IMC Guy

I was fortunate enough to attend ICE last week.  I had never attended before, but heard a lot of about it from several members (Anne, Lori, and Smeech) of my PLN.  The drive was about two hours and I was able to work out one day of attendance, but due to some family conflicts, I couldn’t attend longer.  Attending conferences is something that I really, really enjoy.  Sure, the learning is fantastic, but another part that I enjoy is the conversations and chances to see some of my friends face to face.  Interactions on Twitter and other social networking sites is great, but there’s nothing like saying “Hi” in the real world.  Attending a conference for one day certainly doesn’t provide you with a lot of time to chat and mingle, but I still enjoyed it.  If it wasn’t for the cost of attending and getting the days off of school, I’d try and attend as many conferences as possible.  I’d really like to attend FETC, PETE & C, CUE, EduCon, and others.  Someday.

Have you ever benefitted from an unfortunate circumstance that happened to someone else?  Well, that was the case for me this year at ICE.  Jen Wagner, one of the first members of my PLN, was scheduled to attend ICE, and leading a few workshops and presenting a couple of sessions.  However, due to unfortunate timing, she wasn’t able to attend in person.  (She did, however, attend virtually).  About a week before the conference was to start, I received a message from Jen, asking me if I would fill in for her during one of her sessions.  Me?  Are you kidding?  YES!  The topic was Online Projects, which Jen knew I was familiar with.  We chatted a little throughout the next several days, with Jen giving me a few ideas on what she was planning on doing.  I took those ideas, chatted with another friend who was presenting on a similar topic at PETE & C a few days before mine, and the next thing I knew, I had a presentation ready to go.  The help of Jen and Karen made me feel a little more at ease because this was going to be my first ever presentation at a conference.  This one doesn’t count.  While it was certainly unfortunate Jen couldn’t attend in person, I was happy that I had the opportunity to present.

I bet you’re wondering how it turned out.  Tune in to part 2 of this post, which I’ll be working on later today.

I saw a tweet the other day about The Twit Cleaner.  Not knowing what it was about, I decided to check out the link.  According to the website, TwitCleaner will “Clean the garbage from your Tweetstream!”  I was curious what they meant by garbage and read on.  In addition to cleaning out the garbage, The Twit Cleaner said it will:

This sounded pretty cool to me so I thought I’d give it a try.  I knew I probably had many followers who haven’t posted a lot, but wasn’t sure the best way to gather the information.  I was also not sure who I was following who wasn’t following me back.  I do believe you benefit the most of out Twitter when the conversation goes both ways.  I certainly realize there are a lot of people with thousands of followers and they must be selective with who they follow back, but I wanted to check out what the people in my network were doing.  I logged onto the site and provided my information.  With a few hours, I received a link to my report.

The report included a summary that included information about the Tweeps it felt were potentially garbage.

The report provided me with some pretty interesting information about this potential “garbage,” much of it very useful and some of it surprising.  My followers were broken down in several categories:

Dodgy behavior. I’m not sure what they mean  by “dodgy,” but this section was broken down the following groups:

• Nothing But Links: Followers who posted nothing but links.  Not surprisingly, these were usually like CNET News, Education Week, ESPN, School Library Journal, among others.  Not a big deal to me.
• Tweeting The Same Links All The Time: These were followers who tweeted duplicate links more than 25% of the time.  I only had 2 in the group.
• Tweeting Identical Tweets All The Time: These posted the same tweet too many times.  Again, I only had 2.
• Other Dodgy Behavior, Now Absent: Any dodgy behavior, plus haven’t posted in ages.  I had 6.  I think I need the definition of dodgy to better understand this group.

No Activity in Over A Month. Pretty simple category.  Interestingly enough, I have 37 followers in this category.  I’ll probably take a closer look at some of these, but for the most part, if they aren’t contributing, they don’t need to be a part of my network.

Not Much Interaction. This category was broken down into three sections, all providing useful data.

• Not Active Yet: These are people with fewer than 10 tweets.  Perhaps this is a group to keep an eye on.  I had 8 in this group.
• Don’t Interact With Anyone: The people in this group NEVER interacts with any of their followers.  I guess they are just for putting information out there.  Again, I had 8 in this group.
• Hardly Follow Anyone: People that follow back less than 10% of the people who follow them.  For me, this group consisted of some celebrities, sports starts, the NBA, and TV shows like The Office and SNL.  It also included five big names in ed tech.  I can certainly understand this group – many of these have tens of thousands of followers.

From this report, I’m able to click on any of the people listed and I’m taken to their Twitter page.  This allows me easy access to unfollow if necessary.  I’m also able to unfollow any of these groups with a single click from the site.  I don’t anticipate doing that, with the possible selection of the No Activity in a Month group,  because there might be some reasons why I want to keep following some of them.

Overall, I think the report is valuable.  Finding out who is active is important.  I can imagine for the Twitter superstars with thousands of followers, this tool might even be more valuable.  I’d encourage you to take head over to The Twit Cleaner and run a report – if anything, the report will provide you with some pretty interesting information.  I bet you’ll be surprised to see some of the names in each of the sections.

The idea of a Personal Learning Network has been around for a while.  Building your own network is certainly something I think is rather important.  However, once you build it, there is still work that needs to be done.  It’s very important to adapt your network to your needs.  As your network grows, so do your needs.  Some of those in your network will not be meeting those needs in ways that you had originally hoped.  You will find Twitter followers posting information that might be less valuable to you.  With Twitter, you can stop following or even block these people.  I believe the more quality people you are associated with the better.  Don’t feel as though you have “enough” followers or people you follow.  There are lot of great educators beginning their online journey with a lot of great information to share.  Add these people.

Blogging is an important of my network.  Recently, I spent some time updating my blog roll.  If you are using an RSS reader to keep track of blogs and blog posts, I recommend you update your list as well.  In addition, I post my blog roll on my blog.  It was very out of date.  When I looked at my reader recently, I noticed a number of blogs without new items.  After taking a closer looks at those subscriptions, I found that several stopped blogging.  As a result, I removed them from my reader.  I also realized that a blog was no longer meeting my needs.  The author began writing about K-12 issues, sharing resources for all levels.  However, recently, I found almost all of the content geared toward the high school level.  Since I’m not working in a high school, I stopped subscribing to the feed.  In addition, I worked on categorizing my feeds based on the topics of their blogs.  For me, I have two kinds, those related to school libraries, and those related to general education topics.  Unfortunately, the blog roll on my blog is listed in alphabetical order, but I’m not sure how to change that.

I often felt overwhelmed when I looked at the number of unread posts, which was often over 300.  I wondered when I’d ever get to that information.  Was I missing timely conversations?  After taking a closer look at my reader, I realized that two blogs were accounting for well over half of the unread material.  Larry Ferlazzo’s blog and Richard Byrne’s blog are two blogs that share a ton of information, with at least one post, if not more, per day.  For me, changing my subscription from an RSS feed to email worked wonders.  Now, I get an email when new posts come along, which I promptly look at.  In addition, the number of unread posts in my reader is much more manageable.  Maybe you want to consider subscribing to some of your favorite blogs by email.  If you’re like me, your email is checked a lot more often than your RSS reader.

Here’s a quick recap of how I helped manage my blog subscriptions – things I recommend you do as well:

• Check blogs that haven’t posted in a while.  Are the blogs still active? If not, drop them from your reader.
• Put your subscribed blogs into categories to help you organize the feeds.
• Consider subscribing to some posts via email.
• Make sure the content of the blog still meets your needs.

You’ve spent time building your network.  Take the time to manage it as well.

Thursdays are usually days I dread. It’s the day I travel to my other school to teach two classes, both 4th/5th grade splits.  The first class contains too many students who are disrespectful, rude, mean, careless, and unmotivated.  I believe these students also negatively impact many of the other students in the class, who are probably pretty good kids.  However, the group as a whole, is one of the worst classes I’ve had in my 15 years in education.  The second class, isn’t bad.  There are a lot more “normal” kids.  Students who actually listen to me, want to find good books, and want to learn.  However, because of the first class,  I don’t really look forward to Thursdays.

I’ve been trying to rework the hour long class period to minimize unstructured time, which they can’t handle at all.  I’ve tried to break up what we do, for how long, and with who to manage the group.  I’ve split the class into two groups, one doing book checkout while the others are keyboarding and then switch after a short period of time.  I’ve tried breaking the class period up into 15 minute periods to keep them moving from activity to activity a little more.  Some of these changes have had a slight difference, but overall, there are just too many kids who do what they want and act inappropriately.  I do get great support from the principal who is willing to pull kids from the class if I ask, but I sometimes feel as though I should be able to handle them for an hour.  I’ve been trying to give the kids incentive for behaving – free time on the computer, but it doesn’t work much.

Today, the 4th graders were on a field trip so I only had the 5th graders.  This was a nice change.  The group was smaller but most of the “star students” were still there.  We started off with keyboarding, which they have to do for a few minutes, moved into book checkout and then onto a Google Earth Scavenger Hunt.  The kids really like Google Earth so I planned an activty that would take advantage of their interest.  The kids like to play on Google Earth, which I think is valuable for them, but I can’t let them just play around every class period.  Today, I created a Google Form with 7 questions on it.  The students had to travel to three different locations (Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Gallaudet University, and Lackland Air Force Base), read through the Wikipedia entry, and answer a couple of basic questions.  This really wasn’t a difficult activity, but it did require the kids to maneuver Google Earth, read nonfiction text, and do a litle research.  Using a Google Form provided me with a quick assessment because their answers would show up in my spreadsheet.  Prior to letting the kids loose, I demonstrated how to enter the locations into the search box, how to find the Wikipedia logo and then how to navigate back to the Google Form and enter the answers.  Unfortunately, only some of the kids paid attention, resulting in a lot of “I don’t get this” and “How do you do this?” and “This is hard” comments from the peanut gallery.  The students were able, for the most part, to get to the correct location, but the biggest challenge was actually reading the text and looking for answers.  I was a little shocked.  I wasn’t asking any deep questions, the questions were all right in the text and I don’t think the text was that difficult to read.  In some cases, the question was a sentence from the article with a word or number removed.  In the roughly 25 minutes the students had, only 10 or so finished.

The second class came in immediately after, consisting again of only the 5th graders.  However, 5th graders from another class also showed up as well.  The teacher told me about this in the morning, so I wasn’t shocked, but these were students I normally don’t teach.  The teacher, who I’ve known for a long time, gave me quite the introduction to these students.  After book checkout and keyboarding, it was time to introduce the lesson again.  I quickly reworked the form to alter the order of the questions, moving easier questions first, but other than that, pretty much did the same thing as the previous group.  This time, the results were much different.  This group paid attention during the introduction, kept a positive attitude and put forth effort.  What a difference!  I was really pleased with the result of this lesson compared to the first group.  The students picked up on what they were supposed to do and completed the assignment with minimal help.

The other part that was thrilling for me was the excitement the students from the other class showed.  Most of them have never seen Google Earth and thought it was really cool.  They had fun looking around and when they completed their assignment, explored their school and neighborhood for familiar places.  I do believe these kids will want to explore Google Earth more, hopefully resulting a better understanding of geography.

On the way out the door, a couple students said to me, “I wish we had you as our librarian.”  Awesome!

“That’s what she said” – wait, who let Michael Scott in here?  Sorry, I should have written – it’s not that difficult!

I’m trying, as any good educator should do, to improve what I do.  As the school librarian/library media specialist, I serve the entire school community, both students and teachers.  It’s my job to make sure the library services I provide are meeting the needs of my patrons.  I’ve been spending a lot of time the last few days working to improve the collection.  I’ve been running reports to find out usage statistics, weeding the fiction and nonfiction sections of the library, and opening boxes of new books that have arrived.  Yes, these are things everyone in my position does, but these are also things most teachers don’t realize occur.

I enjoy learning and as an excuse to learn something new, I decided to ask for input from the teachers at school regarding my library services – using Wallwisher.  I figured this was a pretty simple tool for anyone to use, simply double click on the wall and type a quick note.  I created a wall and sent out an email to my staff explaining what I was looking for, directions on using Wallwisher, and a link.  My hope was that the teachers would take a couple of minutes to provide comments and suggestions to the library services I provide.

Apparently, what I asked was too hard, I mean difficult .  Only 1 (ONE) person responded.  The person also did not attach their name to the comment even though they didn’t say anything negative.  Hmmm.  The comment was centered around our collection and basically asked if we have a good collection and how it compares to other school library collections, if that’s possible.  I posted a response on the wall, but I doubt the person will visit the wall again to read it.  If I knew who it was, we could have a conversation.  However, that can’t happen.

I can’t read the minds of the teachers who use the library.  I can’t improve my services if I don’t know what users need.  I can’t improve my services if people don’t respond to my requests.  Maybe I’ll return the favor and start ignoring their requests.  Of course I won’t, but the communication can’t be a one way street.

I read this post on MaryBeth Hertz’s blog the other day as was completely blown away.  Her post sums up her feelings/experiences about recent contract negotiations in Philadelphia.  I rarely read about contract negotiations on any of the blogs I follow.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps everything is just rosy and there’s nothing to talk about or perhaps people just don’t care what going on in their union.  Some people might be in working in a unionized district or are in a position that doesn’t require union membership.  Regardless, posts about union negotiations are few and far between.

I’ve been a pretty active participant in my local union.  I have been a part of the Negotiations Team for our past 4 contracts, serving at the Head Negotiator for the past 2 agreements.  I’m not sure if I’ll continue in the future, but reading about what is happening in other places regarding negotiations is of interest to me.  I’m not going to comment on the agreement itself because I have no background knowledge of the situation, but do question the process of how this contract was ratified.  I hope you read her post, but a few things about what happened just should not have happened.  I simply do not understand:

• Why teachers were given the tentative agreement on the same day they were required to vote.
• Why the turnout to the ratification meeting was so poorly attended.  About 14,000 didn’t show up.  Do people not care about their working conditions?
• Why the meeting was scheduled the night before grades were due. This is probably the worst night besides a Friday to do this.
• The “vote” to ratify the contract was done by those in attendance saying “Aye” or “Nay”  - WHAT??   Is there not a formal procedure, outlined in the bylaws, for contract ratification?
• Why paper ballots were handed out and then not used?  Or were they?
• Why the membership did not make this a bigger issue (the ratification process, not the contract itself).

If the leadership of my local union tried any of this, there would be a huge uproar.  We aren’t nearly as big as the Philly Public Schools, but believe me, the it would not fly.  There is no way this would occur.  If anything positive can come out of this situation, it’s the fact that the Philly Teacher’s Union needs to come up with a clear, easily understood ratification procedure so teachers don’t feel like they didn’t have a voice or are grabbing their umbrellas as they rush to vote on a future contract.

The AASL has officially changed the title of my job.  I’m no longer the Library Media Specialist – I’m the School Librarian.  When I first heard this, I wasn’t pleased.  I’ve never been a fan of the term librarian when describing my job description.  To me, the term librarian can be stereotyped pretty easily and I don’t feel I fit the librarian stereotype.  I felt the term Library Media Specialist was a better job description of what we now do.  We are not just librarians – checking books out the students.  I believe, to many outside of education, people view our jobs as a simple one – check out books to the kids and shelve books when they are returned to the library.  They don’t realize what else we do during the day, maintaining and building the collection to match state and district standards.  They don’t realize how much time we spend reading book reviews and scouring the web to find quality materials for our students.  They don’t realize how much knowledge we have related to technology.  We do a lot more than people think and that’s why I wasn’t thrilled when I heard this announcement.

Cathy Nelson wrote a great post shortly after the announcement wondering if the title change is a step backwards.  I agree – I don’t see the term librarian reflecting 21st Century Skills.  I went back and reread the original post again and was drawn by one of the comments from Floyd Pentlin, the author of the post, who commented to Cathy,

“Whether we are called School Librarians, Teacher Librarians, Library Teachers, or Teaching Librarians is a state option. The American Association of School Librarians should choose a term for its professionals that is clear to other educators, administrators, and the public and also indicative of our role as teachers.”
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Cathy, I can’t imagine that what title you choose to use will “hurt our cause.” There was a lot of discussion about the fact that perhaps the title wasn’t very important in the long run but what we actually did in our job that will make the difference.

The last sentence about what we actually do making a difference is so true.  We help decide the success of our libraries and we help make a difference.  Does the title matter that much?  If the goal of the AASL was to have a consistent term for publications, then fine.  The idea that each state organization can choose what term to use tells me there still isn’t a clear consensus on the issue.  Requirements for certification in our area probably differs from state to state, so I guess I’m okay with the title varying as well.

In my school district, our school libraries are called Instructional Media Centers – or IMC for short.  A kindergarten student once called me the IMC Guy because he hadn’t learned my name yet, which I decided to use for my online identity.  Some people at my school still call me the librarian, some Library Media Specialist, and some IMC Director.  With no general consensus, should we (those in my district), start referring my classroom as a library again? Should I be the “School Library Guy?”

I’ve been thinking about Professional Development lately, specifically, PD in the use of technology.  Perhaps it’s the buzz around EduCon, ICE, and WEMTA.  Perhaps it’s because I spent last weekend working with other Discovery Educators on Leadership Councils from a few states planning out some events for 2010.  Regardless, these thoughts have brought me back to my district, where technology related PD isn’t a priority.  For my District, the priorities are on reading and math.  It’s easy to understand.  ESEA/NCLB.

I realize the pressure that is on to make AYP, to meet the demands of Federal and State requirements, but at the same time, there needs to be a balance .  Our District has spent a lot of money on hardware and software, as have many other schools, but there has clearly been inadequate training.  We do not have an Instructional Technology Department.  We do not have anyone to provide initial or ongoing training related to technology purchases that have already been made.  Sure, initial, one time training took place when new software purchases were made, but if people were hired after that training (which took place many years ago), they weren’t trained.  We have been adding Mimio IWB’s to our schools.  The PD that’s being offered is a class that interested teachers have to pay for and attend outside of the work day.  This isn’t right.

I hope something changes.  We can’t continue this trend of not preparing our teachers, which undoubtedly will impact our students.

Today, I was introducing a project one of our classes will be working on involving National Parks across the United States.  We are in the early planning stages of the project, but today, students (grades 4/5) were given a map containing all of the National Parks.  They were to look around and find three that they would be interested in researching.  After making a decision on their 3 choices, the students were to email me the list.  With this information in hand, the classroom teacher and I would be able to assign a park to a student or to a group of students.  I introduced email to these students last week so this was only their second time using their school email account.  For most of these students, this was their second EVER use of email.  They picked it up fairly quickly, which I’m happy about.

With 5 minutes left in class, my brain started working and I realized how much time it was going to take me to organize all of the information the students were emailing me.  Then, the light bulb went off – Why didn’t I create a form in Google Docs and have the students enter their information there?  I very quickly created the form, showed it to the students, and told them to fill it out in the remaining few minutes of class.  Many moaned and said they already sent the information and didn’t want to do it again.  When I told them that 2 minutes of their time would save me at least 45 minutes of my time later, they were okay with it.  I sent the link to the form out to all of the students using our lab monitoring software and we were good to go.  Almost all of the students successfully completed the form and the data was collected in a matter of time.

I have to thank the flexibility of the students for shifting gears in a matter of minutes and completing the simply task of filling out a brief form.  We need to keep in mind the abilities of our students and realize that they can learn quickly and on the fly.  We have to be just as flexible.

This year, I’m attempting to participate in the 365 picture challenge.  If you don’t know what the challenge is about, it’s pretty simple – take one picture a day for the entire year and post the picture online.  Those involved in the challenge are posting their pictures in a variety of places.  Many, are posting on Flickr, using a variety of tags (edtech365/2010, 365/10, 2010/365.  Some have their own blogs and others are using other sites, like Posterous or Tumblr.  I was going to start another blog for my pics, but I thought I’d try something new.  My choice is Posterous.  I really know little about it, but from what I understand, I can simply email my pictures to the site and they are automatically posted to my site.  So far, it’s working just fine.  My thought for using this method was to make the project as simple as possible.  This way, I don’t have to download any pictures, upload the pics to a blog and write a post.  I believe I can follow through with the challenge by making this as easy as possible.  By no means do I consider myself a photographer, but I do hope I end up with some pretty interesting pictures when I’m done.

Here are my pictures on my Posterous site.

Well, wish me luck, we’ll see how it goes.