By the time you’re reading this, most of you are likely to be finding your way through one of the amazing sessions making up the 2022 Association of Independent School Librarians Annual Conference. This year’s virtual conference features an incredible variety of topics! As I scan through the schedule, there are sessions on topics as varied as:

• How to help students ask excellent questions…
• Supporting DEI in our schools…
• Supporting the college admissions process…
• Cultivating a culture of reading…
• Launching student library boards…

One of the things about being a school librarian is that, though we’re all “librarians,” our lived lives in our libraries can be SO VERY, VERY different than that of our colleagues in other states, countries, or even just a mile down the street.

I think that the uniqueness of our lived lives as librarians is a huge part of what has made librarianship such a very exciting profession for me, but also from time to time that exact uniqueness can sometimes make me feel like I’m the only one out here doing the work that I do… To clarify, I work with a wonderful, enthusiastic young librarian that I hope many of you get to meet in person at an in-person AISL Annual Conference some day, but I hope you get what I mean when I figuratively say, “…feel like I’m the only one out here doing the work that I do…”

Anyway, an AISL colleague recently inquired about librarianship in a project-based learning school. Our colleague asked,

I’m interested to hear from other Upper School librarians about project-based learning. If you work in a school that’s embraced PBL, I’d love to know more about how you’ve integrated it into your work as a librarian. How do you work with/support teachers & classes on project-based learning initiatives? 

I spent my first 14 years as a librarian at a very rigorous, rather traditional independent school in Los Angeles. I was part of a team of 5 MLS librarians at the middle school. Yes, you read that right, there were FIVE MLS librarians and a full-time library assistant that served our middle school. We had a seeming bottomless budget for purchase of resources and the curriculum was extremely consistent and stable. Every teacher who taught 7th grade history taught from the same team lesson plans, did the same research projects, and used the same summative tests and quizzes. We had the great benefit of knowing that every February, every 9th grader would come in with their history classes for an arc of lessons on locating and using primary sources that they’d incorporate into their papers and projects (yeah, no… they were just papers). We had a well developed list of research topics that the 9th graders would cover so we were able to identify topics that proved challenging for students and purchase resources to facilitate students’ success. It was rigorous. It was fun.

8 years ago, my elderly mom had a bad fall and it was time for me to leave “the best job I’d ever have” and move home to Honolulu to help with her care. As luck would have it, I landed here at Mid-Pacific, an amazing preschool to 12th grade progressive school that’s leaned heavily into project-based learning, and I realized that I ended up in a new “best job I’d ever have!” 🤣

Things I’ve learned about librarian-ing in a PBL school:

1) Goodbye “Just in Case” Collection Development – I had to jettison my “just in case” notions of print collection management. In my PBL environment, topics covered and research project assignments change. Every. Single. Year. I don’t have the luxury of knowing that every February the Middle Ages primary source project is going to run so I need to buy more books on the Cluniacs and how the Irish monks preserved literacy in the Middle Ages… Books that I bought for to shore up our print collection for “the food project, next year” sat untouched because the project never returned. The following year, the class had moved on to sound waves… #Alas

2) Think Systems and Frameworks, Not “Library Lessons” – I’ve had to learn to think about framing information literacy instruction in terms of systems and frameworks rather than discrete skills and processes presented in library lessons. Over the years we’ve worked and reworked our “research framework.” Every time it gets reworked, the language becomes less “librarian-ese” and more the language of ordinary humans. If you need a book of supporting documentation, your framework probably isn’t accessible enough for mere mortals who aren’t librarians to use so keep simplifying. Note: Making our stuff simple is REALLY, REALLY hard!!! #Ugh

3) Farewell One-Shot Library Lessons – The one-shot library lesson has pretty much become a thing of the past, here. They don’t work in PBL. If I’m being honest, I kind of doubt that they work in general. #SorryNotSorry #Shrug If we work with your class, we need to expect you to make time to see us 3-5 times over the course of the project because information needs and the skills/processes that kids need to know at different points in the process vary. Having tons of one-shot lessons littering up our instructional calendar means that I work SUPER HARD with no pay off in terms of student learning. It also means that I don’t have space in my schedule to book an arc of 3-5 lessons over 3 weeks with a class where those kids see how the different skills and processes come together in a holistic way and therefore, understand the process and the parts/skills utilized along the way.

4) Librarians Shouldn’t Be Teaching All the InfoLit – I know that this one might ruffle some feathers. I used to think “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” but yeah, I seem to have reached an age where when I think that sometimes I just figure, “Whatevers… Let’s see what happens…” Hahaha! So here goes, I’ve adopted the philosophy that it is my job to be sure that good information literacy and research skills are being taught—NOT to teach all the information literacy and research skills on campus. That is just not gonna happen in a preschool-12 school of 1400 students with 2 librarians… More importantly, that’s JUST NOT HOW LITERACIES DEVELOP. You’ll never develop information literate young adults on 6 library lesson a year. Our job is to teach the teachers (and that’s usually in the form of library lessons). You watch me do this for 2 periods and you teach it in your 3rd and 4th periods. Teach your teachers how to fish. Going forward, when teachers have learned your research process and strategies they’ll design better research projects and assignments. Most importantly, teachers just have many, many thousands more opportunities to teach and reinforce the concepts, skills, and dispositions that further students’ information literacy development than I will EVER get to have with students as a school librarian. 🤷🏻‍♂️ If we ever hope to have an information literate voting public, librarians need as many friends as we can get! We need everybody to be teaching good information literacy skills, habits, and dispositions.

5) Hello PRESEARCHING and TOPIC EXPLORATION – Make presearching and topic exploration A VERY BIG FEATURE of the “research process” work that you do. In authentic PBL, students typically should be posing the questions for exploration, but… How do you know what to ask? How do you know what to explore with regard to the civil rights movement if you haven’t explored and had a good amount of time to “get the lay of the land.” You will likely end up with 20 projects on Rosa Park because she’s one of the only civil rights figure that a 9th grader might know… 

6a) Talk to Us, People!!! – Insist on CONVERSATIONS about project design EARLY in planning process. Teachers think they know what resources we have, but they don’t know what they don’t know. Sometimes I use those conversations to buy ebooks we need “just in time” (see #1) or sometimes those conversations allow us to let a teacher know, “Yeah, this is impossible to research given what we have and your requirements…” -OR- “Yeah, your 10th graders aren’t going to have success with Academic Search Complete so let’s do this…”

6b) Keep Talking to Us, People!!! – In the project design conversation, keep taking your teachers back to BROAD ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS. Some of my teachers want to throw out a list of 30 topics and have kids pick one and research it. “I’m doing “deeper learning,” but how, then, does the kid doing research on Farm Bureau programs during the depression learn about the other 29 topics? If they don’t go back to the bigger essential question, then that’s not “deeper learning” it’s just “myopic learning.” Good PBL builds in lots of opportunities to share out across a cohort FORMATIVELY. When I’ve seen GREAT PBL, teachers find ways to have student integrate the work shared by their peers into their final pieces. In the case of the class researching government programs of the Great Depression, students shared their initial research

Anyway, that’s the stuff that just is off the top of my head.

I’d love to chat with any of you you there who are librarian-ing in a PBL leaning school. What have you learned? What works for you?

That’s it for this month. I hope that we’ll cross paths in a breakout room sometime in the next few days (or on an email thread)!

Have a great #AISL22 Conference everyone!

It is a new year and my name just popped up on the blogging calendar so I guess it is time for a new post. Now, for most of my 57 years on this planet new years has been a time for me to wipe the slate clean, purge my emotional (and actual) clutter, and lurch enthusiastically into the new year with clear eyes and a fresh new attitude.

Honestly, though, this year I’m struggling a bit. I don’t want to be, as can be my wont, Mr. Davey Downer, but at the same time sitting down at my laptop and tapping out a super optimistic, “Our library is so awesome!!! Life is so awesome!!! We’re doing so awesome!!!” would probably just read, to many, as another #ToxicallyPositive #HowToBeAnEDUCelebrity post.

In the words of Charles Munger, “The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. That’s one you can easily arrange. And if you have unrealistic expectations, you’re going to be miserable all your life.”

So… In the year 2022 which, to me, is feeling a little more twenty-twenty, too… than I’d hoped here’s the short skinny on our immediate and medium term goals for the new year…

1 Fling the Windows of the Library Open Every Morning!

I got a little ahead of my self at the end of last year and thought that things in Libraryland (and, well, across the land…) would be returning to normal “early in the new year!” #Yay! Now that those dreams have been dashed by the Omicron variant, I’ve had to reset my mindset. Disappointing as it may be (to me, but hey, I’m pretty sure it’s disappointing to everyone on the planet…), when I work at it I can find things that help me to find my new equilibrium.

I am blessed to work in a library with old-school windows that ACTUALLY OPEN!!! I am blessed to live in a place where it is 73º outside on this January 6th so as soon as I get into the library in the morning, my first order of business is to fling open the windows of the library! #VentilationIsOurFriend!

On good mornings, I imagine myself singing to the wildlife like Cinderella, but on other days I just grunt and try to get it done quickly so that I can get my cup of coffee. #PandemicLifeHasItsUpsAndDowns

My library assistant wasn’t super pleased, yesterday, when the bird flew in and hung out in the library, but you know life is trade offs and sometimes we just gotta look over, see that there’s a bird in the library, shrug twice, and then write about it on Twitter. #WhatchaGonnaDo?

2 Upgrade our Masks…

If you and your library staff haven’t “upgraded” from cloth masks yet, you might consider making a change. I started wearing KN95 masks about a year ago. There are, apparently, quite a few counterfeit masks that don’t truly meet the KN95 (or similar) standard. Here’s the thing, sometimes knowing how to SEARCH and EVALUATE aren’t truly enough to know with certainty that the masks you purchase are the real deal, but all we can do is look for recommended manufacturers from typically reliable sources and do the best we can. #RealLifeIsHard

While we’re at it. If you are having trouble wearing your KN95 all day, you might want to look into getting ear saving mask extenders. There are many options and types. I’ve tried many. I like extenders that are adjustable and that are made of elastic fabric. I’ve found that they have the added benefit of allowing me to pull my masks more securely to my face so, I’m hoping, that it helps create a better fit for my masks as well.

3 Build Weighing of Arguments into the Curriculum…

On the curriculum front, we’ll be looking to build weighing arguments into our curriculum. In the first semester, we pushed really hard on systematically introducing SIFT to all of our frosh and as many 10th-12th graders as we were able to reach. SIFT is great for on-the-fly, quick-and-dirty, real-world source evaluation, but IT’S JUST THE START of good source evaluation. I’ve come to believe that our content area teaching faculty do a really good job with the teaching of deep reading strategies in their various content areas, but sometimes students need some explicit scaffolding/frameworks that we can use to activate the appropriate strategies in a given context.

This is, exactly, what SIFT does. Our students know how to search. Our students know strategies for learning about the person/organization that’s posted something online. When they’re looking for statistics on the percentages of people vaccinated in the hotel industry in Hawaii for a class activity, they don’t always think to apply that knowledge on-the-fly in that moment so it helps if a teacher can shorthand the strategies with, “Where’s that statistic from? Did you SIFT the source?”

I’m noticing that we need a similar scaffold or framework for the weighing of arguments so that students can better contextualize the data and arguments that they come across as they search. In debate classes, we call this “weighing the debate.” The Middle School Public Debate program teaches has a nice streamlined framework that works well:

• Magnitude: Severity of the impact.
• Scope: How many people an impact effects.
• Probability: How likely an impact is to actually occur.

But there are other sources, like this one from the University of Texas at Austin that bring more nuance to the task:

I’m honestly not quite sure where to go with this, but that’s the goal for the next few weeks.

I hope that this post finds you well! I’d love to hear about your goals for the new year. Please hit the leave a reply button below and let us know!

So… With Charles Munger’s advice in mind, here’s to wishing each of you a Better Than Ambivalent New Year!!! #Yay!!! #LOL!!!

Helping kids understand source types is hard.

When I’m trying to teach kids about types of sources and what they do, I find myself feeling like more and more of an information dinosaur with each passing year. My reality is that the vast majority of my students’ research is digital. But… I’m a “librarian of a certain age” and my first instinct is to draw analogies to the print collection. When I’m working with kids I often want to use examples like, “These are like ‘World Book Encyclopedia’ type articles…” then realize that there is a very high likelihood that not a single student the class has ever actually used a print version of the World Book. #SoOld

Over time, I’ve learned to substitute web native equivalents to help students build mental models of source types that might be useful in their database searches. “If I imagine my perfect source right now, it probably looks like a Wikipedia article and in ‘database language’ they’d call that a reference source so let’s click on that reference link and see what we find.”

Increasingly, however, we’ve been finding that students just don’t have adequate mental models of source types to help them grow as online researchers. What follows is my messy, messy in-process of figuring stuff out efforts to help students build mental models for the information they inquire. #UnderConstruction

Putting a Tool Kit Together…

We emailed community college and university libraries in our area to see if anyone had copies of trade or academic journals that they were weeding and would share with us. We gathered two class sets worth of materials (we have two librarians and sometimes both of us are doing research lessons at the same time) and labeled magazine for a general audience with green stickers, trade/professional journals with orange stickers, and academic/scholarly journals with a yellow sticker.

When we’re working with classes we’ll typically have students take a sample of each type so they can thumb through each and maybe look through a neighbor’s. As someone who grew up (50 years ago) in a home that got, probably more than a dozen magazines a month, it’s wild to me that some of my kids seemingly very, very little experience with actual print periodicals. I’ve found that having these artifacts has been incredibly helpful for students! Sometimes #PhysicalArtifactsMatter

I’ve Given Up on Known Sources First As My Default…

Another vestigial tail I’ve had to shed because I’m old is that I clung to the idea that research always should go from print sources to database sources to web sources–in that order. In the perfect controlled world of my fantasies, this is great in theory. As a school librarian at a school with a heavy emphasis on project-based learning, a small print collection that serves 3rd-12th graders, and where projects and topics change every year, emphasizing print first just does not work for purely pragmatic reasons that are completely out of my control. Rather than die on that hill, we’ve worked on emphasizing SIFT source evaluation across the board and chosen to figure out how to arrive at instruction that fits the process our teachers and students actually use to do research rather than trying to impose my process on their assignments and projects. #NoFrozen #LetItGo

What This Looks Like When the Rubber Meets the Road…

When I’m doing a research lesson, I typically have students grab one copy of a source from each category. We have kids look through periodicals for a general audience and have them point out typical features. “There are colored pictures… It’s pretty understandable… Some are about lots of topics, but some are, like about one thing like surfing…

I then have them look at scholarly journals. “Looks super boring… Why is this only in black and white? Is this even English? …” #GottaLoveHSKids #Hahaha At this point, I like to ask the teacher to explain peer review and/or scholarly journals as they apply to their field/subject.

The last category we tackle are trade/professional publications.

Once students have some familiarity with types of print serials, we chat about who typically creates the content for each category and how each type of source might be helpful at different points in their research process.

How It’s Going…

We’ve got a ways to go, but I’ve been happy with the progress we’ve made by moving in this direction. One of the HAPPIEST outcomes has been that by giving students side-by-side samples of different source types, most come to an understanding that just because your assignment sheet requires “at least two citations from scholarly sources” that short circuiting the process and just searching for a peer reviewed journal article without doing the other foundational research is going to be a largely futile endeavor because if you can’t understand the concepts or vocabulary you end up with sources that are relevant, but not pertinent–they may was well be written in Greek… #Grin

A second, welcomed outcome has been that once they know that different types of print sources exist, showing students how to limit database search results by type actually makes some sense to them. By giving students reference points for “this is a magazine, but this is a trade publication, and this is a peer reviewed article” they seem much more able to parse the slight variations of source type labels used in different databases.

Again, it’s all messy and ugly and “in-process.”

I’d love so much to hear about how you are teaching source types and searching. Please hit the reply button below and share what you’re doing!

Happy Wednesday, all!

I’m feeling a little self-conscious about the how much I know I have become “one-note Davey” when it comes to talking about what we’re focusing on instructionally in the information literacy, media literacy, research instruction space. To be completely honest it is literally almost all we’ve done instructionally since we started our ’21-’22 school year in the second week of August.

Apologies in advance if you’ve read previous things I’ve shared about Michael Caulfield’s SIFT methodology for checking online sources. If you have, you might want to skip down a few paragraphs.

What is SIFT? – Michael Caulfield, Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, developed a magically simple four-step process for quickly evaluating and contextualizing online sources. The SIFT method, takes techniques and strategies commonly used by professional fact checkers and puts them together in a format simple enough that my 9th graders to learn and successfully apply in a 45-60 minute stand-alone lesson!

Never Waste a Good Crisis – Misinformation/Disinformation has always been with us, but events and the discourse of the last few years seems to have made teachers i work with acutely aware of the need to explicitly teach students skills, strategies, and dispositions needed to discern reputable sources from their less reputable cousins. Living in a new golden age of misinformation isn’t exactly something any of us would wish for but the reality on the ground is that, this is where we are so as librarians it would be a tragedy to waste a crisis foisted upon us.

During the first week of school, I sent versions of the following email to every teacher in our science department.

For the time being SIFT has, temporarily, become the entirety of our high school research curriculum. We have now introduced SIFT to almost every 9th grader through their science classes, and we’ve also had a chance to introduce SIFT to 6 or 7 jr/sr science classes as well (we piloted SIFT for the first time at the end of last year so our older students never got it). If you are just beginning your school year, DON’T WAIT!!!! Approach your science teachers before they get too deep into their content! The storm of misinformation around vaccines and masking has made science teachers very willing partners on infolit instruction! We’ve also found that working with these classes on SIFT has helped us to start collaborative conversations with teachers on other projects and skills they’d like to work together on!

Science teacher: “I really wish our kids could learn APA for science. Why do we have to use MLA?”

Me: “Uh… We don’t only have to use MLA! Nobody ever asked. LET’S DO IT!”

Science teacher: “And when we do that, can you help us with how to use databases?”

What Does all this SIFTing Instruction Look Like? – I use 4 introductory videos that Michael Caulfield created for CIVIX, a non-partisan group based in Canada, and posted to the Ctrl-F channel on Youtube. They’re embedded in a Libguides page and we watch the first two (very short) videos. We give students a sample sources to SIFT and simply have students try the strategies and techniques that have been introduced. When student(s) come to a conclusion we debrief and share the methods and strategies the students tried that helped them find success.

When it seems like the class is comfortable with the tools and strategies, we watch the second two videos and continue with practice samples.

Keep if Fast. Keep it Simple! – The sample sources that we have kids SIFT are meant to be easy to investigate, but I’ve tried to pick examples of sources that let us raise issues and strategies that I want kids to remember.

This sample using the publication Undark is a good starting point that says, “See, you can do this. It’s easy and it’s fast, but it works so it’s worth the investment of 90 seconds BEFORE you read the article!”

This sample using Goop allows us to talk about expertise. “So Gwyneth Paltrow is an Academy Award winning actor, if you were looking for information about becoming a successful actor would she probably be a well qualified source? Does expertise apply across different fields or domains? What do you think of this?”

Interestingly, I’ve had three different students talk about Dr. Fauci being an expert in diseases and vaccines, but maybe not baseball… Hahaha!!!

Being Transparent and a Little Humble Doesn’t Hurt – In the midst of teaching this lesson news broke about the owner of the Snopes site admitting to committing plagiarism. As Michael Caulfield recommends Snopes as a source for reliable, fact-checking, I decided to bring the issue up head on and have honest conversations with students about citation, attribution, and trust. I tell them honestly that I still use and trust Snopes because I have a long history with the site and I’ve checked enough of their stories over time that continue to believe in the integrity of their work as a whole, yet it is frustrating that i now feel the need to have this conversation with students when talking about using Snopes–and that if they don’t feel comfortable with the recommendation that, that is very legitimate and they should use other sites instead.

When students look at the Wikipedia article on the New York Post, they tend to conclude that it is a less than credible tabloid and therefore the story itself must be misinformation. I find that this is a good opportunity to show students the Google News tab where they quickly see that multiple news outlets that they know have reported the same story. This allows us to talk about how the SIFT process often actually doesn’t give us a black and white answer and THAT’S OK because what we are actually seeking as we SIFT is how to place this source IN CONTEXT. Understanding and using what a source has to offer in an appropriate context is also why we typically don’t want to rely too heavily on any single source.

SIFT is a Start, Not an End — Our juniors and seniors pick up on SIFT very quickly. We do some of the same exercises and cover the same ground as with our 9th graders, but with the juniors and seniors we use it as an opportunity to point out how better online journalism or open web sources typically link to the scholarly work that supports claims being made. “Trace those sources as close to their original context as you can get and typically try to cite the source that is the furthest up the chain.”

Reception from Kids — Feedback from students has been amazingly positive. Where there used to be a lot of frustrated eye rolling and heavy sighing from the last row (and sometimes the middle and first rows, too. LOL!!!). I’ve had students tell me, “I can use this!” As I see it, we can teach perfect techniques and strategies for source evaluation, citation, and annotation, but if kids just won’t use them unless they’re coerced to do so for points, we’re not really teaching source evaluation for a real world and for kids’ real lives.

When they leave us as graduates, I want my kids to have the information literacy knowledge, skills, dispositions, and habits necessary for them to thrive in a world of networked information.

• How do I weigh the risks and benefits of a vaccine?
• What are the costs and benefits of this policy on greenhouse gas emissions?
• Is this policy change likely to do what its proponents say it will do and whose hypothesis is more likely to be correct based on their experience and/or expertise?
• Which candidate running in the next election is most likely to represent the positions that I value?

In the highly complex world of networked information that we now finder ourselves navigating, two of the most valuable “commodities” individuals have to invest are our attention and our trust. Until recently, I feel like I haven’t been able to find a way to very effectively help students understand how to discern where and how to invest their attention and their trust. With our work on SIFT I am starting to feel like the pieces are coming together. We certainly have a way to go, but SIFT feels, to me, like we’ve taken a solid first step in the right direction! I hope you’ll give it some consideration in the work that you’re doing!

Happy new school year, everyone!

Happy summer, everyone!

I hope that this post finds you spending some of your summer off doing good work like our colleagues Christina and Tasha, traipsing about in the glens and gorges of Ithaca or sighting eagles in Washington. I too, spent three weeks treating my serious case of “tropical island rock fever induced wanderlust” with three weeks on the East Coast by visiting friends and family in New York, Rhode Island, Boston, and Maine that we haven’t been able to see in two years. On the way home from the East Coast, we stopped off and spent a week catching up with friends and former library colleagues in Los Angeles where we lived for 14 years. I know that there are many of you out there excitedly working on initiatives and projects that you want to implement next year, but very honestly, I just haven’t had it in me to think about my library at all for the last four weeks.

Things I have been thinking about instead of my library…

I’ve been back home here in Honolulu for almost a week now and yesterday I finally mustered the energy to go in and check on the library and pay some bills. It’s really interesting. I initially struggled with burnout pretty significantly during the spring of 2020 when we were in the initial COVID-19 lockdown and we were working completely from home. In October of 2020 we began a lengthy reopening process that saw us bring our PK, 1st, and 2nd graders on campus, then slowly bringing a grade at a time back to school. During this transitional time, middle school and high school faculty were allowed to teach remotely from home or to come to campus and teach remotely from their classrooms or offices. I choose to go to campus and work and teach from my empty library. This experience brought me to the realization that I am a person who is significantly influenced by my physical surroundings. When I was working completely from home my brain thought about the library 24-hours a day. My brain would not stop thinking about work–to the point that it was affecting my sleep. When I was able to return to my library space, the physical separation of my work space and my home space seemed to cue my brain to think about different things in each space. “Oh… We’re here in the library. It’s time to think about that news literacy module that we’re writing” vs. “Oh… I seem to be home now and there’s my bed so I guess I can stop thinking about work stuff and just worry about which of these characters might be Lady Whistledown…”

The experience of the last year and a half has made me realize that I need to pay much closer attention if I want to work with intention so that’s what I’m going to try to do starting right now in the space below. Please know that this is a first draft document…

Things I want to do with intention…

• Reset our Library Culture–I think we had a pretty good pre-pandemic library culture going in our physical library space. We typically were bulging at the seams with kids in the space before and after school, and we had a good number of kids in our space every period of every day. That being said, sometimes I think that we tipped further toward “student lounge” than I sometimes desired. While I was perfectly fine with the balance of work to socializing ratio we had going most of the time, I’d like to work to reset the culture in the space so that we’re pretty loose before and after school, but work on being a little tighter on the “this is a space for relatively quiet work, reflection, and contemplation” during the middle of the day. The fact that our space as been virtually closed to drop in access by students for a year and half is actually a pretty rare opportunity to reset our school communities’ perceptions and expectations for the library as a place. I don’t want to squander that!

• Build on “The Library is an Instructional Department” Mindset–Let’s be real, the pandemic has been hard and painful, but a silver lining in this experience has been that many more of our faculty colleagues have begun to see that the “Mid-Pacific Library” is ACTUALLY just as much an instructional program as it is a physical space. This is a mindset shift that I’ve worked to instill since I got to Mid-Pacific 7 years ago, but having an opportunity to able to work with teachers and their classes both synchronously and asynchronously WITHOUT A PHYSICAL LIBRARY SPACE seems to finally have helped a significant number of faculty let go of their pre-pandemic notions of what the “library” is; what the “library” has to offer; and what librarians know and can do! I’m hoping that we can continue to foster the new collaborations that emerged over the last year and a half and that these new “willing partners” will bring some of their friends along for the ride as well!

• Lead the Way on “Non-Discipline Specific Concepts and Competencies”–Over the last year and a half, teachers’ reality ALL OVER THE WORLD, has been that they just have not been able to teach all the content, skills, and competencies that they thought they were teaching in a pre-pandemic world. Going virtual, virtually overnight and then having to teach cohorts of kids that were socially distanced with some learning from home, etc. really forced teachers to ask themselves WHAT REALLY MATTERS in what I’m teaching. I’ve started asking our academic curriculum chairs’ group and other teachers we’ve collaborated with, “So, when your students are 35 and perhaps working in a field that might not be directly related to your subject what concepts, competencies/skills do you want them to remember from this course/project?” What I’m finding is that the resulting discussions have frequently produced opportunities for us to collaborate on instruction in the information literacy, media literacy, and news literacy spaces that seemingly weren’t as available to us in the past. I’m hoping to keep this question on the front burner with our academic curriculum chairs’ group in the coming year.

I’m sure there’s a lot more, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I’d love to hear what you hope to do with intention in the upcoming year. Please his reply and share what you’re thinking in the comments below!

Have a safe, restorative, AND WONDERFUL rest of the summer, all!

Aloha!

PS–Something I suppose I’m not super intentional about is that someday I’d like to have six pack abs, but… Alas… Carbs are SO DELICIOUS!!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

I’ve been a Libguides user for YEARS and I must say…

I ❤️ Libguides

I also know that I’m not alone. WAY BACK in 2014, CD McLean posted Libguides: My Most Favorite Tool.

I think the folks over at their parent company, Springshare, call them, “Lib [like liberty] guides,” but I don’t care and with my kids I’ve always referred to them “L-eye-b guides” since they’re guides to the library. I’ve heard other librarians argue that we should call them “research guides” since the platform branding really isn’t the concept we’re shooting for in our information skills instruction and that makes TOTAL SENSE, but I don’t care so I still call them “L-eye-b guides.”

Really, though, you know it’s been a long year. Let’s just all smile and agree to say it my way… Thanks for your cooperation! LOL!

If you’re not a Libguides user, no worries, it’s not all that complicated. At its most basic the Libguides platform is really just a really good and rather elegant web authoring and hosting platform. I think the reason that I’ve been so taken with Libguides over the years, though, is that it’s web authoring software that behaves like it was designed by librarians for librarians–the tools are tailored for librarians to very quickly and IMHO pretty intuitively organize content and resources the way that librarians want to organize content and resources.

A week or two ago librarian extraordinaire, Matt Ball, asked how people organized their database offerings to help students select the most appropriate database for their information need. The thread that transpired led to an interesting discussion that surfaced some really fascinating factors that librarians consider when creating the digital portal to their library’s resources and services. Things that people appeared to weigh as they organized resources for their students seemed to include:

• What is your student population like?
• At what grades or age groups is your site aimed?
• Are all of your students Academic Search Complete or JSTOR power researchers or do you need to meet a broader range of research needs?
• Are you a laptop school? iPad school? Other?
• Is your curriculum structured and consistent where you know that middle ages primary source project is going to be launching in February so you can plan or are your students’ projects completely different from year-to-year?

Clearly, there were many more, but you get the idea. What I found fascinating was that librarians in the discussion indicated that they were having a lot of success with the A to Z database list feature in Libguides. As a librarian, I find this feature so freaking elegant! I LOVE it! But, alas, after I set it up, my kids found it bewildering and just wouldn’t use it.

We ended up using a more graphic approach to organizing our databases. Kids generally just wouldn’t read the scope notes and other text so I just got rid of all of it. It looks like here at Mid-Pacific we will be returning to all face-to-face instruction next fall so we’ll probably stick with our current database organization, but our icon only format only works if you have in-class face time with kids so they’ve been introduced to searching in Gale in Context: High School–otherwise known as that “pretty purple icon that’s probably a pretty good place to start almost any search” ahead of time.

I supposed this is all just a very long winded way of explaining, that as much as I love Libguides, I’m not really sure that I’m using enough of their elegantly powerful tools to justify my annual subscription costs. My program is decently funded, but I don’t have the luxury of a bottomless budget bucket and I’m finding that emerging digital resources like Sora for our eBooks and digital streaming databases that I’m think are becoming a new necessity are really forcing me to find efficiencies in my spending so I can stretching my budget as far as it can possibly go. Over the past two or three years I’ve thought long and hard about whether I can do what we’re doing on Libguides with Google Sites, Weebly, or other service. Each year, I’ve chosen to stay with my Libguides, but I’m finding it harder and harder.

Factors I’ve weighed in deciding to stay with Libguides or head off in a new direction:

I work with an younger librarian who is an amazing, talented, excellent, and hugely creative partner in the library, but I’m also a huge control freak. Our Libguides templates give us each flexibility to build research guides for classes with our own style, but keeps the look and feel on our site as a whole, consistent enough that no matter where you are on our site, you know you’re at the Mid-Pacific Library. .

We originally created “admin guides” that housed all of our main resources. When we were building project-specific research guides, we placed “linked boxes” on the new research guide. That new offspring box continued to be live linked to its parent on our admin page. When a database icon or URL got updated, replacing the new icon on the admin guide parent box automatically updates the icon on all of the offspring boxes everywhere else on our site. It’s elegant and saved us time which was hugely helpful when you’re a 2 librarian department in a PK-12 school with 1500+ students.

That being said, as time went on I found that as a 1:1 iPad school, our students seem to prefer a single long page that they scroll with most of the information in fewer boxes (Libguides boxes rearranged themselves and move around a page in a way that can be confusing when on a mobile device). That, combined with our move toward more icon and graphics dependent design lead to me doing far more “copying” of database buttons than use of linked boxes. I’m guessing there are better work flows to achieve what I do, but the result is that my work flow has negated the elegant linked box, parent box/offspring box capability of Libguides. When I last had to do a global update of some URLs, I was able to make do with a find/replace search from the admin page, but even now, I’m not super sure that I caught ALL of the necessary URLs that needed updating.

If I really had to, I know I could put together a simplified and probably a little more static web presence for my library. I’m just barely comfortable enough with HTML that I can make minor tweaks and get a page to do what I want it to do. That said, I think it would take more time and there would be some trade offs that wouldn’t kill me, but that I just really would prefer to not have to deal with if possible.

In the end, I think that I’ve continued to ante up the pretty significant subscription renewal because I am comfortable with the platform and I can get resources put together quickly with minimal thinking/learning as far as the authoring platform is concerned. I, honestly, don’t think that that is a wrong or a poor decision. It just, however, troubles me because those extra few hundred dollars mean fewer print books that get added to our K-2 collection or our MS/HS collection. Maybe I just need to get over the guilt and say, “It costs more, but I’m worth it! It’s OK to spend money on myself once in a while!” #LOL but also #Sigh

So that’s it… I’m still in love with Libguides, but I have wandering eye just to be sure it continues to be the right tool for my particular school’s needs.

How to you build your library’s web presence? If you’ve got a cost effective way to make stuff look good that you find works well, I’d REALLY love to hear (and see, so please share links to your library pages) about how you’re handling things! I love my Libguides, but I’ve got wandering eyes! 😉

PS–I’d love to see links to any and all Libguides alternatives, but if you’re a Libguides user, I’d love to see how you organize your resources too! Please hit reply and share a link to your site below!

Under different circumstances, I would be opening my first post of 2021 by offering a platitude wishing everyone a Happy New Year accompanied by a humorous-to-me gif, but given the events that unfolded in Washington, D.C. today, that just isn’t what I’m feeling at the moment. In fact, I’m not sure what to feel in this moment beyond feeling rather heartbroken for the where we find ourselves.

When it comes to my work, I tend to be someone who is averse to risk. I don’t perform well in “brainstorming sessions” because I so dislike/fear sharing thoughts and ideas that aren’t well formed that I spend all my energy managing my anxiety rather than participating in the process. The thing is that when it comes to things like the US Capitol Building being stormed by a mob of protestors seemingly based largely on misinformation and disinformation, the teachers, administrators, and students with whom we work are going to expect librarians to say SOMETHING. What I’m struggling with this afternoon is what this means for my work tomorrow and in the days, weeks, and months to come.

Be warned… This is kind of a mess… It is, what it is…

On Breaking News…

I’m thinking that this might be a good time to talk with teachers and students about how to contextualize “breaking news.” This came to mind. It’s old, but holds up very well…

On Quality Journalism…

I need to stop being so afraid to explicitly tell kids, “I generally give more weight to mainstream media sources. Here is why I do that…” This entire module on quality journalism is good, but I sometimes have just used sections 1-6 as a way to contextualize source evaluation lessons. I will be talking about this a LOT more.

On “Motivated Reasoning”…

On Types of Misinformation…

We need to talk about the different types of misinformation that kids are likely to encounter.

On Emotional Health…

Talking about the news of the day is depressing or anxiety inducing for some–It is for me… I tend to be a “defensive-pessimist.” Basically, my kind of flippant personal motto since I was kid has always kind of been, “Hope for the best, but expect the worst.” That is, when I took tests in my HS chemistry class I always left the room hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. I recently came across this piece on The Stockdale Paradox that actually helped me understand why it seemed to work for me. Maybe it will speak to one of you…

A Final Thought for Now…

Our school President, shared a lengthy message with our faculty today and I read it in a moment when i was struggling to deal with what I was seeing. This excerpt from his longer message spoke to me and maybe it’ll speak to you.

I think I found my theme for the coming year, “Character will prevail…”

Hoping you are all safe and doing as well as might be expected. Wishing you all the very best, friends.

I hope my final AISL post of 2020 finds you either already enjoying some well deserved time away from your libraries or that you will be heading off to start your winter break very shortly.

Butter Cookies, Beignets, and Gingerbread Man Time…

Here at Mid-Pacific we begin our school year in the first week of August so, for us, this week marks the end of our first semester. I know that the end of a term is typically extremely busy for many libraries, but in our heavily project-based learning curriculum, demand for library services tends to come early in the semester when projects launch and then about a month before the end of a term when the bulk of work is in progress. Interestingly, the very end of a term tends to be the time when we catch up on cataloging, weeding, cleaning up catalog records, and other “good librarian’s do this” stuff that I HATE doing. I’ve deemed this period butter cookie, beignet, and gingerbread man time because I hate these tasks so much that the only way I can make myself do them is by telling myself, “Catalog 5 things, then you can go to the work room and have a butter cookie, one of the chocolate beignets, or one of the gingerbread men.” It means that I usually have to swap over to the fat pants in my closet about two weeks in, but it also means that I don’t get fired so… #TradeOffs #Pragmatism

A Gift from Santa Your Email Inbox (and No, Not the SPAM Kind from Random Library Vendors that Want to Meet Your Printer Toner Needs) …

Sometimes, though, as you’re wiping the stray powdered sugar from that delicious chocolate beignet off your face, your email notification chimes and you get a random gift that’s so unexpected that all you can do is rub your eyes (you know, metaphorically, because it’s a pandemic and you should never touch your eyeballs) and read it over and over…

I got this email from a 10th grade STEM teacher in our multidisciplinary Mid-Pacific eXploratory [MPX] program:

Hi Dave, saw this.  We have been following the vaccine in class.  How do we turn this into a lesson? https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/tech/covid-19-vaccine-misinformation-social-media/index.html

So, I’ve been thinking about what to do with this…

When Trying to Grow Information Literate Humans, Can Less be More?

I recently came across this article on Why the ‘Paradox Mindset’ is the Key to Success on how “embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership.” I’ve been thinking about that piece a lot lately. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel like I’m working super hard getting all sweaty everyday, and teaching bundles of skills, yet never seeming to get to the point where I feel like we’re sending students out into the world with the degree of information literacy that they need in order to thrive in a networked, polarized world. I’m ready to try something different. I’m wondering if 5 minutes of library instruction can be more productive than 85 minutes. I know that’s crazy talk, but hear me out.

When I think back to my days as an elementary classroom teacher focusing on developing students’ reading literacy, nobody ever expected that reading literacy would come in 6 discrete reading lessons a year. Literacy just doesn’t develop that way. I don’t know why, but it occurs to me that I seem to be trying grow information literate young adults in 6 library lessons a year. When I really think about it, it looks a lot like a fool’s errand.

This is grossly oversimplifying, but literacies, I suppose, develop when students are able to put skills, concepts, and strategies together and apply them to complex, faceted contexts that they haven’t seen before. With reading literacy, when I say skills and concepts I’m thinking things like:

• Letter-sound relationships
• Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends
• In English we read from left to right and from top to bottom
• Etc.

And when I say strategies, I’m thinking about things like:

• What should I do when I come to word I don’t know?
• Based on the title and the illustration, can I predict what this book is about?
• Does the information that I think I’m getting as I read this story match my prediction or is it causing cognitive dissonance?
• Etc.

When it Comes to Information Literacy or News Literacy Instruction, We Need to Keep it Simple, but Keeping it Simple is Super Not Simple… 👀

If we ever hope to help students truly become #NewsLiterate or #InformationLiterate, I think we’re going to have to make our news literacy and information literacy instruction look and feel more like reading instruction looks in our elementary classrooms. We need to find ways to teach specific discrete skills and specific strategies in multiple ways over sustained periods of time with lots of opportunities for students to practice application in different contexts. I know that’s a horribly constructed sentence, but I hope you get what I mean.

Half-Baked Thoughts: What If…?

I think that’s what we need to do, but I’m in uncharted territory so I’m feeling stuck and all I have to offer here is my half-baked thoughts on a half-baked plan for some news literacy instruction that we hope to begin working on sometime in January.

What if, instead an 80-minute library lesson, we taught news literacy skills and concepts in the form of short 5-10 minute lessons and activities over a sustained period of time? The pandemic hasn’t been any fun, but if we’re going to have to take the negatives, we may as well embrace the silver linings in the black clouds. We’ve gotten pretty good a making short instructional screencasts and teachers here have become really comfortable having librarians Zooming into their hybrid (most of our students, PK-12, are on campus for face-to-face instruction, but almost every class or section has a few students who are learning virtually) for short “just in time” instruction. We are finding that having the technology in place and working with teachers who are now comfortable with virtual/hybrid instruction is giving us a lot more freedom and flexibility to deliver library instruction in different ways. As in:

“Hey Dave, my kids don’t know anything about in-text citation or works cited!”

“Yeah… No, the frosh haven’t had any instruction on it yet, but do you want me to Zoom into your class RIGHT NOW? I can if you want…”

Sometimes our service is a screencast; sometimes it is a short Zoom session with a class; sometimes it is meeting in a breakout room with a segment of a class; and sometimes is is face-to-face in a teacher’s room.

Here’s What I’m Thinking, But I Need Help Figuring Out How to Make It Work – CSI: InfoLit Edition…

Rather than schedule an 80 minute library lesson on news literacy or source evaluation, I want to try 3-10 minutes of instruction or activities with our 10th grade MPX STEM sections, everyday for 2 weeks. Some days, we’ll teach or demonstrate a skill or concept and on other days we’ll try some guided practice applying the fact checking or source evaluation skills and strategies that we’ve introduced. At the end of two weeks, I’d like students to have to come up with a deliverable of some kind that demonstrates their ability to apply the skills, concepts, and strategies presented.

At some point earlier this year, I had a conversation with AISL librarian Nancy Florio who mentioned that she had her research seminar students record narrated screencasts of their database search efforts to demonstrate what they’d learned in her class. I thought the idea was genius so we’re thinking that at the end of the instructional module, perhaps we can give students sample sources and have them create narrated instructional screencast that demonstrate how they would fact check, verify, and/or place the source in a broader context before sharing it on social media or using it for a research project which we’ll then share out to their parents as a virtual presentation of learning.

The Format…

On instructional days, show or review an information literacy video that we already have on hand or record new screencasts presenting the skill or concept.

Something kind of like this:

During the next class meeting, present students with a source for them to fact check and evaluate, then briefly debrief the techniques members of the class used to achieve success.

Hoping to Hear from You!

I know it’s not a lot, but that’s where I am right now. That’s all we’ve got. I’ve love to hear about any thoughts, suggestions, concerns, better ideas…

I’m not completed wedded to these ideas, but I’m hoping that getting students to think about source evaluation concepts, skills, and strategies over a more sustained period of time might help to build an information mindsets that leans toward skepticism and determining context, but that avoid turning students into cynics–skepticism is good, cynicism not so much…

I’ve come to believe that when students feel overwhelmed by source evaluation they either:

• Become cynical and believe that there’s no way to discern “truth” in any form so they just use the first thing they find that le’s them fill their perceived information need get that assignment off of their todo lists.

-or-

• They literally don’t know HOW to investigate a source’s accuracy; origin of a claim; or discern whether a source’s creator has political or financial conflicts of interest that may influence the context for the information presented.

I’m hoping this might be a way to combat those scenarios with a little more success.

That’s All I’ve Got, Friends…

Wishing you all a restful, safe, socially-distanced, healthy, well deserved time away from your libraries. I’m so grateful for everyone in AISL. In spite of the year that has been 2020, you all help me to remember that the world is #MostlyGood and will continue to be so because we choose to make it so. Thank you for being my community!

[Edited: 12/19/2020] Checkology and NewsLitCamps!

Thank you to AISL Librarian, Lia, for her reminder about resources available through Checkology and the News Literacy Project! While we’re at it, please consider attended one of the News Literacy Project’s NewsLItCamps for educators! A number of AISL librarians attended the December 10th event. I thought it was an amazing experience! There is a NewsLitCamp scheduled for January 23rd. Details and registration information is available here: Jan. 26: CNN (Virtual: Open to educators nationwide). The event is free!

Happy Fall, All!

I hope this post finds you all hitting your “It’s not the beginning of the school year anymore so here we go, people!!!” stride.

Figuring out what to post every other month is really challenging. I always hope to share something new but you know, as a “librarian of a certain age,” to be honest, I’ve reached the point where I think I might be posting about things that I’ve already posted. So, if that’s true… Sorry!!! It’s hard to keep coming up with new stuff. Besides, new episodes of The Boys (parental guidance suggested) and The Great British Baking Show (fun for the whole family) have started dropping every Friday so I kinda, sorta also have other demands on my time these days… 🤣

Anyway, back in February of 2018, Courtney Walker wrote a really fantastic post on Hyper Docs for Hyper Connection in which she shared how she was collaborating with a colleague to use hyperdocs for her research instruction. I’d played with hyperdocs a bit in the past, but we had instructional methods in place that seemed to be working for us so I kind of just tagged the idea in my #ThingsToStealAtSomePointInTheFuture and moved on.

After planning all spring and summer for an in-person opening of the 2020-2021 school year, a significant spike in Covid cases in our State forced us to open the year completely virtual. Experience from our move to emergency virutal learning in the spring of 2020 made it clear to all that 85 minute blocks of virtual synchronous instruction were just not viable or sustainable ways to deliver instruction so TA-DA!!! The time seemed right to revisit and steal the hyperdoc concept!

Emergency Virtual Instruction vs. Starting a New School Year Virtually…

I don’t know about the rest of you out there in LibraryLand, but I’m finding the way that emergency virtual librarianship manifested itself last March to be COMPLETELY different than starting a new school year virtually. Our teachers were no longer dealing with a completely unknown form of instruction and most of our faculty seemed comfortable enough with the technology that they seemed to feel comfortable going back to more project-based/inquiry-based instruction in line with our school’s philosophy of learning. Beyond that, an amazing number of teachers who had never worked with us in the past began requesting help with sources and instruction. It’s been a little like school librarian buffet of opportunity for us!

The Pragmatics of InfoLit Instruction…

Opportunities that come with requests for help are wonderful, but there is the reality that we are a PK-12 school with 1500 students and two MLIS librarians. Given those parameters, our mission as a library program is to assure that information literacy and research skills are being taught and taught well–not to teach all of the research and information literacy instruction ourselves. Hyperdocs are emerging as one tool we are using as we work to be an instructional presence in students’ research and information literacy endeavors while reducing our instructional load on procedural and “work flow” kinds of issues. Done right, much of the instructional support content can be recycled and reused on multiple projects. The goal is to make as much “library work” asynchronous-able as possible so that when we have actual face-to-face time with students we are doing instruction that is hardest to commoditize with canned tutorials–I’m thinking things like:

• How to broaden or narrow a research topic
• How to refine your keyword search terms to find what you need
• How to paraphrase
• Where else to search when you can’t find what you need in Gale High School and Academic Search Complete
• Etc.

Addressing Just in Time vs. Just in Case Instruction: All Library Instruction that Can Be Commoditized Should be Commoditized…

What I truly love about employing hyperdocs in our instruction is that it gives us a way to offer instruction to kids just in time–just before they need to do something while also freeing us to skip laborious and torturous instruction with kids who don’t need it. I am someone who HATES having my time wasted. PLEASE don’t make me sit though another meeting about stuff I know. I get it, sometimes we need to be sure that everybody understands the school’s sexual harassment policy or other necessary basic things. That is repetition that is needed and in those cases we each do our best to learn SOMETHING from the experience. As a librarian, I sometimes feel that everything I teach rises to this level of importance, but let’s face it, if the 14 year old sitting in front of me knows how to set up a new project in NoodleTools or locate a preformatted citation for an article in a database she really shouldn’t have to sit through Mr. Wee’s lessons on those things AGAIN–you know, even though he’s super entertaining, hilarious, and easy on the eyes… #Hahaha!!! #Eyeroll

Our First Test Drive with Students…

Our first hyperdoc outing of the 2020-2021 school year was with 8th graders in a science class. Because our spring semester of the 2019-2020 school year was so topsy-turvey and we were launching the school year virtually for the first time ever, our 8th grade science teachers decided to ease students into their first “research” project. The stakes and content were purposely and wisely kept low. Many, many moving pieces–over the summer, our school transitioned from Google Meets to Zoom; a system upgrade meant that students all received new active directory usernames and passwords; and we moved to an 8-day rotating class schedule. Teachers’ desired outcomes included:

• Introducing students to a new middle school digital work flow
• Introducing/Reviewing database research skills
• Making sure everybody could login to Google Drive and school databases from home
• Reviewing note taking skills
• Learning students’ personalities, abilities, strengths, challenges, work habits, etc.

Taking the hyperdoc out for a test drive with actual middle school students was a really interesting learning experience. A significant amount of the instructional focus with this project wasn’t specifically “library research” instruction as much as digital work flow instruction that students typically use in just about every library research project through high school. We did end up spending a good amount of time creating the tutorials that we embedded into the students’ hyperdoc, but I saw it as a very good investment of time because we were able to reuse the tutorials for multiple projects at numerous grade levels. Because the tutorials were embedded directly into the hyperdoc adjacent to each task, we were able to quickly walk students through each part of the hyperdoc; let them work on the tasks independently; and while the majority of kids worked independently we were freed to move into Zoom breakout rooms and trouble-shoot with individual students who needed extra help.

Iterating and Fixing Stuff Based on Things We Learned Along the Way…

Immediately after finishing our instructional arc with our 8th graders, we got to meet up with our 7th graders. They were working on a similar introductory project with, largely, the same desired outcomes.

We built our first hyperdocs in Google Docs using tables. We are a 1:1 iPad school and in our first outing we discovered some issues and frustrating limitations with the Google Doc app for iPad. If you begin taking notes with a numbered list, for example, if you move to a new table in the document the numbers cannot be restarted. #DearGooglePleaseFixThis

To work around this issue, we built our second hyperdoc for our 7th graders in Google Slides which worked far better than Google Docs for our purposes. Each slide serves as it’s own independent page; the slide navigator in Slides allows one to navigate to different sections of a hyperdoc very quickly and intuitively; and since students are more comfortable working with Slides than with tables in Docs, adding new slides for additional sources didn’t require any explanation.

Coloring slide backgrounds to group tasks together proved to be very helpful with 7th graders. “Right now, we’re looking at the green slide–step #2.”

A Last Google Drive Tip to Keep in Your Pocket Just in Case…

After you’ve built your project hyperdoc and you want to share your hyperdoc with students, there are few ways to tweak your Google URL to change its behavior when it’s clicked.

Epilogue…

So far, so good. As soon as we concluded with our 7th graders, our 8th graders returned with a 2nd science project with more science and research content. We pushed a new hypderdoc out to students and we were able to get to our actual research instruction work far more quickly the second time around.

We work with some teachers building BEAUTIFUL hyperdocs. Some of those teachers build their own and incorporate our tutorials. Our hyperdocs tend to be more utilitarian, but they’re getting the job done.

If you’re using hyperdocs in your instruction, please reply below with a link to a sample. I’d love to see what you’re doing and how you’re doing it!

Have a great week, everyone!

When last we came together in this space, I was happily going about making plans to reopen my library for face-to-face service to limited numbers of students.

The world out there…

We watched with horror and empathy for our neighbors in the Pacific Northwest the Northeast as the virus raged through communities and overwhelmed their medical systems. In Hawaii we had daily counts of new COVID-19 cases of 5, 10, and on bad days a dozen new cases per day. Like much of the rest of the country, we locked down to flatten our curve. Travel to Hawaii was, basically, shut down. Rather than the roughly 33,000-35,000 passengers to the islands that arrive by air on a spring/summer day in a typical year, Hawaii was seeing in the very low hundreds of air passenger arrivals per day–most of them were thought to be residents returning home or essential workers moving to the islands.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

We set about planning for reopening by distancing all of our furniture so that masked students could be 3 foot distanced if facing the same direction or 6 foot distanced if they were facing each other. Computers were removed from our desktop area. Tables were rearranged in our Library Classroom, and plexiglass dividers were ordered for our library tables and circ desk.

After accomplishing our directive and goals, we proudly sat back and I started to rest and recharge for the start of the 20-21 school year!

The world out there…

About the time, that I started getting ready to enjoy my summer staycation (because, you know, I’m not a fool that’s going to fly to virus plagued NYC when I live on an isolated archipelago with almost no COVID and my condo has a pool…). At about this time, schools in many locales began seriously looking at 6 foot social distancing all around and REQUIRED, rather than just RECOMMENDED, masks in classrooms. I was extremely grateful that my school administration had, by then, VERY EXPLICITLY established that any return to campus would include a requirement that any child or adult on campus would be REQUIRED to wear a PPE at all times.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

With emerging guidance from the Hawaii Department of Health my administration took the lead in asking our reopening committee to go back to the drawing board and reconfigure all spaces on campus for 6 foot social distancing all around.

The library staff developed policies for class visits, plans for materials purchasing, plans for circulation, plans for tracking students entering the library. Our IT and ET staff helped us remove more computers, we removed more tables from our classroom space, got rid of all of the library’s “comfy” furniture, and we began rethinking ways that we might tweak delivery of services to students from K-12.

At the same time, other groups on campus worked on plans to keep students monitored at all times during the day to help them maintain safe social distancing and even more furniture (including teachers’ desks) were removed from classrooms to allow every single square inch of space to be used for social distancing in classrooms. A new schedule that might lend itself to an easier transition to virtual learning in a worst case scenario that saw us return to fully virtual instruction was developed and rolled out, and our AC units were upgraded with UV cleaning systems and higher quality filters.

The world out there…

People, for whatever reason, were growing weary of life under lockdown. As our community started to reopen from lockdown and people began to return to parks, stores, restaurants, and streets (still under a required mask mandate) little by little people just seemed to grow weary of the social distancing and masking that had kept our COVID rates so enviously low. Reports of things like huge beach parties in protected shoreline areas. A huge rock jumping contest attended my many kids without social distancing or masks. Predictably our rate of new COVID cases began to skyrocket.

Meanwhile, back at the library…

We put the finishing touches on our direction arrows. Put down our socially distanced “stand here” dots to facilitate queuing in various areas of the library, and were pretty much ready for school to start. Just over a week out from the first day of instruction, all of the public schools and just about all of the independent schools on Oahu announced that almost everyone would be starting the school year virtually so, once again, EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED.

Meanwhile, [NOT] back at the library…

I’m writing this as we prepare to switch from Google Meet to Zoom as our online instruction platform; my co-librarian, Nicole, and I are putting together our new Library and Technology 6 class that we will be teaching for the first time; and I’m preparing to be a virtual librarian for at least the next few weeks.

Physical cues matter… (At least to me, they do…)

As I’ve worked IN my library for the last few days, one of the things I’ve come to realize is how important the physical separation of my library life and my home life is to my personal mental health, my wellbeing, and my productivity–I get SO MUCH MORE done when I am working at school. While we were on lockdown and virtual librarian-ing from home in the spring, I truly struggled to stop librarian-ing each evening so I ended up thinking about work for, what seemed like, 20 hours a day. I’ve come to realize that when I’m working in the library the physical space tells me that it is time for me to work. When I get home, the change of my physical space signals my subconscious self that it is time to stop working and be a spouse/son/uncle/friend. As we enter a new phase of virtual education, I’ve decided that I will probably try do quite a bit of my virtual work from the library if we are virtual, but not under broader shelter-in-place orders. It is just something that seems that it will work better for me.

I’ve also made the decision to take all work accounts off my personal electronic devices. When I am working, I will be on a school device and when I am using digital platforms to visit with my friends and family, I will do that on personal devices. I seem to be a person that has a brain that needs physical cues in order to switch gears.

Sometimes we can solve, but sometimes we just cope and that’s ok…

It’s really exhausting and stressful to have everything you know how to do suddenly feel null. In a PD session earlier this week, an educational psychologist that Zoomed in to work with our faculty on our own mental wellbeing asked us to differentiate between problems and dilemmas. His point, as I understood it, was that problems have solutions so we should work on finding ways to solve problems. Dilemmas, though, are part of the fabric of life. They are things, like pandemics, that we as individuals have little ability to solve based on our individual decisions or actions, so we should focus instead on how to cope with the dilemma. With dilemmas we work to mitigate the negatives, but we simply cannot look at a future need to revisit and change how we’ve tried to cope because our reality is that there are no solutions for us to suddenly find.

Finding solutions to invisibility…

One of our biggest problems when we went to emergency virtual teaching last spring was that we, as librarians, felt like we became suddenly invisible (and believe me, my colleague and I are very different by personality, but we aren’t typically people that are easily missed within our school community). One way Nicole and I are trying to make ourselves more visible to our students and teachers in our virtual environment is that we’ll be rolling out short 5 minute or less videos for teachers to show to their classes. We’re planning to try targeting teachers in different subjects depending on the topic, theme, or skill being emphasized in each video. It, honestly, feels really weird to have your face in the corner of your screencasts, but we decided that it was important for students to see our faces in order to be a visual presence as well as a voice. We hope that students will feel like they “know” us a little better over time and that will serve us well when we finally get to work with students in a 3-dimensional space.

The production values are admittedly low. I don’t want us spending too much time making things perfect and pretty so I’m trying to get over my slow talking, weird phrasing, and awkward pauses. I just want to have a way to get info lit concepts out to our kids that’s relevant, authentic to our personalities, and a little informal, without too much fussing…

On the horizon…

I talk a good game, but honestly, I’m struggling with the idea of going back to virtual learning. Here’s the thing, though, this afternoon, I realized that we actually won’t be “going back” to what we did in an instant back in March when we had to implement “emergency virtual learning.” Last spring, teachers and students just didn’t have the “bandwidth” to switch everything online AND think about incorporating library and research work into that mix.

As we move toward opening school year 2020-2021… virtually … we’ve already been approached for research lessons and support than was our pre-COVID-19 norm at the start of a year. So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves.

Hahaha!!! That last sentence, “So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves.” sounds EXACTLY like something that would be posted on the Typical EduCelebrity Twitter feed ( @educelebrity ) which is sooooo worth following!!! But sometimes what makes parody funny is that it is based in truth.

So let’s work on moving forward with hope and let’s be kind to ourselves!

Take care everyone! And Happy New School Year!!!