Questioning tools

Marco Bellucci via Compfight cc

  Last week I had the opportunity to attend a large professional learning event organised by the English Schools Foundation (ESF) for the teachers in the seven secondary schools run by ESF. Over 800 people attended with most of the many workshops being facilitated by teachers within the system. The  keynote speaker was Ian Gilbert (@ThatIanGilbert ) who was a very engaging speaker with many relevant and poignant comments about what teachers should be doing. Some of my tweets from the keynote which captured the essence of his talk ....

Teach children to read & write so they can reread & rewrite the world - tchrs need to fire them up to do this!

Can you help students be human? Who can be angry and act on this anger, unreasonable people who do not just comply

Teaching students to think ethically? Not just to be the smartest or cleverest. Be brave

Are you the best you can be? Are you as good as each other? Are your students going to save the world?

Professional learning is not what is done for you but what you do for yourself

"Why do I need a teacher if I have google" Teachers need to be adding value by teaching critical thinking skills

Fear stops people being brave - taking risks - you end up just doing OK - not striving for best you can be.

I also attended a workshop on questioning tools which was presented by Monica SAEZ AROS where she shared with us the 8 way thinking questioning tools. I have only just now connected these tools to Ian Gilbert and his Independent Thinking Ltd Group. (See links above).

The 8 way thinking allow students to question beyond the obvious and start questioning more deeply - a topic is chosen, then questions are formed using each of the the 8 ways of the thinking which are ... 

Numbers

Words

People

Feelings

Nature

Actions

Sounds

Sights

The 8 way thinking planning wheel is available on the linked page above to download along with other information.  

The group of teachers in the workshop were led through some activities which progressed from shallow obvious questions to quite deep questions which led to a discussion on how these questions could be developed in class activities. It was only an hour of scaffolding questioning, but very effective. It goes way beyond the who, what, why, when questioning tools. At the end we were asked to evaluate the questions based on the following criteria :

Open – are there several different or competing answers?

Practical – can you research it meaningfully given the available answer?

Connected – is it relevant to you?

Charged – does it have an ethical dimension?

Provocative – does it make you question your basic assumptions?

Deep -  can it be answered only with careful and lengthy research usually by being broken into subsidiary questions?

I came away thinking about these questioning techniques and how the students in our Diploma program need to be formulating their own questions for their Extended Essay, and the independent research projects and how this scaffolding could be applied to their needs. It would also be of benefit to the PYP and MYP curriculums as they base their work on inquiry and questioning. 

Do have a look at the links, and have a look at the examples and even apply them. I think you will find them quite powerful and effective.

Sharing the toolbox

Image from Morgue files.

Part of the role in my current job is to coach the teachers in what is possible with regard to tools (digital and otherwise), thinking, information literacy, questioning. I don’t have the opportunity to meet with all the teachers individually or even as a group regularly, so I use a number of avenues to reach out to them.

I started a highlights blog called Teacher Discovery last year, where I placed new resources we had received, new tools that might be useful. I made it short and snappy with a lot of visuals. It took quite a bit of planning, collection and putting it together, so it was irregular. The reaction was very positive with people responding within minutes the blog going online. I chose the blogging platform because the previous posts are always accessible and teachers are busy people who may come back to something many months after it was originally posted.

Something else I do probably once a week is to send one snippet or idea of a digital tool or idea that I have been made aware of that I could see the staff of our secondary school using. Sometimes this is to the whole staff, other times it may be to one faculty or even one person.

Due to these connections I have built up, staff come to me to ask about an application they need for a specific task. They describe what they want to do, and if I am lucky, I will be able to give them idea of where to look, or, I did a quick google search, or blog search to find something that might fit. One example was a classroom assistant who is doing her teaching qualifications needed something for a newsletter - I suggested Smore, she used it and ended up with very high marks for her assignment.

One science teacher just last week said, “these links you send us are the best professional development I have had for a long time”. This drip feeding piques interest and allows the cogs to start turning in their own time. In most cases the link I send will be from a blog that also describes how the tool is being used, giving the teachers the opportunity to see the connection between pedagogy the tool, which it makes it far easier to adopt immediately.

I also use Diigo as my collection tool for links, ensuring I list, tag and share with groups as I go along for easy retrieval.

Where do I get these gems to pass on? Twitter is a deep and constant source with new ideas being thrown my way every minute. Reading specific blogs and mining them for ideas  - Free Technology for Teachers and Great Techxpectations, are two of my go to sources,  along with other blogs I read where people just share what they are using which happen to be very cool -  The Styling Librarian, Never Ending Search, The Daring Librarian, The adventures of Library Girl.
These are a just a few of my regular reads for new tools and ways to use them. I am also always keeping a look out in newspapers, professional publications and recreational magazines. Discovery through serendipidity is often the best.

I will be leaving this school in a few weeks, and many of the staff want me to continue sending them these links and tips. I am not sure I will do this in individual emails, but I may set up a page for feeds, maybe even a blog, or just a professional facebook page to share the ideas and tools to a wider audience, or just form a group on Diigo. I do need to keep in mind that I have a whole new staff to nurture, connect with and make feel special, so it needs to be the highest impact for the lowest time investment. I may have to dig around in the tool box to figure out the best tool for this job.

eBook Platform offically launched

Photo Credit: lynn.gardner via Compfight cc

Some time ago our library bought some Kobo's as a way of introducing eBooks to our students. This trial went well and the students enjoy the Kobo's very much as an alternate to reading from the paper variety, they also like how instant the request for a new title can be fulfilled. However, many students have their own devices which they want to read eBooks on, so we looked into different eBook lending platforms.

We decided we would go with Wheelers for a number of reasons. Wheelers at that time was not quite ready for an international market, so we had to wait a while until the publishing rights were cleared for Hong Kong for many of the titles, which took about another 12 months. At the beginning of this year we set up the Wheelers ePlatform for our school and had a few titles ready to borrow.

We trialled the ePlatform with the secondary library team, received some feedback on the ease of use and other issues they had. This small pilot was successful, however the biggest complaint was the lack of choice as we had so few eBooks available. 

We applied for funding from the Parents Association for some seed money so we could purchase about 100 eBook titles to place the Wheelers platform. Once we received the money, we proceeded to spend it to accommodate eReading across the school. I love ordering from eBook vendors! You click and download and you have the book! So satisfying!

Once the books were placed on our platform, we received the Marc records from Wheelers via email, which were imported to our library system (Oliver by Softlink)) without any problems.  From the school community point of view the books are now ready to borrow from the platform, however there is still some back end work that needed to be done to bring it in line with the normal cataloging protocols.

The first thing that needed to be done was create a GMD and Bibtype called eBook, which triggered its own little icon in Oliver. We then have to import the front cover image so students can see that when searching. Under classification we are using the same classification as if it were a physical book on the shelf with (eBook) in brackets after the call number. ie. SF Crime ARL (eBook). We placed all our fiction into genres last year so wanted to make sure the eBooks were classified in the same way to help keep it all in line.

Subject headings are the next step as Wheelers do not import these. We are using SCIS subject headings. We may be able to import the records directly from SCIS as they incorporate more eBooks into the database. One of the imports that comes with the Wheelers marc records is the abstract of the book, and the URL which links the catalogue record with the page on Wheelers. So if a student is on the Oliver catalogue with the record, they just need to click on the hyperlink which will take them directly to the Wheelers ePlatform. If they are registered and logged in, it takes them directly to the page where they can download the book. See the diagram below on how it all looks in the catalogue as a student would see it once all the additional information has been added.

 

Once the cataloguing in Oliver is complete, the eBook file is visited via the admin on Wheelers and settings created to prohibit older books being borrowed by younger students, along with how long the book can be borrowed for and if it can be reserved. Once this is complete the cataloguing process is done.

For the community to borrow from Wheelers they do need to register using their school email, full name, year group and date of birth (DOB is to assist in the blocking of titles to them, they do not know this when they register, but it can be overridden / corrected by the administrator if it is entered incorrectly).We opted for the option where administrator approves the registrations. The administration dash board is very easy to navigate and the customer support is excellent. 

If they will be borrowing via a desktop or laptop they will need to down load Adobe Digital Editions and register for an ADE ID. For those using iPads or Android devices, they need to have Bluefire Reader App installed. Wheelers is not compatible with Kindles at this time due to the Mob format used by Amazon. (There are work arounds, but I won't go into these because it infringes copyright agreements).

As part of our launch I created some screencasts on how it all works then placed these on our daily bulletins, the weekly newsletter home to parents and I will be going into English classes to teach the students how to use the ePlatform. I also sent an email to teachers telling them about it with links to the screencasts. The screencasts are below for your education. Please do not try to register for our platform if you are not a community member, Wheelers are very happy to set up trial accounts for you. There is a FAQs page here that you can read for further information.

So, our ePlatform has been officially launched and we now wait for our customers to sign up and get reading on their own devices.  For those who don't own their own devices, we can use the Wheelers platform with the library Kobos. I am certainly loving the convenience of being able to download and read a book at any time of the day.

PS - This was my 200th blog entry - wow!

Book Week digital fun!

The library team dressed as animals from the Jungle book.

We have just completed book week and it was again a highly successful week in so many ways. After 5 years of working on it, the book character parade had about 80% participation from the whole school community, with many parents coming to watch and celebrate reading. There were some fabulous costumes with an increase in team dress ups - it was a lot of fun.

Book week is a week that requires many hours of planning, collaboration and creating. We have both primary and secondary students to cater for, so we try to have a few different events planned for them to cater for their different needs. We used a number of digital tools this year to reach our audience and encourage participation.

In the lead up to book week we created an Animoto (and embedded below) with our school staff hiding behind a book which was shown at assemblies and home rooms. These pictures were also used in a competition where students had to guess the staff hiding, we had an online answer form and a paper one - the paper was more popular as they could look at the boards and discuss the pictures.

The music is Julian Smith "I'm reading a book". You can watch the video and buy the music from the link. Brilliant! This man has so many excellent songs about fun things.

We developed a website through Google sites,  which gave access to the list of events, and was a portal to some of the competitions such as the Moo Card treasure hunt. We also had a link to the site through our school moodle page which the students need to access every day.

We started a Dragon Book award last year, where students vote for their favourite read. This year we created a Google form to collect nominations for their best reads for the past 12 months. After the closing date,  a poll was created on Moodle for both primary & secondary for the voting to take place.

In the secondary daily bulletin we ran a home room literature quiz where three questions a day were posted. The class who all correct answers first for that day were the winners of that day - working toward an overall winner for the week.

One of the students devised a QR code treasure hunt and was on hand to teach students how to download and use a QR code reader. (Incidentally, he was the winner of the QR code competition in the past 2 years). And another student devised an OPAC treasure hunt.

Not everything was digital. We had read aloud days, mother tongue story time, book swaps and the competitions on boards for students to participate during their lunchtimes. overall it was a good mix of digital and non digital with much excitement prevailing!

The excitement before the parade

The Star trek Team - (part of our leadership team)

The best costume of the day - Cruella (she had about 50 Dalmations) and myself as a vulture from the Jungle book.

Guessing the staff behind the books

The business of the primary book swap.

Sharing the light ....

Image from Morgue File

At the beginning of April I learned it was School Library Month through a posting on twitter by Library Girl and a link to her blog about what she had done to link the days of the month of April to a service that school Libraries offer.

Library Girl had used an image of a calendar, then used Thinglink to create an interactive image to link to resources that describe the types of services that School Libraries offer. It was a great idea and a great resource. I love it.  Taking that idea a little further, I took the idea of highlighting a service for every day to personalise the month of April by posting a different service we offer on our Library Facebook status once a day. You can see what we have posted so far on our Facebook page.

We have missed a few days, but we have been able to be consistent with our postings. It has been an interesting exercise to select a service and to be able to describe it in a few words then to back it up with pictures and links where appropriate. I am sure we will be able to find 30 services we offer with no problem.

Many of our Facebook community are parents and teachers with some secondary students. The feedback from doing this has been very positive with many mentioning how they are learning more about what the school library does behind the scenes and what they can utilise. Fulfilling all objectives!

One of our feed recipients is Tanja Galetti who posted to twitter today that she will be highlighting a something she offers in her library everyday for the next 14 days on her school library blog after being inspired by Discovery College Libraries highlights. 

It is fantastic how social media has allowed us to learn from each other and to be inspired by each other to reach out to our own communities in different ways. How can you not have time for twitter or reading blogs when there is so much being shared? Are you doing simple things to improve your school library over April? Do consider sharing through a blog or twitter. Share the light ....

Working with special collections

                       Quote by Donald Rumsfeld 2003 www.defenselink.mil/faq/comment.html,                                                   

Typography by Ami Clarke www.amiclarke.com/unknownknowns.htm

In the IB Diploma curriculum there is a subject called Theory of Knowledge or TOK for short which leads students through examining how learning occurs, ethics, morality, philosophy and other big thinking issues. It is an unusual subject and it is nothing the students have ever been exposed to before. TOK is to be integrated across subjects of the diploma programme.  As you can imagine, there are a number of resources which need to be purchased to support this subject. This post is about how we manage this collection in our library and database. If you have a special collection that is integrated but needs to be able to be retrieved seperately, maybe this will help you.

Cataloguing the TOK resources was normal up to a point, after this point we messed a bit with subject headings and made lists to make sure these resources could be found by the students when they searched. TOK is an extremely broad topic and covers many many facets of thinking and emotions. The call numbers range from 000's through to 900's. The resources are all integrated in the normal non fiction collection.

The first thing we did was create a subject heading called TOK when cataloguing in addition to the normal subject headings the book would be given. For all the subject heading purists, I do apologise now for what I did, but TOK is how the students will first approach the OPAC to search, and is exactly what they will type. Creating this subject heading also allows us to bring up the whole collection in one search, so we can see the variety and what is missing.

We then divided the TOK resources into subheadings. Such as TOK - History. With these headings we made lists and added the appropriate resource to the list. This tagging or listing allows us to do a quick search under one of the headings and see how many resources we have for a particular topic area.

Once the book had been processed,  it was then given a TOK sticker on the spine along with the normal call number sticker. This way, all books that specifically supported TOK could be found on the shelf while students were browsing, or even just walking past.

The TOK labels. This is from the 100's which has a high TOK content, hence the high incidence of TOK labels.

Arranging the data for these resources in the Library database has allowed for staff and students to  access and isolate these TOK resources, even though they are fully integrated through the collection and spread from one end of the library to another.

We have done similar tagging and listing for other collections as well. Many of the picture books have been allocated a Learner Profile subject heading (again sorry to the purists), and we have created lists of picture books to support the PYP Units of inquiry, for example "Yr 3 - Where we are in space and Time" has a list, so at the beginning of the unit these picture books are pulled from the shelves and given to the year 3 classes so they can be immersed in related stories while learning about the world around them, and hopefully making connections. We also have fiction lists for all the Transdisciplinary Themes across the year levels, and picture books which feature specific sounds in them.

The lists are used in the secondary programme  as well, especially where fiction can support a unit. In Year 7 English, family is a concept and we have listed a number of books we have which feature family, so these titles are used for wider reading. Similarly the theme of slavery is explored in year 8 humanities, so we have a list of fiction which will support this unit which the students can access.

Using the various tools of your library management system allows you to customise searches and refine how you can support the curriculum.

Further info about TOK

Below is the of subheadings we used for the TOK collection, numbers in brackets indicate how many resources we have of each. This link leads to the catalogued resources we have purchased for TOK.

TOK - Art, Aesthetics  (2)
TOK - Critical thinking  (2)
TOK - Emotion  (3)
TOK - Ethics  (12)

TOK - Fiction (6)
TOK - History  (11)
TOK - Knowledge  (9)
TOK - Language  (8)
TOK - Literature  (3)
TOK - Logic  (2)
TOK - Mathematics  (5)
TOK - Perception  (10)
TOK - Philosophy  (33)
TOK - Psychology  (4)
TOK - Reason  (3)
TOK - Religion  (8)
TOK - Sciences  (25)
TOK - Social sciences  (9)
TOK - Truth and belief  (4)

Inspired by Apple

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

I recently had the opportunity to visit New York for a few days, and as part of this I visited the Apple store on 5th Avenue at 5:30am, which happened to be a great time as there were hardly any customers and we had the store almost to ourselves being able to take our time and really have a look around.

I have been an Apple user since 1987, and although I have also had to use other machines in my work life, I do prefer Apple products for their user friendliness, and the service. This visit to the store was just to have a look around, but I have come away thinking about how they have set the store up and how a school library could take some of their ideas....

Firstly, having different spaces for different uses - they had a section for each product, we do this already with our fiction, non fiction, etc sections in a library. The Apple signage was also very clear and clean.

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Individual instruction / advertising for each product with an ipad next to each product. The home button was disabled, so the customer was only able to see what the store wanted them to see on these ipads. They were embedded into a table mounted perspex holder which prevented theft. Having ipads in various parts of the library set to a specific screen for instructional purposes would be so useful (and expensive).

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

They also had different tables for different style of training - Personal training for people who needed one on one learning and group training for those who had a similar learning need to each other - it could be a group of strangers, or a group of people working on the same project who needed technical help.  Is this something that could be implemented in a school - if you want help, sit at one of these tables. This would save having to 'ask' for help, but give the message that you would like assistance. I wonder if this could work in a school library?

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

I also liked their kids area - a low table with comfy ball chairs with ipads on the table waiting to be used and played with.  These were not mounted permanently onto the table, but were mounted on a small perspex mount that invited these devices to be picked up and used. I would love to have an area in a library that would allow for such impulsive interaction.

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

They also sold some interesting gadgets for fitness and health and  a GPS for your child and dog. What we did notice there was limited software on the shelves demonstrating the change in buying habits where most software is bought online now - could this be a reflection of the changes in libraries to come where most of the space is used up by people, and the books are an online feature of a library? And where we franchise out some of the space for special deals on ereaders etc?

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Apple stores feature a lot of glass, and glass only looks good when it is clean. The Apple store in NY has 3 people a day dedicated to cleaning the glass on the staircase and elevator. Moral of the story - avoid glass if you do not want to be cleaning it all the time.

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

Photograph by Dianne McKenzie CC Share-alike

The other great thing about the Apple store is that they have many, many staff to help people, the service is streamlined and they all know the products they are selling. Over 15,000 people a day visit this store so they also need to be patient and cheerful, all the time. They are also happy to have a chat if they are not too busy. A lesson for libraries - know your product, and always be cheerful and patient even if you do not have the massive staff base, and take time to connect with your customers. You want your customers to come back.