What a privilege to be here, seeing and hearing some of the top people in our field. I used Dr. Todd's paper “Evidence-Based Practice: Difference, Intervention and Transformation” to support one of my masters papers. I remember moving from confusion/overwhelm to clarity as a result of that reading. Now I am in the presence, and he's not only clear and bright, he's hysterically funny, too! (How did librarians get that serious, controlling rap? Joe Janes was hilarious also.)His session was titled, "How to be Constructive with Web 2.0: Powering up Minds, not just Machines." Web 2.0 is sometimes referred to as the interactive web, but Russ' point is that it is not just about participation, it's about generation - creating new understandings in community.
He took issue with Joe Jane's notion that libraries are about place, stuff, support, interaction and values. The school library is the school's physical and virtual learning commons where inquiry, thinking, imagination, discovery and creativity are central to the information-to-knowledge journey, and to the personal, social and cultural growth of students.
He challenged teacher-librarians to move past helping kids to find stuff, and to get them to engage with the stuff they find in order to create deep learning. To do so, we need to keep our focus on a set of intellectual competencies:
- Thinking - creative, critical, metacognitive processes. Learning happens in the head, not on the web.
- Using language, symbols and text. Making meaning with the codes
- Relating to others - listening, recognizing and respecting points of view, negotiating, sharing ideas
- Participating and contributing
- Technical mastery
- Self management - self-motivation, developing a can-do attitude, ethics, safety.
The central message was that regardless of the tools you use, be they stone tables or net books, the important thing is not the technology, it's what we do with it. Make sure you create tasks that require critical, analytical and/or synthetical responses.
Here are some of Todd's Faves:
- Voki - a free service that allows you to create personalized speaking avatars and use them on your blog, profile, and in email messages
- ToonDoo - a comic strip maker
- The Rubric Machine at Landmark
- Citation machine at Landmark
- Audacity - a free, cross-platform sound editor
- VoiceThread - a tool that lets you download images and record audio, video or written responses
- Wordle - a word cloud generator.
- WallWisher - an online notice board generator l where people can post the equivalent of sticky notes.
TIPS:
- Teach students how to set up RSS feeds, then have them gather information on a topical theme from a variety of sources and analyze the information for variance and bias.
- Wordle can be used to help students discover the key concepts in a piece of text. Here are two word clouds made by dumping the text of two speeches into Wordle. Guess which one belongs to Obama and which to Cheney.
My favourite quote of the conference came from this session. "Do not be an accomplice to mediocrity!"
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