Does technology really harm our pupils?

I came across this article on the BBC Newspages, and it made me think.  Tech Addiction harms pupils.  Now, those of you who know me in person, know that I am fairly tech addicted myself.  Whilst writing this, I have Tweetdeck open for my twitter updates, and also MSN, in case a friend of mine comes online whilst I am writing this piece.  But does this harm me, and my ability to write?  It will slow me down, undoubtedly, and I wouldn’t argue with that at all.  But will it harm my finished piece of work?  There is also the fact that I can ask all of my online friends a question about something that puzzles me whilst I am writing to be weighed against the difference in time it may take me to write the assignment. I am now in my dissertation year, and I am going to study the impact of technology on teaching. Whilst, as a school librarian I do get upset by the fact that pupils are reading less books, and I also know the perfectly good reasons why they should read more (empathy, etc); I cannot say that the pupils are not reading, because they are.  They read blogs, Facebook entries, and webpages, for a start.  Does this harm them?  Well, it does depend on the child, but we could also say that maybe they are living a completely different type of life than we did as children.  They have access to technology way beyond my wildest dreams as a child.  I need to be careful not to judge them by the standards of my own childhood – where there were no other sources of reading other than the printed word – and to judge them by their own standards.  They may not empathise with other people different to them through the medium of fiction; but they may be doing this through Facebook.  Are they being harmed?  No, I don’t think so.  Are they different?  Yes, completely.  And is that a bad thing?  I leave it to you to judge that.

Growing the baby ‘Guerrilla library’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, here we are – you are witnessing the birth of a new baby library!  I am so proud!  Those of you who have been reading my posts, and following my blog, will know about the story of the Guerrilla Librarian.  Today I got to visit the school again, now that the furniture has arrived, to advise on future developments.  Now, those of you with big and ‘proper’ libraries may not think this is much, but to us (the teacher and I), this is miraculous!  This is a tiny space at the back of an English classroom transformed by two sofas, spinners and some nice plants.  What you can’t see – because they were in another classroom – were the two lockable folding bookshelves stuffed full of Accelerated Reader books, already being used by the pupils.  Most of the books on the shelves are old, and I am going into the school again to weed the stock (but very gently), and to help catalogue the books on LibraryThing so that everything is up and running for September.  Our next project is to buy some exciting non-fiction and some graphic novels, and we’re away!  The teacher is asking staff to donate their holiday reading, and some staff have already donated books from their children’s books at home, now they can see the library growing.  Isn’t it wonderful!  I will keep you posted on the growth of my baby, but thought you all deserved to see what can be done by sheer determination (and a generous grant of start-up money from the school of course).  It is fantastic that the Accelerated Reader programme has been used to grow a library back, and we hope that demand for reading is so high over this year that she will need more books and more shelves next year, encroaching even more into her classroom!

Slideshare – the value of online presentations

I learnt a really valuable lesson about the value of having your presentations uploaded to an online presentation site, such as Slideshare, recently. I have had occasion to upload three presentations recently, one of my own and two that I have been given permission to host from a recent CILIPKent training day that I organised.  The one that I uploaded was called A Guerrilla Librarian, and it was the slideshow from the presentation that I gave recently at the Renaissance Learning conference in Birmingham, which arose from the blog post of the same name which you will find earlier in this blog.  The other two were about developing libraries – one a university, and some public, – to incorporate social spaces.   What this exercise has taught me is the numbers of people that you can reach with the simple (and free) exercise of hosting the presentation online.  26 people came to our training day; however, I advertised the slideshows on my Twitter feed, by email to the other members of the CILIPKent committee who could not make the training day, and to the members of a librarians online group to which I belong.  One week after posting the links to these slideshows, this is the result: The Kent Libraries modernisation programme slideshow has had 280 views, and the Imperial College refurbishment programme has had 194 views!  Now considering that there were only 26 people in the room at the time, this shows the value of online networking. Many more people have been helped by the excellent ideas in these two slideshows, than if I had not bothered to upload them and left it to the more traditional handouts to delegates.  I think I have learned a valuable lesson about online presence – and I hope that CILIP learns from this too.

Professional Reviews makes a person professional!

 

You may think that this goes without saying.  You may think that I have just put that heading to be smart, using alliteration and tongue twisting.  But funnily enough, no.  I put that heading because it should be the most obvious statement there is.  Recently, I have been shocked to find how many of my fellow school librarians are not only not allowed to participate in professional training to enhance their skills, they are also not given professional reviews alongside teaching staff.  How can they be expected to be seen and treated as professionals in a school which does not see it worth their while to properly review and evaluate them?  Some of the librarians have ‘a little talk’ with their line manager once or twice a year, without anything being committed to paper; some librarians have complained that they only get interviewed once every four years when the school is renewing the Investors in People certificate; and some are never reviewed in any way at all.  I despair, I really do!  How are we to be able to prove that we need certain skills and training, and so have an entitlement to money from the CPD budget if we do not have a Professional Review which binds the school to provide that training for us?  In a dispute about working practices, I at least could look at my professional review to prove that the school had not trained me even though I had asked for training and it was one of my objectives.  How do I know what I need to improve if nobody bothers to observe my work?  And how do I prove to the teaching staff that I am a professional alongside them when they have objectives that they are held to account for, and I only have a ‘little talk’ now and then, nothing too rigorous? NO, sorry, but no!  We cannot expect to be treated like professionals by the teaching staff unless we are reviewed as professionals alongside them.  If you are not subject to a professional review at the moment, I would seriously suggest that you go to your Line Manager and ask to be included in the next round of reviews.  I guarantee they will be surprised – but I have given you some arguments to arm yourself with.  Let’s not collaborate with the de-professionalising of school librarians; lets strengthen our professional position instead!

Playing in my sandbox

Recently, there has been a violent storm on an internet list I belong to – a storm all about Web 2 technology.  It resulted in some violent and intemperate words being said on both sides, and ended with a valuable member of the list leaving.  Now, why am I telling you all of this?  Because it all was about who was a digital pioneer and who were digital settlers.  So where do I come in?  Well, I am one of the pioneers on the list.  Not one of the first pioneers by any means, but I am an enthusiastic user of Web 2 technologies, and I love playing around with these new technologies.  I am an enthusiastic Twitterer – for now, anyway, until something else catches my fancy!  I sign up for lots of new technologies,  try them out, and then discard them, or use them, whichever is appropriate.  I am perfectly happy doing this, and don’t see it as a waste of my time at all. I am not the most skilled user of any of these ‘toys’, but I am perfectly willing to spend time ‘playing around’ with different applications, seeing which may come in useful.  Every so often I will throw one of my new toys out of the sandbox for others to have a look at, to examine, and to put to good use.  For instance, I recommended Twitter as a useful tool for the internet list recently, having looked at other means of communication and discarded them as not being very useful.  At the moment there are a lot of pioneering school librarians and teachers populating Twitter – with the result that when the settlers catch up with us there is a lot of traffic on the site already, and lots of people with useful information to follow.  Now when I first caught the ‘Twitterbug’, there were very few of us, but we slowly built a useful colony for others to follow.  And that is the point of ‘playing in my sandbox’.  You may find that what I am doing is totally useless, and a waste of time – that you don’t have the time to play with toys, and so why should I (the accusation on the list which caused all the furore).  However, if I hadn’t been there before you, playing with lots of technologies and seeing which ones had educational value and which did not, then where would the settlers be in a few years time?  The pioneers are not superior to the settlers – they just enjoy trying out new technologies and seeing what they can do.  They aren’t necessarily the best ones at embedding this new technology into the curriculum – they’re off finding other new technologies to have a look at.  So what I am pleading for is this: whether you are a pioneer or a settler, make room for the other.  The pioneers may drive you mad with their butterfly approach to technology, but they are doing a useful sorting and sifting job; the settlers may drive you mad with their slow adoption of the wonderful new technology you are dying for them to try, but once they do adopt it they will embed it into the curriculum in a far better way than you will.  Be a pioneer or a settler, whichever suits you - but don’t shoot at each other!

A Guerilla Librarian

Today, I became a guerilla librarian. In fact, I had actually started this guerilla warfare back in October, when I met an English teacher at the Accelerated Reader conference in a plush Stansted hotel, near London.  She was from a school near me, but I won’t identify which one.  We sat next to each other at the Gala Dinner, never having met before. She was a bit dejected, and we started talking.  Turned out that her school had got rid of the school library a few years ago – because everything is now on the internet, reasoned the Head, and there was no need.  She had managed to rescue  a few fiction books at the back of her classroom.  She has three years left in teaching, and her greatest wish was to bring a library back to the school.  I was full of enthusiasm – how DARE he! – and my blood was up.  We started planning our campaign.  I told her that we needed to build a library by popular demand, from the bottom up.  The pupils would be so enthusiastic, I told her, that they and their parents would DEMAND to have a library.  She began to see how it was possible, using a lot of Web 2 technology.  

Just before Christmas, the English teacher visited my school with a member of the Senior Management Team in tow.  The first part of our plan was to  persuade the SMT that they needed the Accelerated Reader programme to improve children’s reading ages throughout Key Stage Three.  And guess what?  AR is book hungry!  She emailed me in delight a few weeks ago, saying they had approved the programme, and given her 10k, which had to be spent by March.  No problem at all!  Today, I went to her school to see the physical space she had, and to plan which books she needed, and which furniture.  We have spent a wonderful day planning a lovely little library in the back of her classroom, with beanbags and sofas, with the help of a very enthusiastic TA.  We are buying bookshelves that shut up and are on wheels, so that they can be pushed out to the corridor during lunchtimes, extending the library outside the classroom walls, making the most of the physical space.  Fantastic! 

Although she is a full time English teacher, and is time limited, all of this is possible with love and enthusiasm.  She has no library management system, and has no need of one yet – I showed her how to work the old-fashioned but simple ‘Brown Issue’ in a couple of minutes, and with the help of pupils, she will use that.  I showed her the wonderful school library blog pages by Anne Robinson, where she has used a lot of Web 2 technology to great effect.  My teacher was enthused straightaway.  To catalogue the books, we are going to use LibraryThing, putting a widget on her blog.  I will show her how to make Delicious bookmarks, Flikr pictures, and she was thrilled with Wordle.  She is now going to buy her lovely new books, get started with AR to get reading started with Year 7 pupils, and buy the furniture.  I can’t wait to see the space she’s creating – I get to cut the ribbon when it is officially opened!  And I bet you when she retires, she will have her dream.  It’s worth fighting for – however small you have to start – kids still love books, and we will still have school libraries.  At least, whilst I am around!

21st Century Learning – are we ready for it?

more about “The Future Of Learning“, posted with vodpod

 

This video by Stephen Heppell, which was used for the Bett show in London in 2008, is an excellent example of 21st century thinking and learning.  Stephen Heppell talks about educators being coaches – about us not being afraid to allow students to go way beyond us when they are moving into collaborative learning.  He draws the analogy of sports coaches not being better players than the top players they coach, but being able to stand back, analyse and draw inferences from the performance to make the performance better.  Heppell tells us that our role in educating young people today is changing to this role of facilitator. And I guess that is where the difficulty comes, especially with some very old-fashioned educators.  Most of us  – and I know I am one – grew up in a world where the teacher always knew best.  You never questioned the authority and knowledge of the teacher, you could only hope to equal their knowledge one day.  But in 21st century learning, Heppell argues, we need to put down that didactic role and allow pupils to know a lot more than us about Web 2 technologies.  They do anyway- I don’t use my phone to take videos although it has that capability – I am so old fashioned that I use my phone for phoning and texting!  If I have trouble letting go of my ‘godlike’ knowlege and capabilities, then I am going to fare badly in the 21st century world that our students work in, and they are going to discard me along with every other piece of outdated technology.  However, if we work alongside them, helping them to analyse, criticise their own work, and suggest improvements and alternatives, without necessarily having all the technological capability ourselves, then we are a useful part of their learning.  Of course I advocate learning the technology myself so that I will be useful on a deeper level – but all I am saying is that we don’t have to have all the technological capability first before we allow our students to use this technology, just enormous enthusiasm and vision for learning to learn, for all of us, students and educators alike.

Thinking about plagiarism

There’s an saying my teacher husband told me, but he doesn’t know where it came from.  However, it is relevant to this piece: ’Using one source is plagiarism; using two is research.’  I read an excellent books about learning in the digital age called Homo Zappiens for my research on my current essay on VLE’s and collaboration, and found a really interesting idea in there for us to think about.  Up to now I have always taken the traditional approach of any librarian – ‘”Don’t just print out from Wikipedia – do your own research!” However, whilst not saying that approach is wrong, let me just throw out a ‘cat amongst the pigeons’ for you to have a think about. And it is this: why, when I am writing my academic essay, should I be encouraged to read other people’ s research, and to use their ideas, and to quote from it – but I call it plagiarism where a child does the same?  Now, I know that there is a difference in scale – I know how to attribute sources and they just print out from the internet.  But if we teach them how to attribute sources from an early age – when they first come into secondary school rather than leaving it to later, they will know how to do it properly by the time they get to GCSE level.  Instead of telling them printing out a page from Wikipedia is wrong, why don’t we ask them to print out a second piece of homework, following on from the first, where Wikipedia is correctly attributed (giving them a writing frame in order for them to do this); and also including a second source also attributed with a short comment on how the two sources are different?  How about asking a class to read each other’s pieces of work about the same subject, and then choose one sentence from three different friends from their original writing, to enhance their own essays, commenting on it?    After all, our students live in a plagiarised social network, where YouTube videos have soundtracks on them that come from records whose sources have not been sought or acknowledged, and this is true of much of their social media.  They share photos on Facebook or on Flikr – see my post below where I didn’t realise that a photo I got from Flikr was attributable to another librarian.  They believe that everything in the public domain is there for them to copy, to change to suit themselves, and they have the software to do it.  We cannot stop them doing this – but we can teach them to attribute sources correctly.  Have a think – what’s your view?

How collaborative are your VLE’s?

This has been occupying my mind, lately.  Partly because I am writing my second year essay for a Masters on how VLE’s have changed teaching and learning, and partly because I am very interested in this question anyway.  And my research has led me into some fascinating directions – such as, what is the nature of collaboration?  If we become truly collaborative, won’t teachers become facilitators instead?  I have been thinking about this quote from Stephen Heppell  in ‘Virtually There’:

‘Learning is breaking out of the narrow boxes that it was trapped in during the 20th century; teacher’s professionalism, reflection and ingenuity are leading learning to places that genuinely excite this new generation of connected young school students – and their teachers too.  VLE’s are helping to make sure that their learning is not confined to a particular building, or restricted to any single location or moment.’

If we truly believe this to be true, then we need to act it out!  How many of our resources on our VLE’s are just static worksheets?  They are no different than the old photocopied handouts.  To be a truly collaborative 21st century learning environment we need to allow our pupils to learn outside of classrooms, which means using pod casts of lessons, videoing parts of lessons such as experiments; having Skype conferences for pupils who want to take part in revision sessions outside school; maintaining discussion forums where pupils can ask us – and each other – about coursework.  I am beginning to envision a very different type of VLE than the one we now have – but to get there not only requires a whole amount of work, but also a lot of changing of  the way that we think about how and where learning and teaching takes place. I will return to this – when I have thought a bit more – but your comments are welcome!

Learning all the time

After putting up the lovely pln picture in the post below, which I found on Twitter, which led me to Flikr, I find that it is attributable to another librarian on WordPress, whom I haven’t acknowledged.  Slapping myself on the wrist, – a librarian should know better than anyone about attribution of sources, I now acknowledge that the wonderful diagram about pln’s comes from the lonewolflibrarian blog.  Sorry and all that – newbie’s mistake, will try not to make it again .  Now to play with the dashboard and try to make my blog look interesting before I let anyone else look at it!