Portfolio Finished

I've managed to print all of my portfolio pieces out here, around the computer skills test, and have it assembled. I only included my blog postings about the action learning process in the portfolio, since the others pertained to other parts of class. I don't feel like there's much to the portfolio, aside from notes and sketches, but I guess that's what this process is about... learning from action rather than busy work. I enjoyed working with the group and hearing what others worked on and am looking forward to that part of class tonight.

I do wish that we'd had a few more class meetings just to have a more coheasive feel with the class. I feel like there are some people I barely got to know and so much of this work is about collaboration it just makes sense to build relationships with your future colleagues.

I'm going to try to write a more substanative reflection on the process and post it before I leave this afternoon.

Portfolio

I've been working on my portfolio some over the past few days and hope I have everything together. The presentation will have to be done at school, since I don't have internet at home right now and I need to insert some images of the websites and links, etc. I hope I'm including everything I need to within the porfolio: planning tools, printouts of webpages, notes for the grant, the completed grant, a unit outline, etc.

I may do a trial run of my presentation to my intern tomorrow. She's been very interested in the project and has been helpful in finding other grant sources for other projects, so I think she'll be a good objective sounding board.

Action Learning Post 4

I met with Kathy last week to finalize our grant writing and to write my biography for the grant. We compiled it and sent it off and should hear back by January, in time to order the books for the unit. I like the format of that grant and would love to have the opportunity to go to the conference with Kathy if it gets funded. Doing the storymapping with the kids is going to be an interesting experience, and I hope that they'll be able to discover some things about the program that I haven't learned yet and can teach me as much as I teach them.

I'm thinking I might try to email/write Paulsen before the kids do just to make things easier so that he knows to expect correspondence from them.

I need to rework my planning sheet a bit, but I really feel like I'm on track with this. The grant is only a small part of what we're trying to do, but it feels like the first hurdle is complete.

I've put together a rough outline for my presentation on Wednesday, but need to finalize it. Not having internet at home is really making this planning a bit difficult because I have to remember to print everything at school or run to the public library (as I have this morning) to complete things. But, at least we're in the home stretch!

Meeting Frustration

Nancy and I met today online for our meeting for the LES collaboration. Nancy was there at 4:00, as we had planned, and I arrived a bit late due to a traffic accident that had traffic stopped both ways for a while. By 4:35, neither of the other two group members had shown up and neither had posted their schedules on the discussion board, as we had discussed in our last meeting, so Nancy and I decided to leave the chat room as she had class and I have another meeting tonight. I posted my schedule and answered some of Nancy's questions about hers, but we have seen very little interaction from the others on the discussion board during the week and feel as if this project is an aside or afterthought for them, rather than a focus. They seem to be logging in before they get to class and have not been very good about letting us know if they're going to be late. I hope that we can work through this, and that they are not equally frustrated with us or our actions. I wonder if some of the issue is that they do not feel comfortable with the technology and are putting off logging in until they are there to do it with a community.

I am going to post a preliminary schedule on the discussion board tomorrow to help Nancy get a better idea of what a master schedule can look like, since she's not had much experience in scheduling since she has not been responsible for that in student teaching or internship experiences. I hope to see some interaction from the others on the discussion board or via email.

Where do we go from here? I wonder if other groups are feeling a similar frustration.

Action Learning Reflection 3

I've been steadily working on my action learning project, although it may not look like it here on my blog. I've decided to mesh my two thoughts and create a unit plan using story mapping software and write a grant to acquire books to use. I'm writing the grant in collaboration with our media coordinator at school and have met with her twice to discuss ideas and put together a unit plan. The unit will be taught in the spring, when this course is finished, and will be based on Woodsong by Gary Paulsen. Students will have an introductory lesson on using the story mapping software and will create a map of Blowing Rock with points of interest along the way and incorporate photos they take as well as text. Then, after reading the book, we will chart the Iditarod and insert text from the book, from letters they write and receive from the mushers in the Iditarod this year, and video clips that we will use with permission from the Iditarod website. Not only will this incorporate the technology that's of interest to me, but it will also give me some more experience in grant writing. If the grant is funded, then Kathy and I will attend the North Carolina Library Association conference next year to present the grant. So, that would be an added bonus of getting some professional development experience before I was in the field.

I've met with my learning set three times now, I think, and that has been helpful. They persuaded me to pursue the idea of combining my two original ideas, grant funding and storymapping, into this one idea. It will be interesting to see how the students react to this project and how it all plays out. I continue to play around with the software in my free time to get an idea of the various ways I want the students to use it, and ultimately know that they will probably discover new ways to use it that I haven't yet.

The grant's due at the end of November, so I'll include that application as a part of my portfolio, along with notes and readings I've done.

Action Learning Reflection 2

I think that I'm still having trouble distilling my topic down to the necessary points. I know that I want to investigate funding of libraries in public school systems, and that I want to specifically investigate libraries in Watauga County, as that's where I plan to be working, but I'm not sure if I want to do a comparison of those libraries in terms of funding or if I want to investigate one library's funding sources in depth. Which would be more beneficial in the long run? Would it be more valuable to understand things from a more "big picture" approach or to look closely at a school where I am likely to work? Am I doing this to make my future career a bit easier, or simply for my own edification and working with future colleagues?

In looking at the template and questions, I don't know if I can even use the questions there yet. It seems like I may have to frontload this more than anticipated, rather than doing what I typically think of as a project, which I think is the point. It seems like this project is structured more how I like to structure my science fair projects with kids, where they do some research and then come up with the questions. I know that I did some preliminary research in my interview initially, but I think I may have to do some more digging to really get a distinct idea of the direction I want to go.

I am wondering how our new change in administration at the county level will affect the allocation of funds to school libraries. Is that a state or local decision concerning the percentage of the budget that is spent in the media center? Is that of relevance here? Again, I seem to be having more questions than answers and I'm struggling with where to begin. Do I narrow down my questions, or try to find answers to all of them in hopes of finding a topic that really fits and one that I can run with?

Action Learning Post 1

So far, I’ve only gotten as far as to brainstorm ideas about the action learning project. I think I’m leaning toward doing a project about media center funding… but I’m not sure where to go with that. Do I compare different counties within the state? If so, where do I start? Or, do I look at voluntary funding sources, such as grant funding or PTO funding? Another idea I’ve had is to look at collaboration that takes place between teachers and media coordinators throughout our school and across the county. I know that our librarian is an excellent collaborator and is willing to help us find almost anything that will work with our curriculum and fit our needs, but is that the case everywhere in the county? Will I be able to do that one day?

As I stated, I’ve only come up with questions. Our learning set has not met yet; there was some confusion about meeting time, but that has been cleared up. Hopefully we can meet next week and get the ball rolling with that. I haven’t yet heard from one group member regarding our meeting time yet.

The whole project is a bit ambiguous to me right now, and I’m a little unclear about the portfolio, but I’m sure that will come into perspective more as the semester progresses.

Media Coordinator Interview for LIB 5050

I interviewed Kathy Moore, librarian at Blowing Rock Elementary School, about her job and her use and experience with technology. She finds that she primarily uses technology to facilitate cataloging, the Follett resources, the school network (including Microsoft products), the internet, and the SmartBoard located in the library. She also uses software for book transactions (circulation). Mrs. Moore finds that she uses the cataloging technology, the internet, and the Microsoft products during her “planning” time, when students are not actively using the library, to aid with locating resources needed for the library (either per a teacher’s request, or to fill needs in the collection) and grant writing. She most often uses the SmartBoard when she is teaching classes or faculty. Some lessons she commonly teaches are on plagiarism, copyright laws, bibliographies, and paraphrasing. Google Earth and maps are other ways that Mrs. Moore uses the SmartBoard to introduce these tools to students for research that supports classroom learning and projects. As a future librarian, I would love to become more adept at using the SmartBoard and tools such as Google Earth to facilitate student learning, both inside the library and at home with their own computers.

One of the ways she finds that students use technology in the library most frequently is through the use of United Streaming, a service paid for through library funds. United Streaming offers students the opportunity to view video clips that pertain to what they are learning in the classroom. Students can use the computer lab located in the library to view the videos, each having his own computer and set of headphones so that the experience is more personal and students are less distracted than they can be watching a video in the classroom on a single television.
Mrs. Moore finds that teachers are most likely to use the technology that she suggests in her regular emails listing new resources that are curriculum based. She often includes web links and new subscriptions to resources that are web based, such as United Streaming and World Book Online. Teachers also make use of audio book talks that Mrs. Moore makes available that are found on various websites, such as audio book talks about some of the Caldecott books. Both of these seem to be tools that I could easily use in my first year of being a librarian; they are already tools that I am familiar with and could provide some professional development opportunities to show teachers how to use audio books in their classrooms, aside from reading along with a text.

Technology has its benefits that far outweigh its drawbacks, Mrs. Moore stated, but she does spend a portion of her day, usually half an hour to an hour, trouble shooting technology for faculty and staff. Often, this is as simple as getting a new cable for a television or hooking up a DVD player, but it is a part of her day that she finds that she can support teachers in other ways besides curricular. Some faculty members want to learn how to fix things, such as broken overhead projectors, while others would rather have someone else do it. She finds this to also be true of circulation in the library. I would like to improve my skills with technology outside of using the computer in order to be able to better help teachers trouble shoot problems as they arise. As a classroom teacher now, I know how frustrating it can be to have a TV that is not working and not be able to find anyone who can help fix it. I would like to be able to train faculty and staff to find solutions to their own technological problems, so that they do not always have to rely on someone else.

Kathy Moore finds the school website to be a tool of value to both faculty and parents and would like to increase the presence of library resources and announcements there. Currently, the library newsletter is found on the website, but there are other resources that could be there as well. I could see the school website being an excellent place to post links to online podcasts, interviews, and audio book talks that would be helpful and interesting sources for students, faculty, and parents. If the school library catalog were online, this would be an excellent place to post that as well.

Perhaps our most interesting area of discussion was surrounding Mrs. Moore’s wish list for the library with regards to technology. She would love to have the school library catalog online so that faculty, students, and parents could access it from outside of the school network. Additionally, she would like to have a new media retrieval system to replace the Ducane system that we currently have, so that teachers could use it all at once for the school news broadcast or other functions. Photoshop is also on her wish list, as it would help her with the photography exploratory course that she teaches for middle school in conjunction with doing the yearbook.

Overall, I learned a great deal from my interview about the daily life of our school librarian. I knew what she did in bits and pieces, but gained a greater insight into what my future career will look like on a daily basis. It made me excited, and somewhat overwhelmed, to think of all of the possibilities for the use of technology within a school media center. Ultimately, I will have to find a balance between my vision for the use of technology in the media center, and what can realistically be accomplished in a day.

First Day

After class tonight, I'm really looking forward to the action learning project. It seems like a learning philosophy that I try to integrate into my teaching, as best I can with sixth graders, so I think I'll get a lot out of it. I'm also looking forward to the interview assignment. I think talking with Kathy about her job, and the challenges and opportunities that come with it, especially since I may be doing an internship with her later on.