Life Could Be A Comic Book

I have been enjoying looking at everyone's posts. If you haven't checked out Ann's, look at some of the cool things she has there. I am going to try picture trail over the holidays.
Jimmy it was good to see that you discovered your local library. I hope you are sharing that story with your students.
I think I will spend much of my winter break catching up on this "course." One application I want to do more with is Comic Life, a program that comes on all the new Macs.
We have several media specialists who are using it in their tech classes. It's a great way for kids to create their own graphic novels or non-fiction. One of our k-8 teachers is having her students research a person and then put together a comic book highlighting their accomplishments. In another school I saw pages from Comic Life of students doing a science experiment and recording their process and observations.

Happy Holidays. I am very excited about seeing everyone again in January.

Trying Can Be Trying

Search blog as it deals with lots of Information Literacy issues. Jean and I have also been updating our Minneapolis Media Trying new things can be a "trying" experience, especially when things...like my schedule...change on an hourly basis. Since the last time I blogged I have been working on organizing my hundreds of pictures from Bangladesh. I have also set up an iGoogle web page and set up an RSS feed from School Library Journal. I must recommend the Neverendingwebpage where we try to post all the things that media specialists need to know to do their job. That's quite a feat! We have also been assigned to do a little action research on the efficacy of an audio enhancement system that has been installed in one of our North Side schools. It has been fun visiting classrooms and seeing teachers and kids in action. Through a district initiative many of these schools have been able to reduce class size to 20 students. If only all of our students could be in that kind of environment again.
I will be posting this "class" on the eCompass site so we can track the credits for everyone. Technology is amazing but I often think of what happens to all those records out there in cyberspace when we experience a major power outage. Ouch!

Back from Bangladesh

Talk about time travel and culture shock! I feel like I am dealing with both as I try to re-enter the reality of my work life in this 21st century realm while part of me is still in a 3rd world village.
We hear and talk so much about a global community. What is it? Who is part of it? How do we exist and operate in it? Whose ideas get shared and listened to? Who benefits? Who doesn't? Is there real communication and understanding or just more information and and greater chances for exploitation? These are the questions swirling inside my head as I think about how we use technology on a global scale. How do we use it to help our children do more than compete in a global economy? How do we use it to engage them in discovering the world and its people in a way that creates understanding and empathy and leads to solving real world problems?
Two women's community savings groups were on my itinerary. What they are learning about savings and using their limited resources for their own good and the good of the community is powerful stuff. I also visited a village where arsenic in the water has lead to systemic diseases in members of the community. Luckily, a deep wells project has provided this community with clean water. The arsenic poisoning is abating, their health is improving and their children are going to be healthier from the start. But these villages constitute a minute proportion of the 145 million people in Bangladesh. Already poor water is now more severely contaminated as a result of the cyclone which recently devastated the southern portion of the country.
I keep thinking about the children in the two schools I visited. How would access to technology improve their education? How could it change their lives? How could it impact the development of their country?
Leap: back to Minneapolis, this project and restarting my participation. I set up a Google web page and am working on my rss feeds. I continue to work on learning more about web pages as Jean and I need to get our media web page up to date. I am looking forward to seeing everyone again and enjoy the excitement you are all sharing through your blogs.
I will try my hand at posting some pictures when I get them organized.

I'm Feeling Behind Already

You know how it feels when you are supposed to be in the lead and keep falling farther and farther behind? That's my feeling right now as I try to keep all the projects in the air and get ready to fly back in time to a country where in the interior villages bricks are still made by hand, the re-bars in buildings are bamboo rather than steel, and where there is electricity but no Internet access at this point. I am looking forward to observing a slower pace and connecting with people whose monthly income is less than we pay for a large latte. I am sure I will return changed in many ways. I will miss seeing you in November and I know I will fall behind in my technological skills while I deepen my understanding of another culture. I look forward to sharing some of my experiences when I return. Perhaps I will have the chance to blog during my London lay overs on both legs of my journey. I hope you all enjoy your upcoming holidays and time with family and friends. I will see you all in January.

Hello From Reno

I have been at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) conference in Reno since last Tuesday and do I have things to share! If anyone thinks librarians (media specialists) are behind the times, they should be here. Every other session was about 21st c. skills or using Web 2.0 in information literacy. So we are living at the edge.
The opening speaker was Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind, that is a great read about the skills and habits of mind that our students will need to move out of the Information Age and into the Conceptual Age. He emphasizes that we need to move from LBrain dominance and move to include more R Brain thinking. He talks about the 6 things that will be most important in the conceptual age: design, story, symphony, empathy play and meaning.


I am at the closing sesssion and the keynote is Omar Wasso, the creator of Black Planet.com also the People magazine sexiest Internet executive about 5 years ago. Here are some notes from his presentation. We must help transform as well as inform our students. He is talking a lot about social networking. Not much new here, but interesting from a business perspective.

He just did a "nerd purity" test and thanks to information literacy project I had created some of the tech things he asked about, like a blog, etc. Libraries may need to be more about transforming than service. Libraries should be a reflective space and environment for learning, part of the Experience and Transforming Economy. A place out of the hubbub where you can be energized and transformed by your experience.

Well, enough rambling. You will be hearing more about this conference as I share the things I have learned that will fit right into our literacy project.

No, I have not spent time at the tables at all. In fact casinos kind of creep me out. So I can only share my knowledge and not big winnings.

Think about the history of economics as coffee:

Beans are a commodity.
Tin of coffee is a product.
Cup of coffee is a service.
Dunn Brothers is an experience.
Coffee tasting class is a transformation.

I Thought I Would Be Brain Dead

I thought I would be brain dead after a 3-hour meeting and racing across town to help with some web page training but I was wrong. Great food from the Holy Land revived all of us in the Information Literacy project. Hearing about all the unique and creative research projects that are getting under way in the three participating schools brings back very good memories of my years as a high school media specialist. I really am a researcher at heart so this project could well be the highlight of my work week.