After completing the initial draft of the library's CAIS chapter, I was able to look at our statistics from a broader perspective. In the last three years physical circulation has slowly drifted down to hover around 200 resources a month on average, while electronic circulation has steadily risen with thousands of articles being read each month. (This month, over 2300 full-text articles were accessed.) With our relatively small student population (just over a hundred students a class) our monthly physical circulation is strong, and more than justifies shelving and bound-and-paper books. Last year, physical circulation rounded out at about 5 check-outs per student. This month, 342 resources made it into student hands.
Featured Resources
This month I attended the California School Library Association's Southern Section conference, and attended a great session on web tools "for productivity, creativity, learning and inquiry." Here are a couple that jumped out at me:
- See and listen about the Eiffel Tower. Qwiki makes encyclopedic information come alive with a combination of a computer read-aloud and slide-show images. A more interesting way to introduce a topic that creates a dynamic visual. (P.S. Do a search for 'Sage Hill School'...)
- Tripline offers the ability to tour the world from home. You can add text, pictures and multimedia to map locations. Tripline automatically assembles a video from the input. Check out The Lewis and Clark Expedition. Tripline also allows for mobile and iPhone app use, a good idea for some of those science trips, perhaps?
- Students can create online flashcard sets with Quizlet, then practice or test themselves. The best thing about the site, however, is that it archives other sets, including some language and standardized tests. How's your SAT vocab?
- Speaking of vocab, watch the way Visuwords connects words with meanings by visual relationship. Take a stroll through a dictionary.
Last month I was able to speak to all of our ninth graders through a seminar coordinated through Mer's P.E. wellness program. The topic was internet responsibility, and I focused very heavily on social networking and online reputations, responding to the outbreak of cyberbullying-related suicides and online incidents. After 11 suicides across the nation in last September alone, a conference was held at the White House on March 10th to focus heavily on this topic, attended by the head of Facebook security, the author of the book the movie Mean Girls was based upon, and others. (Rosalind Wiseman's follow-up book, Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, can be found in the Educator's Library portion of our collection.) My goal, like that of this conference, was to initiate discussion and awareness of this issue among our students rather than preach my opinion.
The seminar began with three breakout groups, each of which received a scenario. The scenarios were each drawn from an actual incident that occurred this month, which I revealed only after I asked the students how they would handle each issue. (You can read the discussions and find linked news articles by clicking here .) I felt the students were extremely engaged and I had some wonderful discussions with many of them. During the presentation following, my hope was to get students thinking about their presence and actions online and share the consequences other teens are experiencing. (You can see my presentation on GoogleDocs by clicking here. Hit “Actions” on bottom left to pull up another window that says “Speaker Notes”; you can scroll through the presentation and see my notes at the same time as long as you can see both windows.)
Research Projects
As always, don't hesitate to contact the library to reserve research time or to collaborate on a project. I would love to visit your class, and I'll bring with me some tuned research tips to help.
