Acquiring Books

As a teacher librarian we are bombarded with different ways to acquire books. Usually from large publishers or big box stores. In our UBC courses last summer we were visited by representatives from both Follett and ULS (United Library Service).  When it comes to buying books and other resources there seems to be a taboo on it just like when weeding and discarding books. It seems some methods of book buying are frowned upon. And yes it is great to support our country and its publishers such as ULS but there are many options out there that are cheaper. While Follett may be able to keep track of what books you have and how many of each copy, sometimes a good bargain is just too hard to turn down. Which lead me to the discovery of this website: www.bookdepot.ca. This company, located in Ontario, sells wholesale and discounted books. You can browse by category, or even by binding. There are savings more than 75% on some books! And unlike when shopping retail the discounts are on books that you actually want to buy. I know this course is on reference books so shouting out to everyone that I found Erin Hunter's Warrior books for little more than $3 each is not what I should be doing, but I also found great reference material such as an illustrated dictionary for $5.25 and "Mo' Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined" for $2.10; the dictionary deals are too many to name! I would love that sland dictionary just to put out on a table so kids can flip through on their way past to find a new word. I could go on almost endlessly on the bargains I found: Canadian Atlas for $3.15; Atlas of Lost Treasures just $5.15! This list goes on. It is definitely worth a look. And if you think that these prices are too good to be true, this is not a second hand seller, all books are new. This is an exerpt from the company's website.

 "BookDepot.ca is one of North America's largest sellers of Bargain Books. Bargain Books are new, unread books that the publisher sells-off in volume to reduce excess inventory. Sometimes the publisher printed too many copies, in other cases bookstores purchased too many copies and have returned them to the publisher for credit. The books therefore have been handled a few times but are still in excellent condition."

 ....................If only I already had a library to buy for!.....................

Assignment Three.....

Assignment 3: Need I say more? The problems we all seem to be having in understanding how to begin and carry through with this assignment seem to be endless. I have been talking to colleagues who have taken this course in the past, and they say that they never had to complete this assignment which leads me to ask, why in a course about reference material we are asked to change a teacher! The teachers I have talked to know what reference material there is available to them, and also how to access it. They use it in their classes all the time. If the course is on reference material maybe the assignment should have been finding a resources currently unavailable in your school and writing a plan on how to acquire said resource (print or electronic) and how to inform colleagues that the school now has the resources and different ways it could be used for each subject in coordination with the classroom teacher and the TL.

(...and this is no reflection on you Anne as I know you are the only one reading this.....I thought I just had to say this.....no matter how poorly articulated)

Again I come to the point that these courses are for teachers who are hoping to become TLs (although I realize many already are in a library position) how fair is it to assume that we all have libraries and are able to "change a teacher" in regards to their use? The current assignment, which is hard enough to understand and wrap your head around as it is, seems to be so far from actual course content that I wonder why it is an assignment in this course in the first place. I know in online courses it is hard to evaluate student learning and there have to be assignments to assign a specific grade, but really, to the powers that be, would an assignment that is directly related to course content not be better?

Dwindling Time......

I was called in today to TOC for a librarian at one of the local middle school. The first thing that I noticed was that her library time had been cut from 100% down to 50%! How can we let this happen? How many times do we as Teacher Librarians have to stand up and shout out that our jobs are important to the education of the students. That cutting our time will over time affect the students: the adults of tomorrow. We aren't just glorified library monitors who check in books and put them on the shelf. We are the hub of the school: a place for all to go students and teachers. We help teachers plan lessons that integrate the library and impart valuable lifelong learning skills. We help students hone their problem solving skills and teach how to assess information. It is disappointing to see these skills go to waste. When will it end, who will finally be the voice to give us our libraries back? I picture a battle between the government and librarians, war paint and all...think Braveheart! For Freedom! For Lifelong Learning!

All that aside, it was such a joy to be in the library at lunch and watch all the students gather, some to do homework, others to just read. They had novels or Non-Fiction, but they were all so absorbed and full of enjoyment! I really hope that there are some schools left with TL's in the next few years when I get my diploma...... It is a scary thought thinking what it could be if there aren't any positions left....

youtube

I have been thinking recently how we seem to discuss (in quite some detail) the merits of Wikipedia vs. print Encyclopaedias. The most common reason given for colleagues turning away from Wikipedia was because it can be, and is, updated by anyone and everyone. I was curious as to what my fellow Teacher colleagues thoughts were to using clips from youtube or similar sites in lessons. Like Wikipedia videos are uploaded by an anonymous someone....but yet is there still the same stigma attached to using these uploaded videos as using information obtained from Wikipedia?

I posed this question in the discussion board and in describing how I have used videos in the past I realised that using these videos may not be so much an issue of validity, but an issue of copyright infringement.

As for the issue of information validity, I don’t think it applies because I use the videos to show something specific to enhance learning, not to research something new; so it doesn’t really matter who uploads it. As for the copyright issue, I did some research online and could not find a definite answer to how long a video clip could be without breaking copyright law. Not even Wikipedia could offer me the answers.....

Whose job is it?

We have been discussing our specific districts and the resources (or lack of) that we each have. I think it is crazy that some districts have so much while others are so deprived. I even mentioned previously that the Chilliwack school district announced more than $3 million surplus this year! But even with that I doubt any of that will get back to the libraries. Looking at the resources that some other provinces have such as the Alberta Library maybe the online resources should fall on the shoulders of the provincial government and not the individual districts. Then surely students province wide (and also public library patrons) would benefit, and not just the ones from more affluent districts! A few of my classmates pointed out that a number of these resources were the same as they had in their district, or free; but I don't think this is the point. It isn't whether we have the same resources as another province is is whether we have the same resources available throughout our own province. Students from small or rural districts where funding may low deserve the same education as those from large districts such as Surrey or Vancouver! Wendy Sigaty posted a comment about the book "21st Century Skills" administrators who read this (and it seems to be present in many schools province wide) are starting to realize that students these days do use online resources much more. The book states that, "...many online resources are available for building information literacy skills. Some of the best are from the American Association of School Librarians, who believe that librarians are becoming 21st Century 'Digital Directors,' championing the effective use of information technologies in schools." The teacher librarians responsibility in educating the 21st Century students seems to be recongnized, and like Wendy says "If this is the direction in which the Ministry of Education is steering us, might it not have an impact on school library funding"

Mind the Retail Reference Gap (An Analysis of a scholarly article)

ODLIS (Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science) defines the reference interview as the “communication that occurs between a reference librarian and a library user to determine the person’s specific information needs.” Sadly, it seems to be an all too common occurrence that librarians do not put in the needed effort into finding out exactly what the library user needs, or teaching the user how to find reliable information himself. Kaetrena D. Davis calls this quick interaction the “retail approach” in her article Mind the Retail Reference Gap published in the Library Journal May 2006. She compares the library to a retail store: “the retail approach in reference is similar to what goes on in a clothing store, where customers walk in, browse the racks, ask a clerk for help in finding a particular item or size, purchase it, and walk out.” These retail librarians often only find hasty answers to questions which may in fact be more complex. Davis suggests that retail reference is becoming more commonplace in libraries because it requires little follow-up, and leaves the librarian free for other jobs. She believes the retail approach may, in the long run, lead to multiple problems in the library world such as preventing the library patrons from learning or improving their information literacy skills, which could lead to users relying on unreliable sources because they don’t know any better; or undermining librarians because the retail approach does not use all the skills a teacher librarian possesses. I feel as Davis does that a teacher librarian’s job is “matching resources with a user’s request and helping that user understand how to navigate resources for future use.” The retail approach only takes care of the superficial question that the student asks. This is why taking the time to complete a quality reference interview is so important: if the teacher librarian has the time and resources to conduct the reference interview the library user should not only find answers to their initial question, but should also strengthen their information literacy skills in the process. With students constantly receiving the retail approach, simply because of a librarian’s lack of time in the library or lack of training (school districts trying to save money hiring unqualified librarians or going with only library technicians), it can lead to long term negative results such as library patrons losing faith in the library and its ability to help them. According to Davis a “reference interview is a gateway to teaching information retrieval skills, so when an interaction is cut short, an opportunity to help users become more information literate is lost.” This is one of the main problems teacher librarians are currently (and Davis published her findings six years ago) facing: lack of time means fewer opportunities for teacher librarians to teach information literacy. It also means that school districts and administration do not see the true value of employing full time qualified teacher librarians. Davis goes on in her paper to say that programs should be implemented to train professionals to refrain from the retail reference approach and concentrate on improving information literacy. I think that we are already receiving the necessary training, but we need to let the administrators know what an important asset we could be if only we had the time to do our jobs to the way we know they should be done.

What Do They Know? (An Analysis of a scholarly article)

It is meaningless to spend our limited library budgets on reference sources (both print and electronic forms) without ensuring that our students can access and evaluate these resources effectively. This was the driving thought behind Rhonda Morrissette’s actions of developing a survey for both students and teachers in her school to assess information literacy levels. She talks about her study and the results What Do They Know? A Strategy For Assessing Critical Literacy published in Knowledge Quest May/June 2007. Morrissette is a teacher librarian at an adult education centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I assumed that adults would have a higher level of information literacy than high school-aged students: the adults having numerous more years of practical “life lessons” and more time to develop common sense and problem solving skills. I was therefore surprised with Morrissette’s findings that the adult students taking part in her survey were less likely to evaluate the accuracy of information correctly than the teachers. Morrissette surveyed both students and staff so that she could accurately compare the results. On average both teachers and students had been using the internet for the same number of years with the majority of teachers accessing the internet more often weekly than the bulk of students. A staggeringly low percentage of students use the internet to find new information or research (42 percent) of search information databases (14 percent) compared to 91 percent and 32 percent respectively of teachers. When it comes to choosing the best website for specific information (in Morrissette’s case determinining the most relevant website to find the best places to visit while in China) only 38 percent of students correctly answered and “only 48 percent of the students were able to identify the most reliable website”. Wikipedia was chosen by 40 percent of the remaining students as the most reliable source. While this does highlight the fact that Wikipedia is increasingly the first go-to website for student research in this case one may argue that Wikipedia (being edited by the general public) may in fact be the website to find places that must be visited in China chosen by the people. However the rest of Morrissette’s findings show that there is a “need for continued instructional intervention in critical literacy for helping students to identify and use reliable Internet Web sites”. I thought that adults returning to improve their education would be more interested in accessing new information. Perhaps this is the fault of us as teacher librarians in making this assumption. It is our job to show students all the information available to them and how to access and evaluate the information. Morrissette highlights some ways to begin this instruction such as uploading false information onto Wikipedia and then time how long before it is actually removed, or by getting students to visit hoax websites.

Online Resources

This week I was curious about online resources and how my own district (Chilliwack) and other districts dealt with these databases and catalogues. Chilliwack does not subscribe to any online resources leaving the choice up to individual schools, but subscriptions being so expensive, they are not purchased. Annete (from Surrey school district) and Regina (from Vancouver) have both said that their districts not only have many online resources but that the district employs a library coordinator that not only chooses these resources (with imput from teachers) but also ensures that they are up to date and working correctly. Just the other day the Chilliwack school district announced it actually had over $3million in surpluss this year after a spending freeze last year. I wonder if any of this will get back to the schools where it is really needed..... We could use some online resources, or even money to improve our current physical resources libraries. And someone in the district to manage all this would be priceless! Another idea that I got from the discussions was to remind students (and parents) that public libraries offer many online resources to its patrons; the bonus being that to join the library costs nothing! But looking at the Fraser Valley Public library I have noticed that due to Provincial funding cuts, they have cancelled several electronic resources. It does leave public library patrons with access to some journals and databases through ebscohost, but with the way things are going I am wondering what will be cut the next time money is taken away. In districts such as Chilliwack I guess  using public library resources is better than nothing.....but there is still a fair distance to go before we get everything we need to be the Teacher Librarians we want to be.

Weeding

Weeding is a large (and important) part of a teacher librarians job. If the books on the stacks (and the online resources as well) aren't up to date and relevant then they are pretty much useless. There are so many guidelines to follow when weeding, but some libraries (as I learned from Wendy's post) simply don't have the money to purchase new resource materials; in cases like this is it better to have older books or no books at all? Personally I would say it is better to have books that may be out of date. While there may be newer content out there, a set of old encyclopedias for example can be used to teach students the skills of finding information using an index etc.

There has been great discussion this week on what to do with weeded books. While Rielding says that we must personally take our old books to the garbage bin and dump them in, there seems to be a general consensus among us LIBE 467 students that we cringe at the thought of doing that. I have gotten some great ideas from my colleagues though, there is always the idea of sending books to third world contries if not for their information content (if it isn't good enough for us why should we think it should be good enough for them) but even just for the simple use of learning to read, or having a sale to the community where all books are 25 cents which has a dual purpose of raising money for the library to buy new books and getting rid of the weeded books.

The ideas that really impressed me though and I look forward to applying in my own school library (when I am lucky enough to have one). One is to use the books to make different forms of art: collages, or 3D sculpture. The other is to throw away the inside pages (cringing while you walk to the dumpster) and keep the covers to make new blank books to sell as journals etc; or gluing the middle pages together and then cutting out a hole to create a place to hide things. 

I think that weeding is something that although it would be fun is something that could produce a lot of controversy at the same time with parents and other community members complaining that you have thrown out something that is "perfectly good". It is a positive thing that most districts have a weeding policy that can then be brought out to show the people who complain, but this policy does not include what we should do with the discarded books.......until I hear otherwise I look forward to using the above ideas.

It came from Hollywood (An Analysis of a scholarly article)

One of the reference services that a school library (and the teacher librarian) needs to offer is helping to raise students’ information literacy. Teachers are constantly trying to find different ways to engage students and aid them in attaining new knowledge. It is hard to raise achievement if the students are not interested or engaged. Nedra Paterson has come up with an ingenious way to engage students and improve their retention of new material. She writes about it in her article It came from Hollywood: Using popular media to enhance information literacy instruction published in College & Resource Library News February 2010. Developing student information skills seems to be a reoccurring demand on the time of a teacher librarian. Paterson’s idea of “using clips from film, television, commercials, and popular music as part of classroom instruction immediately grabs [the] students’ attention” and thus makes it easier for the teacher librarian to impart knowledge about critical research skills. Paterson believes that “incorporating popular media into the lesson plan can be more effective than pure lecture or hands-on only activities...when material is presented both verbally and visually, recall and recognition are enhanced and deeper learning takes place.” Many things can be connected to memories; have you ever caught a smell in the air that triggered a childhood memory? Emotions are connected to memories so if teachers can evoke some emotions in lessons it could reinforce the lesson making it easier for students to remember the content. I am a huge movie-lover so it was quite natural that I should like this idea so much. It can be used in so many ways, not just in the library teaching research skills and information literacy, but in any subject showcasing thousands of different topics. Paterson’s idea of showing clips in the classroom does not mean simply watching the movie version of a book read in an English class, or a movie that depicts a history topic, but she uses these clips to illustrate certain standards or learning outcomes. For example in a 6 minute clip from The School of Rock in which an unemployed man pretends to be a substitute teacher to earn some money. He does not have any teacher training so falls back on the one thing he does know: rock music. He develops a class assignment to create a rock band. The movie shows a montage of the student’s brainstorming, researching, and using their own specific talents. When Paterson watched this clip she saw the students in the movie mirroring the same processes that our students use to research different topics. Showing this clip to a group before beginning discussions about research and then talking about the different methods the characters used to learn about the rock genre and create their own rock band can solidify the research process in the students’ minds. Most children will have seen the movie and can recall this information easily to remember what the research steps were if in the future need to do their own individual research. I can’t wait to try Paterson’s method in my own classes, and from now on will be looking for clips of my own when watching television or movies.

Information Literacy whose job is it?

I am reading in a lot of posts that information literacy is not often completed by teachers because it is not a "markable outcome" or cannot end up as a "report card grade". I definitely have to disagree with this idea. Information literacy can be integrated into absolutely any subject, in which case it will come out as a markable outcome, and therefore make it onto a student's report card. In Science you could work on a research project where after students access new information they must prove (maybe through a list of questions to be answered) that they can comprehend, and evaluate the usefulness of the information before actually using said information in their research projects. If it is taught and used in all different subjects the students will become so familiar with it they will start using their information literacy and evaluative processes as second nature!

I agree with Pamela Puska's post in the course discussion board: "it would be beneficial for a school to develop or adopt a school wide model that is taught across the grades and curriculum. By the time, students enter higher grades, the research process would be ingrained in them anyways and they would be able to work through the steps in a more timely manner." If every teacher is teaching the same method (but in a different subject) it will make it easier for students to become information literate because the same method will be taught using many different teaching topics and strategies. Maybe one way for the teacher librarian to approach the team teaching is to take this idea to a staff meeting. Once the school wide research model is established and presented to teachers at the same time, the TL can then offer their time (and the library) to help get this method to the students in all different subjects. I think once the teacher realizes it isn't necessarily more of their time and energy that they are giving up; and how much it will benefit the students they will be eager to adapt these ideas and teach information literacy in their classes. Even getting one teacher on board, and then going to other teachers and showing what you have done with that one teacher will get others on board, and then hopefully they will all follow. It is definitely something that has to be done by the whole staff.

Course for future Teacher Librarians??

I am getting fairly frustrated with the courses I have taken so far in my journey to earn my teacher librarian diploma. In every course it has been assumed that we are already in a Teacher Librarian position. The reasons I am taking these courses is to become a Teacher Librarian, and I don't think that it should be assumed (when it comes to assignments etc) that I already run my own library and have come across the problems that current Teacher Librarians may have in their libraries. I am aware that many Teacher Librarians have been in their positions without a diploma and I think it is great that they are taking the time (and money) to upgrade their education, I do not think that it should be assumed that everyone in the course already has that first hand experience.