their belonging to a learning community and what that means. It’s really about effective classroom management.
Another wiki discussion format of Ayn Rand’s Anthem.
nightwiesel.blogspot.com two classes in different states discussing the book Night
Literacy—Using Information ethically
Avoid harming others
Documenting sources
Bibme—helps fill in the bibliography
Blogging etiquette
Guide students to use creative commons material and copyright free materials if they are planning to put it up on the web.
Guiding our teachers to Creative Commons—which reminds me that I should make a handout or do a workshop on this for our whole faculty.
She also has a link on her library page of copyright free materials.
Advice for social networking is important to give students as well.
Have all of their kids develop their own avatars so when they are communicating it’s easy to see who’s who. They have the kids do a pyschological character study. The wiki lists several sites that can be used.
Joyce Valenza is willing to partner with another school. That would be great.
Recommending ning—classroom 2.0 and library 2.0 as well.
Equity—
We have to fight for students to have access to these tools and have equity with other students elsewhere. So try to lead students to alternative free software so if they can’t afford or don’t have something, they have alternatives.
Synthesis—
Senior project—the kids are blogging a whole semester for their project. She’s created a template for the kids, showing them guiding questions. It creates transparency for their senior project—the teacher, mentor, or peers or librarian can see in their site and guide them. (see the wiki for an example)
Wikis and blogs cause students to reexamine their own beliefs in the context of listening to their peers.
Noodle tools has a new notecard feature.
Collaborate
Some new tools to check out—Celtx(scriptwriting site), jumpcut(video editing site), ajaxwrite13, thinkfree
Podcast project on the Crucible-the students wrote a script for a radio program; used the wiki as the playground for collaborating on the script. Used wikispaces, which also has a discussion area where they could debate the script.
It created a strong sense of ownership and motivation for students to get much more involved in the play.
Can use wikis for a team or club and let students add their own content, discuss ideas, etc. and it helps those sstudents who might be quieter.
Shares idea of using a scribe to create a blog or wiki for the class that changes each week.
Voicethread—telling a story around an image. You add voice to it.
voicethread.com
Joycle’s VOYA article—Open the Door and Let ‘Em In
Marco Torres video work from student film festival
Duck Diaries and Trout Blog—Elementary school blogs, Marin county day school
Primaryaccess.org—you can put audio and still images together
Rethinking ppt—They were trying to get students to rethink powerpoint in terms of story. There is a big difference between what we are asking students to communicate and how they are using powerpoint—so they tried to deconstruct this for students, rip down their old powerpoints and to rethink how they were communicating.
www.springfieldvideo.edublogs.org is Springfield’s Video Blog site of student produced video.
They made a site for the prerequisite reading list,that teachers are collaborating on. They’ve put video trailers up there, amazon links, descriptions and images of the books, so that students have a lot more information about the book ahead of time. Great idea.
Use of podcast for vocabulary study really motivated the students. They also had students put together videos on grammar “non negotiables” but the kids made videos on its versus its, personal pronouns, prepositions…. Did it for common grammar issues.
Flickr—Student art gallery—students can have peer review; visual exploration of words.
Back to Stone Soup story—The soldiers as catalysts, they lit the fire, maintained the faith, and changed the culture.
New RULES for 21st century practice
obstacles versus opportunities
do things and get blessings
let go of things that don’t matter
delegate all around
don’t wait for the workshop train yourself
you can’t punch this clock, you have to do some of this at home
it’s ok to be beta
stop watering the rocks, water the people who are flowers
teach outside the library
Get up, stand up and show them what an information professional looks like
lead from the center
What is the worst consequence of your best idea—Chris Lehmann
There is a lot to process here, great ideas, and great enthusiasm.
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