Biographical

Biographical References
October 18-24
These tell information about people and could be very useful in the school setting. Some of my favorite ones were the Dead People Server, Bibliography in AVL and the Something About The Author. These would be of great interest to students especially in doing research and reports. Teachers could also benefit from these resources when planning author studies and guiding students to resources for research. I am really going to use the AVL database this year for our Famous American Reports instead of being limited to our print collection of biographies. This is an easy way to integrate fact checking and authority of resources into the information literacy program by teaching students to check facts in these different resources against each other. Once again I am reminded that the number one thing to do is get teachers educated about how to use, inspired for lessons to use them, and equipped with them in their hands to really use these resources. Part of the overwhelming planning for teachers is the "how will my students find the information and I don't want to have to help them all search the internet." This can be overwhelming to teachers and so they just chose to bypass the opportunity. By sharing these resources with teachers and putting the resources in the hands of students a librarian is advocating for her position as an instructional partner, and information specialist. This virtual, free component of AVL help extends the reference collection beyond the library walls. We all know information seeking and reference habits are changing but we have to quit being so uptight about checking out resources and keeping them chained to the shelves. If we do not make it available to students they will never use it or learn the value of quality information and we will defeat our own information literacy purposes.

Ready Reference

Ready Reference- Tell who what when where why how
October 11-17

This week in class I learned about almanacs as a new ready reference tool. I was very unfamiliar with this resource beyond thinking that it predicted weather for farmers. The definition in class we developed was: a collection of facts,lists and statistics.

After exploring online almanacs like factmonster and infoplease I was much better informed as the possibilities for this resource in the school setting. The topics it covers are so numerous and the online tools like comparison charts were really cool. These would be helpful for research projects and answering questions for spontaneous reference. The special topical ones like sports, famous African Americans, and National Geographic would be so useful in the school setting. Even though some of these are books ( with some online sources), I think students could actually prefer using these as opposed to looking in other search engines like Google. If you teach them how to use the almanacs they would be able to quickly locate information by just grabbing the book from the shelf as well as enjoy browsing them for interesting facts.

Bibliographies

October 4-10
Bibliographies

I was excited to study bibliographies this week in class after spending last week with my first grade teacher friend. I really enjoyed Children's Books A- Zoo as a resource to find so many amazing picture books for so many topics! This was exactly the resource she needed to answer her questions like " how do I find books about ___, or how do you know books that have cause and effect skills". Before class I told her to check out Google or Read write think but I was very excited to share this reference resource with her after class. In fact I would love to have my own copy of this book! :)

The Best New Media Guide would also be a helpful tool for teachers to find technology resources to enhance lessons. This is much more effective than a Google search!
These experiences and this exploration of resources really impressed upon me the absolute importance of putting these resources in the hands of teachers. The library media specialist has to inform teachers of these resources and encourage them to use them to update lessons, read alouds, and to make their planning times more effective. This teacher was spending hours a day and all weekend searching for websites, books and materials for lessons when she could have easily located high quality resources with these resources.

Instructional Partner

Instructional Partner
September 27- October 3
I was able to explore my role as instructional partner this week. I helped a teacher in first grade set routines,procedures, and integrate curriculum. It was challenging and exhausting but very worthwhile and rewarding. I realized that I do have strength in this area in indentifying areas that can be improved both in my own teaching and others. Some of it comes natural to me and I don't mean that in a bad way but to say that I realized the need for this kind of help in the school. Even fantastic teachers do not have the time or knowledge of the great tools at their disposal that can help engage student learning and aide in their planning processes. I was able to suggest websites and games to help during the computer rotation and explain how to search for other quality ones. I was also able to model how to incorporate strategic read alouds to serve as reading pleasure during snack time and teach the weekly comprehension skill or connect to a science/social studies concept.

This really gave me confidence and excitement in my future abilities to do this type of collaboration as a library media specialist.