Updating Blogs (regularly)

It's been an embarrassingly long time since I have posted to this blog, and I apologize if any of you have been waiting anxiously for helpful hints or news about technology at Pierce. So much time has passed that momentum has ceased and complete inertia taken its place. I have decided that what I need to do is set a time biweekly in my schedule to write on the blog. With the inauguration of teacher web sites on homeworknow.com, I thought that some of you also might need a gentle reminder to update your web sites. There are a few ways to do that. (I decided to focus on iCal, since it is free and is available on all school Apple computers.)

• Low tech: Write in your plan book a time each week or biweekly to update your site. The more often that you update it, the less difficult the task becomes.
• Middle tech: Use a calendar program like iCal to schedule time to update your site. Create an event that appears on your calendar and use the Repeat function to schedule regularly occurring events.
• Higher tech: Use a calendar program not only to set aside time to blog or update your site but also to remind you to do so. iCal can send you an email with a reminder, display a notice on the screen, or display a notice with an alert sound.

I have been using an electronic calendar program for almost ten years to remind me about important events and birthday. Now it will remind me to update my blog, too.

For a video on how to use iCal, check out this instructional video on YouTube.

Do you have other tips on scheduling regular tasks in your life? Please share them here!

Pierce Reads is Bigger Than Ever

by Joan Hamilton

This coming Thursday, May 7th, nearly 190 Pierce students, their parents, and teachers will gather in the Pierce School library as a community of Readers to participate in Pierce Reads, a program created and run through the Pierce School Library for the past 14 years. Sadly, it may be the last Pierce Reads if there is no Library Assistant on board next year.

The following is a letter I sent to the Brookline School Committee concerning this issue.

April 28, 2009

Dear School Committee Members,

I would like to invite you all to attend Pierce Reads on Thursday, May 7th at 7p.m. in the Pierce School Library. Pierce Reads is a book discussion evening that entails students, their parents and teachers coming together as a community of readers to exchange views on a book read in common. This program, which occurs once in the fall and once in the spring, began fourteen years ago thanks to a grant from The Brookline Foundation. It is a program that has been replicated in most of the other seven elementary schools.

Our theme this year is “Between Two Worlds.” 4th graders are reading a book about a 4th grader just arrived from Kosovo; 5th and 6th graders are reading about a Sudanese “lost boy” and his first year in Minneapolis following the trauma of losing most of his family; 7th and 8th graders are reading about a Muslim family from Bangladesh who suddenly become “the enemy” following the terrorism of 9/11.

At present 81 students have signed up, meaning 81 parents will accompany them, plus approximately 15 Pierce staff members. We never have to coerce teachers to participate as discussion leaders. They always tell us being here is reward enough. One teacher, several years ago, put it thus: “I almost didn’t come. I was extremely tired and just wanted to go home and sleep; but I decided to come and I can only say this about Pierce Reads – It’s better than sleep.” Parents ask why we don’t have a Pierce Reads every month. Students, as well, give high marks to the evening. One African American boy being mentored by a sixth grade teacher (thanks to another Brookline Foundation grant), whispered (great excitement in his voice) to me one day last week, “I’m coming to my first Pierce Reads. A teacher is bringing me.”

Sadly, it will also be the last Pierce Reads if there is no library assistant at Pierce next year. The amount of person hours it takes both Shirley and me to read and choose the books, order and process them, book talk them in each class, advertise to parents, distribute the books, re-read the books the week prior to the discussions in order to prepare discussion packets for each co-leader, make up the discussion groups balanced between boys and girls, talkative and quiet students, make color-coded name tags for each participant, plan the discussion leaders’ dinner which takes place at 5:30p.m. prior to the event, prepare evaluation sheets, buy and prepare the refreshments and then clean up afterward, will be too many to make it possible to execute this twice-yearly event, given the 2/3 cut in the library program that will occur without an assistant.

You’ve heard me speak before about the culture of reading that takes years to build up in a school. This is the biggest Pierce Reads ever. It seems more than sad that it may be the last.

Sincerely,
Joan Hamilton
Pierce School Librarian

Research Redux

In our last few blog postings, Mrs. Hamilton and I have discussed the research projects that we've been doing with both the sixth and seventh grade classes. I've spent a lot of my class time with seventh grade students, discussing, practicing (is "Googleing" a word?), and engaging in research. While we do meet just once a week, much time and energy has been devoted to the practice of research in those classes. I've really been hoping that the concept of authenticating resources (a.k.a. checking sources) was solidifying in their minds. However, much to my dismay, one of the three sections of classes had that look of confusion on their faces when I was reviewing the requirements of their I-Search project and mentioned authenticated resources.

As a teacher, I wondered what went wrong. I used the same agendas, rubric, and models for all three sections. I utilized a constructivist approach so that each student had to create a list of characteristics of a valid research site. Doesn't this mean that by creating their understanding, they should remember it better? Was this class just more honest than the others? And lastly, how will these students survive in our world of information overload? So I did what I could -
continued to discuss authenticated resources seemingly ad nauseam in class (and probably in this blog, too) and engaged in deep breathing exercises.

I am fairly certain that I am not the only teacher who has experienced this, and we will move on to a new topic in class soon. If the true indication of students' understanding is their ability to use their knowledge flexibly, then I can know only if I succeeded from the results of future projects and from the experiences of colleagues who ask these students to research. Please let me know what happens.

Sixth Graders Learning about the CIvil RIghts Movement

Sixth Graders Learning about the Civil Rights Movement
by Joan Hamilton

Collaboration is a core value of the Brookline Public Schools. Scott Moore, head of the Educational Technology and Libraries Department, used a recent two hour meeting to give librarians and ET specialists time to work together to plan a research unit. The result for Sandra Sicard and me was a sixth grade research unit on the Civil Rights era. Following that two hour meeting, we worked several more hours with the sixth grade teachers and specialists to work out the logistics of implemention.

The result is Pierce's sixth graders have been hard at work since their first day of school in 2009 researching, reading, and writing about the Civil Rights Movement in this country. The essential question they are answering is: What happened during the Civil Rights era (1950 - 1968) that brought change to our country? One objective is to gain the background information that will allow them to understand better the novel, The Watson's Go to Birmingham by Christopher Paul Curtis, a 6th grade benchmark book. The book is paritially set in Alabama in 1963 during the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Each student individually is researching a person, event, or organization. Each student's final product will be one page containing two paragraphs -- one telling the "who, what, where" about their topic, and the second explaining the impact on the progress of civil rights in this country. They must also include a picture and a quotation. Each class will produce a civil rights era "primer", a compilation of individual student work, that will be available on line as well as in print in each classroom.
Students' research tools have been books both from Pierce School Library and the Brookline Public Library as well as online databases and web sites. They have seemed both excited and amazed by what they are finding. "It's hard to believe it was so violent." "These people were amazingly courageous," are two comments I have overheard. Searching for primary sources, one student exclaimed with excitement, "Oh, look! here is an intereview." Another chimed in, "I found a letter." Besides giving students background information for Watson's , we hope this research will increase their appreciation of the historic inauguration that will take place next week.

Using Google Wisely

After my last blog posting about Google, I have continued to work with my seventh grade students to evaluate web sites. We first examined the Dog Island web site to determine if it was valid, and it passed many of the characteristics of a valid web site. (Dog Island purports to be a place where one can send a dog to live “free from the stress and hardship associated with daily life among humans.”)

Not until we researched which other web sites link to the Dog Island site did students become more skeptical. (You can do this by typing link:http://thedogisland.com into Google or Altavista search engines.) As we scrolled the list of results, we noticed references to hoax and bogus web sites. We returned to the Dog Island site, dug a little deeper, and finally came upon its disclaimer.

I then asked students to use Google to find sites to support building background knowledge for their social studies unit. They had to cite 4 ways they knew each source was trustworthy. We discussed their findings and sometimes had to refer back to the Dog Island site for “trustworthy” characteristics. We collaboratively generated the following list of mostly infallible ways to judge the veracity of web sites:

• The site was created by a reputable organization, such as a museum, the government, or an institution of learning (pbs).
• The author is an expert on the topic.
• Bibliographic resources are provided and accurate.
• The information is validated by other resources.

As we continue researching this year, I will review and strongly encourage the use of our library databases, as well. But, for now, if students are going to rely heavily on Google, this seems like a reasonable approach for them to take.

I remain a little puzzled that students weren't quicker to doubt the validity of the Dog Island web site. Anyone have any thoughts about that? Other hoax sites you could share with kids include Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, Velcro Crop, and DHMO.

Pierce Reads -- View Night of the Radishes Slide Show and Pictures of Julian Huston
By Joan Hamilton, Pierce School Librarian

One hundred and one Pierce students, parents and staff members came together as a community of readers to the Pierce School Library on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 to participate in PIERCE READS, an evening book discussion program for 5th – 8th graders.
The theme of this year’s Pierce Reads and Teachers as Readers is “Between Two Worlds.”

Fifth and sixth graders read and discussed Becoming Naomi Leon by Pamela Munoz Ryan, the story of a bi-racial family living in Southern California. Toward the end, there is a dramatic car ride to Oaxaca, Mexico where Naomi finds her father and participates in the Night of the Radishes, a festival held annually in Oaxaca on December 23rd. As you will see from this slide show, the radish carvings are magnificently intricate and beyond anything we might have imagined.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planeta/sets/1401300/show

Seventh and eighth graders read and discussed New Boy by Julian Houston, the story of a young man from Virginia who is the first African American to attend a prestigious boys' boarding school in Connecticut during the late 1950’s. The book presents not only the complexities of the civil rights movement but also the courage of those who were the first of their generation to break racial barriers and those who organized and carried out sit-ins at lunch counters all over the South. Pierce Reads particpants were aided in their understanding and appreciation of this important era by the presence of the author of New Boy, Julian Houston, a retired justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts and a former community organizer in Harlem during the civil rights movement. He answered our questions and told the stories that inspired his writing. This was Mr. Houston’s second visit to Pierce School in less than a week. On Wednesday, November 12th, he participated in Pierce’s Teachers as Readers, also discussing New Boy. As Mr. Houston said in a recent New York Times interview, “Most young people today, even those in the South, have only a superficial knowledge of the civil rights movement and segregation.” He further explained that one of the reasons he wrote New Boy was to give young people a detailed picture of what it was like to live in a segregated community in the late 1950’s and an appreciation for what the civil rights movement accomplished.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/12houston-interview.html
Several attendees commented that in light of last week’s historic presidential election, Mr. Houston’s remarks were especially poignant.

Language Arts Test Scores and Online Literacy
by Joan Hamilton, Pierce School Librarian

Two recent articles provide food for thought about current literacy practices. The first is an article released by the Massachusetts Department of Education stating that for the 2008 MCAS,
English language arts results in the elementary grades declined and the middle schools were flat.
http://www.doe.mass.edu/news/news.asp?printscreen=yes&id=4287

The second article is from the September 19, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education and is entitled "Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind" by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University and author of a book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b01001.htm
Bauerlein describes the style of literacy used for screen reading (web sites, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) as "racing across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest." He argues that when reading a long narrative, a long political tract, a dense argument, a modern poem, a complicated narrtive or academic texts, this style of reading breaks down. He concludes by advocating "slow reading" and a plea that educators keep at least some of our students' educations "unplugged and logged off."

At Pierce School, "slow reading" is built into the culture of learning -- from read alouds in the early grades designed to grip children in the thrill of narrative, to literature circles, book discussions, summer reading, book fairs, and required independent reading projects in all grades. It blossoms as parents choose to regularly read aloud at home to their children. It is a habit of mind that will grow and bear fruit as our students go forward into a speeded-up digital world.