Thing 29: Open Educational Resources

I am embarrassed to say that before this assignment, I really knew very little about search tools that existed for Open Educational Resources. I spent some time in the beginning of this assignment getting a better understanding of OER's by watching the OER video embedded in the assignment and reading through some of the resources. I particularly found the FAQ: OER for K-12 Educator pdf useful.

After reading through the materials and getting a better understanding, I started exploring many of the search tools that were suggested. Each of the tools opened a new window of excitement for me, so much so that I spent way too much time searching on some of them. My excitement quickly turned to, "How can I share this with my teachers without overwhelming them?" I decided that sending out the resources in a newsletter might be best and limiting the resources to my top 3 choices, I really didn't want to overwhelm them.

In my newsletter, I started off by giving them a brief overview, which included the video that I found to be useful and a link to the FAQ resource. Then I provided a brief description of resource with a link to the material, followed by an invitation for further help if they were interested.

From the list of OER search tools, I picked the tools that I felt had good content for Elementary teachers, were user friendly, and offered a variety of resources. Here are some of the features that I loved about each of the resources that I chose:

OER Commons
I loved OER Commons because of the search ability features, specifically that you could narrow your search between educational levels (lower primary and upper primary). In addition, I loved that they had a STEM Literacy section with resources that include templates, resources to prepare educators and teaching materials.

Open Ed
Although I didn't find this search tool as visually appealing, it was user friendly, with great advanced search options, even allowing the user to search by publisher. This search tool also provided resources in a large variety of formats such as videos, audio, lesson plans, games, interactive homework and much more. I felt that this would be extremely beneficial in an elementary school because of the discrepancy of instructional needs. Finally, our teachers could really benefit from the resources specifically designed for NGSS.

Curriki
Personally, I loved this search tool for all of the information and media literacy resources. However, I also thought that it was a great tool for teachers and students as well. The resources were laid out in a user friendly way. There was also more resources than just lessons and units, there were resources to further teachers and student understanding. I also liked the variety of formats of the resources, from links to downloadable files to webinars (there is a great one on teaching NGSS in a first grade classroom). A nice touch to this tool is that the resources could be reviewed, making searching for good resources a little easier. I will say that I didn't find a couple of resources on here with broken links, so having a review or being able to write a review is helpful.

Thing 35: Web Presence (including LibGuides)

I explored "Thing 35: Web Presence" not because I don't have a web presence, but because I thought my website needed a little boost. I have used Weebly for several years, which I love and after reading the "Brown Bag Teacher" blog post, I felt confident that I am already utilizing the tools and features that were highlighted by Catherine Reed.

I decided to explore the list of library sites that were posted in the assignment to see if I could get any ideas for my website. After exploring all of the sites, most of which were middle and high school, I determined that my site really lakes a "reading presence." There are a lot of resources on my site, highlights of student work and programs being offered. However, when it comes to supporting book lovers, book recommendations and generating an excitement for reading, I feel that I have really "dropped the ball." Therefore, I chose that to be the focus of this assignment. Little did I know how tedious this process was going to be.

I started of viewing other websites and looking for ideas and resources that others were using that I would like to include on my page. On the Springston School Library Blog they had links to different resources for book recommendations so I decided to start by including several of those on my site: The Book Seeker, Everyone's Reading, and Literature Map. I also loved how on their site there were pictures of kids reading or celebrating reading and I knew I wanted to capture that as well. For this assignment I started by including pictures that capture readers, but eventually I would like to include and imovie on this site.

On the Staples Library Learning Commons site, I liked the idea of displaying resources with a Symbaloo, but I didn't really feel like that fit with what I visually wanted for my website. In the past, I had used Shelfari and I loved the visual layout of that. I started out with the hopes of building shelves for my page, but unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed to learn that Amazon is no longer offering this services. I next looked into other options such as Goodreads, which isn't as kid friendly in my mind and I even read an article "12 Alternatives to Goodreads"  so I decided to start with that. I tried many of the suggestions, but they were most sites to help gain recommendations, not to provide them by building a shelf. Some were pretty cool though. Next, I tried to see if I might be able to embed my book shelf from Destiny Quest. I couldn't seem to find a way to do that either, I could print my shelves or email them, but not embed them. I then found an article on Shelfari Alternatives and found many of the same ideas that I had before, with a few additions. I tried Shelvable, which was simple and had a great layout, but I wasn't able to embed my shelf onto my site. I like how this site offered a great deal of information about each of the books from the description, to book details, to Goole Preview. Booklikes had a lot of potential as well. I like the look of the shelf and I could add a widget to my site, however creating shelves and adding books wasn't as easy I would have liked.

In the end I decided to go with Symbaloo, but I am open to suggestions. The nice thing about "Book Lovers" page on my website with Symbaloo pages of recommendations for each grade, K-6. The formatting is a little funky, but overall, I am happy to have a resource for students, teachers, and parents to find recommendations.
Symbaloo is that I am able to connect the kids to the catalog and they can go directly to see descriptions, detail and whether the book is currently available. Since that point, people have suggested Library Thing, but I was well into building my Symbaloo pages and didn't want to switch gears at that point. The Symbaloo pages took an extremely long time to put together, but I now have a

I will continue to add and tweak as new ideas and resources come to me, but at this point I am happy to say that I have an exciting "boost" to my website! In the longterm, I hope to work with Sarah Olson, our High School Librarian to also give our site/s an additional boost, by including a feature similar to what is on East Syracuse Minoa Central Schools site. They have the words "Lead-Learn-Innovate" on their with a direct link that takes you to a Google Slideshow of what each of those things means in the library. We would like to play with that idea for our mission or maybe goals and mantra. Sarah and I might even team up for a "DIY Thing" for that.

Thing 3: Twitter Online Communities

I have this saying in the library that says, "Welcome to the library, where we are failing, succeeding and growing." To me when it comes to Twitter I feel this quote holds true. It took me a long time to commit to Twitter and recognize it as the powerful tool it is meant to be. Although, I don't think I "use" it to it's fullest power, I do think that I at least "recognize" it now. I have done this assignment, I believe in each of my "Cool Tools" classes, and each time I seem to fail, succeed and grow a little more. I am slightly frustrated in saying that this third attempt, although had success it had many failures.

I started off this assignment wanting to find a way to connect my social media platforms, specifically Twitter and Facebook. It can be time consuming to share out what is happening in the library to both platforms, so I was excited to explore ways to post to both of these platforms through one post. I began looking at Hootsuite because it had come recommended to me by many people and was listed as one of the ideas for "Veteran Tweeters." However, when exploring it seemed like there was a cost associated with it and it seemed like it was more advanced than what I was looking for.  I quickly "jumped ship" and began exploring "If This Than That."

"IFTT" is an app available for iphones and ipads. This is free and extremely easy to navigate. All options are laid out for you in a tile format and you are able to simply select what posting options you would like. However, I ran into many struggles along the way. First to my frustration it kept syncing to my personal account and not my "library" account (first failure). Once I finally was able to link it to my library account, I couldn't figure out how to link it to a "page" it would just link it to my main account. I finally found an option that allowed for information I post on my main page to also post on all of my other "pages" in Facebook. I was excited about that, but it presented me with two other problems. The first being that because you can only make a business page on FB off your main page, I was now forced to make all my posts on my main page, which I worry about people now being able to make posts on (hmm... I guess I could just not accept their friend requests). The second issue was when I wanted to post a picture with my status the picture didn't post on in the status, just the message. I figured out that I could get the picture to post to Twitter by using the hashtag #tw after my post. However, I still wasn't able to get the picture to go to my "library page." Ugh...

After a lot of exploring I finally found an option to send photo upload on FB page to Twitter w/ image. However, although that was a success, it proved to be another failure because when it posted to Twitter it showed the status, but the picture holder said "image could not be found." (Sigh...)

Like I mentioned earlier, I had many "failures and successes" in this assignment, but in the end I do feel like I "grew." I am not giving up yet though. I will keep you posted... as I try to find a way to get my photos to attach with my status while posting to my "library page."

I do suggest trying IFTTT though because they have so many cool options that don't have to do with Twitter and Facebook. I am looking forward to exploring more options... when I am a little less frustrated.

* As an added comment, I did try Buffer, which very easily posted to pages, but they only gave a 6 day free trial. Was I missing something? When I signed in it said that there was 10 free connections. Hmm...

Thing 18: Student Assessment and Feedback Tools

While on a run one day with a friend who is a literacy coach in a neighboring district, she asked me if I had ever used "Orange Slice." I had never heard of it, so instantly looked into it. I quickly began to play with it and liked the potential that it offered, but found that there was a huge a learning curve and since I didn't immediately have a need for it, I gave up on it. So, I thought I would take the opportunity to revisit it during this online class.

What is Orange Slice? 

Orange Slice is a free add-on from Google. It allows for you to create a rubric within an assignment on a GoogleDoc and individually grade and provide feedback to each individual students work. Once the rubric is created it automatically provides the student with a grade. It even pairs with Google Classroom when grading assignments. There is also a feature for student rubrics, where students can peer review each others assignments. This is a feature that I did not look into, although in hindsight that might have been a good option for my students to review their own work.

As mentioned above there is a learning curve when trying to start. So, in this attempt to learn the tool, I went out to find some tutorials and came across an article written by Joyce Valenza in SLJ that featured Orange Slice. She does an excellent job explaining the tool and also provides tutorials within her article. If anyone is interested in learning how to use Orange Slice, I found her article to be the most helpful:  http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2015/12/12/orange-slice-rubrics-for-docs/.

If you would rather not read the article and just watch a tutorial, I felt this one was a great one to start with:

How I used Orange Slice? 

I decided that I wanted to be able to grade our 6th grade students on their book talks that they were required to give weekly in the library. I had given the students a checklist of things that I was looking for in their book talk and then used the Orange Slice add-on to create a rubric to assess those things. 

This process was a little frustrating at first. Getting the add-on is not a problem at all, but once you begin to build your rubric it takes some time to learn what each of the options are asking you. I often times chose an option that wasn't doing what I thought it was supposed to do. I quickly learned though, that you can add and edit anything just like you would in building any table in Docs. Once you start building your table and you get to the option that says: "Categories" you can pick a blank one and it will put one blank row on your table and five columns. You can add rows from there and delete the columns as you wish as well. Once you finish and select "Sore rubric" it will automatically account for the changes that you made to the rubric. 

I know that Joyce Valenza claims this is easy and I do want to stress that once you build it and learn it, it is beyond easy, but it does take time initially. 

Some quick tips for your first use:

• Have your rubric layout sketched out on paper.
• Add your own rows and columns to your table (you don't need to use theirs). 
• Everything is editable and changeable.
• Be patient it is worth it!!! 

Once your rubric is made you can copy and paste it into any Google Doc.

The tricky part for me was that I wanted to have students view their book talk first, grade themselves and then I wanted to be able to give them their final grade using the rubric that I pasted into their assignment. I was having trouble doing this at first because I couldn't submit the entire assignment within a Google Doc and share their individual links. Even if I indicated that I wanted a "copy" for each student they wouldn't have their specific link to their video. Lucky for me a few days ago Google came out with the new feature that we could create individual assignments. Now, I can use my template, insert the individual link and create an individual assignment for each student in Google Classroom. This worked perfectly!! 

The students were able to view their assignment, watch their video, use the attached rubric to grade

themselves and then return it to me for a final grade. It was so simple to be able to grade inside the assignment with the rubric embedded. All I needed to do was click on the box, it highlighted it and then gave them a grade. It was also nice for the students to be able see the criteria attached within the assignment to clearly let them know the expectations. The best part is, now I can embed this rubric into any assignment on a Google Doc.

Overall, I would say, give it a try or at least suggest it to your teachers. There is a learning curve, but once you become familiar with it, it will save you tons of time on the back end.

Thing 9: Database and Search Tools

I chose this "thing" because I am always looking for new search tools that are applicable for elementary students. As much as we have a strong list of databases that we offer our students, both the students and the teachers want to search the Internet. Therefore, I decided to venture into the resources and articles listed under this assignment. I first started off with the idea that I was going to find new search tools or ideas for helping students to search and ended up in a completely different direction. I began by reading, "6 Steps to Teaching Students to Search" to see if there was any new tips/ strategies that I could pick up that would helper younger students search on the Internet. Unfortunately, this article didn't provide any new information for me. Next, I read an article in the School Library Journal, that caught my attention, " Goodbye, Boring Database Instruction. Hello, Search App Smackdown." I was instantly engaged in this article from the onset. Brenda Boyner, discusses how database interaction can become "tired-and-boring" and that she developed instruction that became more meaningful to the students. She started off by no longer calling them databases, but "Search Apps." She then took it one step further by creating a "Search App Smackdown."

The "Search App Smackdown" peaked my interest for two reasons. First, it seemed like it could help make databases more appealing to the user. Second, it seemed like it will allow me to actually spend quality time teaching the databases and comparing different databases. Unfortunately, some of the resources & links mentioned in the article, I wasn't able to access, but I was still able to get the main idea. Basically, she takes two of the databases creates a video tutorial of each of the databases and assigns them to watch them for homework (flipped classroom approach).While watching the videos student fill out notes on an organizer (I couldn't find this resource at first, but was able to find it in the "comments" section at the end of the article). The next day they come to class, hand in their organizers (which get graded) and form teams. Each team uses the databases to answer a series of question cards. Once the team answers the questions they have a "runner" deliver the answer to the librarian. The librarian indicates whether they have the right answer and awards points.  This game allows students to quickly navigate the databases and their featured tools/ resources, while also making learning fun and meaningful.

Although, I love the concept of the Smackdown and how it gets the students to use the databases, I don't have the same type of class structure/ opportunity as this High School librarian has. I don't have the ability to assign homework to the students and I don't offer them grades. However, I can certainly use the concept. First off, all our students have iPads K-4 and we have already turned most of the databases into apps, so the idea of calling the databases, "Search Apps" will be easy enough. However, what I decided to do was take an idea from what I saw at a NYSCATE conference and blend it with this "Smackdown" concept.  They had a variety of presenters get up and present a new App and they had 3 minutes to give a quick tutorial on it. Once their time was up they said, "Slam" and the audience repeated. The next person had 3 minutes to showcase the next tool. In the end the audience voted on who presented the best tools. Surprisingly they called this "App Smackdown" as well.

Evaluation Sheet
(Please let me know if you would
like access to this document)

Here is my idea for a hybrid of the activities that I think will be both engaging and meaningful. We are starting an inquiry on the American Revolution in 4th grade. This is a 2-3 week unit that I usually introduce various databases along the way. I would love to be able to spend a little more time having both the teachers and the students look more closely at the databases. So, I am going to ask the teachers if they would be open to competing in an "App Smackdown" with me. At the beginning of a lesson, both the teacher and I will have 3 minutes to share a database with the class. We will then have the students use the "Search Apps (databases)" during their research that day. At the end of the lesson students will need to fill out an evaluation sheet that I created indicating which "Search App (database)" won. We will continue to do this throughout the unit, allowing for the students and teachers to learn several new databases and new content as well. Of course, there should probably be a prize for the winning resource! Any ideas???

Thing 2: Photo Fun

I decided to revisit one of the older things for this weeks assignment. I feel like I have been doing a much better job sharing what is happening in the library on both Twitter and Facebook, but like Nikki Robertson addresses in her blog, A Love Story, I need to get the students seeing what is happening in the library. Let's face it students aren't using Facebook and Twitter like adults do, they are using SnapChat. So, I decided to take the plunge... Eek!!!

I found that SnapChat a much bigger learning curve than I had anticipated. Not, that it was hard, but it certainly wasn't as user friendly as I had hoped. Thank goodness for the students. Once I asked a few of them and couple of "trendy" teachers, I was in business in no time.

After playing around with all of the features, I can definitely see why students love this App. It is a lot of fun! Like all Apps, I needed to think about my purpose, which was to share what is happening over the course of the day in the library without sending multiple postings in one day. For that reason I think that the stories feature is going to be the most useful tool for me. It will allow for me to post pictures all day long without having to stop and take time to carefully think about my wording in a post, which I need to do with bothTwitter and Facebook.

I also think the app will be great for showcasing new books to students. It is my hope that when a new box of books arrives in the library that I can quickly take a photo of a  few of my favorite covers/books and send it out as a story.

Of course, like Nikki discusses in her blog, none of this is going to work, if I don't have an audience, otherwise I will just be sharing with myself. So, I took Nikki's idea and made posters in Canva to hang around the school with my code on it. I am also hoping to make notices to go home after the holiday's with tools and resources for anyone who received devices for Christmas. I plan to have a link to Overdrive, Facebook, Twitter, the library website and now SnapChat. Anything to get information out to students and parents is a win in my book!

I am excited to say that I have two followers already. I even gave them a challenge to get as many students as they can to join. I even sent them back to class with a flyer. Hmm... that gets me thinking... maybe bookmarks with my Snapcode.

Thing 14: News Literacy

Thank you so much for addressing this topic. It has kept me up at night during pre and post election events. I keep thinking, what can I do as a librarian to help address this issue of "fake news" and how do I help people become more media literate. At the same time, I begin to question my own ability to be able to determine the validity, and origin of information and was/am in desperate need of time to process and educate myself further on this topic.

I started off reading Joyce Valenza's article Truth, truthiness, and triangulation: A new literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world and was exposed to the term "post-truth" for the first time. I had been wrestling with this concept and had no idea that there was a word for it. For some reason it helped me to put a label to the concept I had been wrestling with. Anyway, there was so much great content in that article and I spent a lot of time venturing off onto the links and resources that were embedded throughout the article, which to be honest overwhelmed me. My head started spinning with all the things I need to teach and areas that I need to address. Then I began to think about "where can I fit this into the curricular content?", "What will this look like in 2nd grade versus 6th grade?", "What teachers should I start with?", ahhh.... it was too much to process!!!

The problem was that I kept reading and reading many great articles that were validating my concerns and I had this sense of urgency to address this issue in light of the recent election, however the topic is so big and complicated, that I just didn't know where to begin. So I decided to take a step back and think about what connections I could make within the my current instructional content that I am working within.

In 6th grade the classes have started a teen activism unit in which I have already gone in and helped them develop good questions for their research. My next step was to go in and help them locate valuable resources, however I decided to take it one step further and "touch on" the issues that Joyce Valenza addressed in her article. We began by reviewing some of the strategies for website evaluation that we had addressed the year prior (I was happy to see that collectively they remembered everything that we had learned 😀) and then I told them that there is a lot more to consider when reading the news. I then shared the TedEd video: How to Choose your News. Originally, I was worried that this was going to be too much for them to process, but decided that it was worth showing even if they only were able to take away 1 or 2 things. When students shared out their takeaways, I was impressed with what they were collaboratively able to pull-out of the video. Some of the main points were that there is a lot of information out there and the best source of information comes right from the people who were at an event and not from a second hand person. They also shared that people can be persuaded to write information a certain way, that there is a difference between fact and opinion and that you should always check the facts in more than one place to verify. I was very happy these takeaways, especially since my original goal was only to show them good resources. After the discussion I was able to share Youngzine that I had explored through this assignment and explain that this was a site that brings them current events, free of bias and sensationalism. Then they went off to investigate and they rocked it. The best part is another 6th grade teacher walked in and said, "I know you already worked with my class, but could you come in this afternoon and do this lesson with my group." I am glad to see that teachers also see the value in this!

As an aside, I have been wanting to document student learning more and make it transparent for students, teachers, parents. Since I was typing this up for this lesson, I decided to add it as my first transparent documentation of learning to my website. If you are interested, you can check it out: http://lakegeorgelmc.weebly.com/sixth-grade1.html.


This may be one of those "things (assignments)" that I end up doing for two assignments, because I feel that there is still so much for me to explore and definitely more that I need to teach. My goal for the year is to work this in at every grade level. Now the challenge is to think about what it looks like at each level and how I can work it into the units I already work on within the classrooms. Thanks again for the great assignment!