Like so many folks in the education industry, I recently embarked upon my summer vacation. I was that kid who couldn’t wait to sign up for the library summer reading program, who three weeks into summer was ready to go back, and who loved school/office supplies with a passion bordering on the unnatural.

And I’m not that different as an adult. After all, I am a learning enthusiast, so it follows that if I have more free time, I’ll learn more, not less. Two excellent opportunities came to my attention via Twitter. They’re both low pressure and easy to jump into at any time, which is great as I’ll be traveling for most of July.

The first is Teachers Write!, a virtual summer writing camp for teachers and librarians. Author Kate Messner and a host of her writing friends will be sharing advice, giving challenges, and generally building community. I am about to dive into it all now - 15 days after it officially started.

The second is the Level Up Book Club, a place to read books about gamification and discuss the gamification of education. Gamification is a topic near and dear to my heart and one of the things that drew me to library school in the first place. Should I go back for a doctorate, it would be one of my chief research interests. So I’m jumping into this one - again, late due to loose ends that needed to be tied up at the end of the school year - and will be making my way through Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken over the next week and a half - if I can tear myself away from the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire, that is.

Check these two out and let me know if you’re already participating or if you sign up. See you there!

In Social Media for Social Good, former social media consultant Heather Mansfield, principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech 2.0, provides a guidebook for nonprofits entering the social media world for the first time. Mansfield divides the Web into three eras: the Static Web (1.0), the Social Web (2.0), and the Mobile Web (3.0). She explains the importance and value of online tools in each era, explaining that each builds on the era before it. She also identifies specific tools such as Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube, and gives best practices for using these tools. At the end of the book, she includes “Your Nonprofit Tech Checklist,” a step-by-step map for planning your organization’s social media strategy.

Mansfield provides a wealth of information and enhances her own advice by providing Nonprofit Examples of Excellence at the end of each chapter and a “Google This!” section with recommended search terms for more information and examples. Social Media for Social Good has both breadth and depth. I purchased it to support my work with the Durham Savoyards as we enter our 50th Anniversary year; the time seemed ripe for launching our organization into Web 2.0 and beyond. Mansfield focuses on suggestions that at first glance would work only for large non-profits with the budget to hire a social media manager, but with some tweaking, the work can be spread across a range of volunteers.

I highly recommend this book not only for anyone working with a 501(c)3, but also for anyone working in education. The principles are applicable to any organization that relies on external participation and support to succeed at its mission. I think they are especially relevant in the field of education, where providing readily-accessible evidence of the good work we do helps us demonstrate the need for continued funding and personnel support. For example, Mansfield suggests having the Board or staff of your nonprofit create a “Thank You” video for supporters. At a school library, you could have students create a video to thank donors or volunteers. In a classroom, you could create a Flickr pool for your Donors Choose project and post the URL in the project description so donors could follow your students’ progress through the project. Social Media for Social Good provides many more suggestions and best practices that will enhance your organization’s online marketing strategy. Check it out at your library or buy it today!

Social Media for Social Good by Heather Mansfield McGraw-Hill 2011 ISBN 007177081X

Storytime: My 17-year-old brother is a student at an online high school.  (I think it’s TRECA but I’m not 100% sure of that.)  Sometime last spring, my mother described to me a challenge he’d had when working on an assignment in his history class.  The teacher had given him a question of causality: What were the reasons that a particular historical event had happened?  (I can’t remember what event in particular; I think it probably had to do with the start of a war.)  The teacher had instructed the students to “do some research” and “write a paper” about it.  The teacher didn’t provide suggested resources for the research or guidance on the research process.    Without this kind of guidance, my brother  spent hours sorting through Google results and ended up writing an unfocused paper that chronicled every possible cause he could find, rather than a cohesive paper making an argument for a particular cause or related set of causes. I said to my mother, “Well, doesn’t he have a school librarian that he could ask for help on assignments like that?”

“No,” she replied.  “They only just got a case worker for IEPs.”  As a (at the time, future) school librarian, this made me sad.  Since that conversation, I’ve been considering what it would look like for students like my brother to receive library services.

The North Carolina Virtual Public School, as I understand it, operates on a different model than TRECA does.  It is not a full-time academy, but rather provides opportunities for students across the state who might not otherwise be able to take certain classes.  Theoretically, students enrolled in NCVPS have access to school librarians at their home schools and would be able to ask for their assistance.  But, at least in my experience as a middle school librarian, collaboration between the distance teacher and the school librarian is rare and could present significant challenges (mostly due to time constraints; in a world of Skype and GoToMeeting, I think actually setting up the communication would be pretty simple).

For this reason, I think there need to be dedicated virtual school librarians, who work exclusively with teachers and students involved in distance learning.  As of 2009, “not one online high school [had] a school librarian position” (Darrow, 79).  Because of this, we don’t know exactly what such a position would look like.  University libraries, however, provide some promising models with e-learning librarians and distance  learning services.

Based on an informal survey of job descriptions for university librarians serving distance learning students and instructors, plus my own brainstorming based on guidelines like AASL’s Empowering Learners and NCDPI’s IMPACT, here are the services I imagine a VSL might provide:

• collaboration with teachers, either synchronous or asynchronous, to create information literacy lessons embedded in their courses, to assist with the research process, or to provide lists of resources
• consulting with students, to help them through the research process and help them identify relevant and reliable resources
• providing/managing a virtual space where students could create & share their work (blogs? wikis? I'm not sure)
• creating free-standing information literacy lessons for commonly-addressed issues
• participating in classroom discussion fora to answer questions
• holding office hours for virtual reference/unplanned consultations

I'm sure given time, I and the whole world of my librarian colleagues could come up with more.  There's plenty of evidence that having a full-time dedicated school librarian improves student learning.  Isn't it time we served the more than a million students enrolled in online courses?

References

Darrow, R. (2009.) School libraries are essential: Meeting the virtual access and collaboration needs of the 21st-century learner and teacher. Knowledge Quest, 37(5), 78-83.

When you are building a collection and especially if you need to defend your collection against challenges, it is important to take into account the developmental needs of your user base.  This is especially important at the school library, where discussions about what is or is not appropriate can become heated.

When considering the developmental appropriateness of materials in my collections, here are the resources I use:

Stages of Literary Appreciation from Literature for Today’s Young Adults by Alleen Pace Nilsen, et al. (PDF of first chapter provided by the publisher) Nilsen and her colleagues identify seven stages of literary appreciation, from birth through adulthood.  When using this to build or defend your collection, it is important to remember that we retain characteristics from the earlier stages as we grow into the later ones.  For example, in late elementary school, we may want to lose ourselves in the fantasy of literature.  In middle school, we may want to find ourselves reflected in the books we read.  Even though we now want to find reflections of ourselves, our desire for escape and fantasy has not disappeared.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Facts for Families.  The AACAP has created an excellent set of resources on a variety of topics of interest to the families of children and adolescents.  At their website you can download a complete set of these resources, search them by keyword, or browse them by keyword or in the order in which they were released.  Two I have found especially helpful are Normal Adolescent Development - Middle School and Early High School Years and Normal Adolescent Development - Late High School - Years and Beyond.

Developmental Tasks and Education by Robert J. Havighurst.  Havighurst identifies six stages of development and tasks that occur within them.  The quickest overview of these is at Wikipedia.

Developmental Assets from the Search Institute.  For a variety of age groups, the Search Institute has identified 40 developmental assets.  These assets describe what children and young adults need to be successful and to avoid high-risk behaviors.  While the other resources have identified characteristics of your students, these identify resources that enhance their lives.  This can be useful for advocacy more generally and for selecting books where characters have and benefit from the developmental assets or do not have them and must work to overcome their situation.

Having these resources available makes it easy to justify the inclusion of works in your collection without having to rely exclusively on your personal opinion or even your professional judgment.

Many thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for introducing me to these resources in her Young Adult Literature and Related Materials course.

 

 

Since I’m now working as a middle school librarian, I feel like what I read is inextricably tied to how I work. Because of that, I’ve imported all the posts from my lectitans reading blog to this blog.  From now on, all reading posts will be made here in the category “Reading.”  I will not make any new posts at either of the earlier lectitans sites.

Here’s a complete list of this week’s interviews:

Monday:

Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

Tuesday:

Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Wednesday:

Sarah Stevenson at Chasing Ray Emily Howse at Bildungsroman Ashley Hope-Perez at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich at Vivian Lee Mahony (Hip Writer Mama)

Thursday: Tessa Gratton at Writing & Ruminating Micol Ostow at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Maria Padian at Bildungsroman Genevieve Cote at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast Vera Brosgol at lectitans

Friday:

Genevieve Valentine at Shaken & Stirred Stacy Whitman at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Alyssa B. Sheinmel at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy Matthew Cody and Aaron Starmer at Mother Reader

Vera Brosgol is the creator of Anya’s Ghost, a young adult graphic novel about Anya, a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be normal. When Anya falls down a well and meets the ghost of a girl who died a century ago, she quickly discovers that her new friend can help her with her social life and her schoolwork. As is always the case, this friendship is more complicated than she initially realizes.

Vera was kind enough to answer seven questions for me for the SBBT.

Why did you choose to create Anya’s Ghost in black and white?

I honestly didn’t think it needed color. Full-color can really add a lot to a story especially when it takes place in an interesting location or fantastic world, but for this particular one I feel like it would’ve been superfluous. The monochromatic palette served the mood of the story, I think. And it would’ve made the coloring take twice as long.

In addition to creating comics and graphic novels, you are a professional animator. In Anya’s Ghost and the art on your website, you create a sense of movement in still images. How do the skills required for comics and animation overlap?

I’m actually a story artist rather than an animator, though I went to school for animation.  [K: My bad!]  In college I learned that the part of the process I enjoyed the most was the storyboarding part, so that’s what I went into. I didn’t have the patience for animating! I think animation made me a much faster and more flexible artist - when you have to do thousands of drawings you can’t fuss with them too much. It also taught me how to be efficient in communicating with a drawing. I started focusing less on making a pretty picture and more on telling some kind of story with it. That definitely carried over into my illustration and comics work. I feel like the same part of my brain gets used for storyboarding and comics.

Like you, Anya came to America at the age of 5. A lot of Anya’s concerns over her appearance and behavior are magnified by the fact that she comes from a Russian family. How do you think having this extra level of being different affects common teenage concerns?

It’s just one more thing making life difficult. Anything that makes you in any way different from everyone else makes you a target, and when your skin is bad and your clothes are fitting weird you don’t want to pile anything else on top of that. I didn’t have a hard time about being Russian but I was constantly aware that my home life didn’t exactly match that of my friends, and a part of me definitely wished it did. Of course it depends on where you live. I went to a high school in Brooklyn where there was a huge immigrant population and being from another country didn’t cause problems - at most it just dictated what group you’d be friends with.

While Anya’s worries are common to most teenagers, Anya’s Ghost adds a supernatural element to issues of friendship and peer pressure. What do you think is powerful about using the supernatural to tell this kind of story?

Part of the reason I added the paranormal element to the story was to make it more fun for me! Regular old school drama is all well and good but I don’t really get excited unless there’s something weird or creepy going on. And Emily served as a way to reflect all of Anya’s bad traits back at her, so that she could get a good honest look at herself. That would’ve been possible to do with a non-ghost character but it made sense for me to do that with someone who literally didn’t have a life of their own.

On your website, you feature fan art for other works such as Scott Pilgrim and The Hunger Games. Who are some of your favorite artists and writers? What about their work inspires you?

I’m a big fan of Fred Moore and Earl Oliver Hurst, both of whom drew lovely lady illustrations. Jillian Tamaki is one of my favorite modern illustrators - I love her embroidered Penguin covers and her amazing ink work. There’s a Czech illustrator named Stepan Zavrel who did the most amazing watercolors - I’d love to get some of that looseness into my own work. And I’m friends with some phenomenal artists - Jon Klassen, Chris Turnham, Steve Wolfhard, Emily Carroll… so I am constantly inspired by them. Writer-wise, I really like Haruki Murakami’s books. Before that I read Dracula and Geek Love. Right now I’m working through the Song of Ice & Fire books. I usually want to draw a picture to go along with whatever I’m reading just to get it out of my head!

A lot of your art, such as your collaborative Tumblr blog Draw this dress! and your many circus-themed pieces, draws on vintage imagery. What is it about these images from the past that appeals to you?

I love fashion. I wanted to be a fashion designer when I was little (as well as an animator and a children’s book illustrator and probably a vet or something). Though really I think what I meant was costume design - I love anything that tells a story and clothes can absolutely do that. Vintage clothes tell you about the kind of person who wore them, what their life was like, what was going on in the world at the time… it’s really easy and fun to insert a character into them, which is what Draw This Dress is all about. Modern fashion can be a lot of fun too but there’s definitely more variety if you’re borrowing from the past.

When you were in high school, you created the webcomic Return to Sender. What did you learn from this experience that has helped you in your career?

Haha! I kind of learned what not to do. I did that comic before school and the whole thing was a very fussily-drawn, poorly-planned experiment. I generally knew where the story was going but putting it up online one page at a time was not the best way to do tell it - once a page was up it was up, there was no going back and reworking things to improve the story. Maybe for a comic strip that would’ve been okay but I was essentially trying to make a graphic novel. It reached a point where it had gotten sloppy and I got too busy with school to deal with fixing it so I just stopped. I’m much more careful with plotting now and try to think of a book as a whole, rather than a series of installments. And I stopped using those darn Micron pens!

Thanks, Vera!

The fun continues: Sean Beaudoin at Chasing Ray Neesha Meminger at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Rachel Karns at Bildungsroman

Hi there! It’s time once again for our semiannual (because we do one in winter, too, see?) smorgasbord of interviews with authors and illustrators. Every day this week, I’ll be posting links to interviews elsewhere, and then on Thursday, I’ll be sharing my very own interview with Vera Brosgol. Enjoy!

Today’s Interviews: Tara Altebrando at Chasing Ray Shirley Vernick at Bildungsroman Jack Ferraiolo at The Happy Nappy Bookseller Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen at Writing & Ruminating

PLN Challenge #3 is all about using Twitter to build your PLN.  I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years now, and it has been the focal point of my PLN.  I feel that Twitter is an excellent tool for finding resources and connecting with others.

Many people think that Twitter is a service for broadcasting the minutiae of your day, the classic example being an announcement of the contents of your lunch. I’ve found it to be much more than that, but it can take some time to find the right people to follow. As I mentioned in my first challenge post, Darren Rowse’s excellent TwiTip blog provides a list of the top educators to follow. The Edublog Awards provide another excellent source for discovering potential colleagues.

An objection I often hear is, “Where will I find the time for this?”, followed by “How will I keep up?” The beauty of Twitter is that it requires very little commitment to be useful. My basic Twitter routine goes like this:

1. Open up the TweetDeck extension in Google Chrome.
2. Scroll back until I reach a post that says it was posted 2 hours ago.
3. Read from that point forward, clicking on interesting links as I go.

When I find something particularly moving or interesting, I retweet it so that anybody following me who may have missed it can take a look. I never read tweets that are more than an hour old. This eliminates the concern over catching up. Good stuff gets shared repeatedly, so if I’ve missed something, I trust that it will pop up again. Twitter is kind of like a party or a conference that happens all the time: when you’re there, it’s fun and enriching, but when you’re not, there’s no need to worry.

What is your Twitter routine? Do you have any limits like my 1-hour limit?