I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a tech tool this much since my first Palm handheld. I like the immediacy of posting a photo to Flickr right away, responding to someone on Twitter, or checking for movie listings or store hours on the go. The cell phone functions seem little different from our old Verizon phones, though I’ve been cautioned by more seasoned users that I should’t expect the same coverage when I travel to less-populated areas.

Smartphones like the iPhone are becoming among the best-selling tech tools out there.  If you–like me–have been steadfastly ignoring all that Apple stuff, here’s a little primer. An iPhone is a phone with web access, an integrated camera and voice recorder, with an onscreen keyboard that lets you send an email or surf the web. An iTouch is the same tool, minus the camera and cell phone part– and it needs to connect to the web via a wifi network, instead of the cell phone network. For the foreseeable future, the iPhone is going to remain a tool that teachers buy for themselves but that just happen to be useful for school.  The reason is the contract iPhone users must have with AT&T for access to the cellphone & data network.  Most districts aren’t going to be able to pay for cellphone contracts for their staff. (I wish.) The iTouch is a different kettle of fish, because it can connect to the wifi network many schools already have in place, and because the iTouches don’t require a contract and monthly fee. At about $200, the iTouch is a good substitute–though not perfect–for the less portable, more expensive laptops.  Affordable magic.

Many libraries and classrooms are already using iPods to share podcasts, lectures, photos…a whole host of media.  iTouches can do even more–access the web, make audio recordings, and perform an amazing array of tasks using apps from the App store, which is the way software developers distribute and sell applications (what someone of my generation thinks of as a “computer program”) for the iPhone and iTouch. There are apps that make grocery lists, let you post to your blog, find an NPR broadcast, play a word game, find a recipe, or trackweight loss. Go ahead, diehard techies, laugh…but I had NO CLUE that such a variety of educational applications were available. Storytelling apps. Math game apps.  Music-making and art apps. Apps to help your learn Spanish, post to the class blog or to Twitter, or figure out what constellation you’re looking at.  Many apps are priced at less than $3; many are free.  The two apps from the International Children’s Digital Library are lovely. And free.

Quick example: my first graders have been learning about the various reasons authors write–to persuade, to inform, to entertain.  We were looking at books by NY author Seymour Simon, a great non-fiction writer.  We read his Danger! Earthquakes! (a far more timely topic than I had anticipated!) which explains the Richter scale and how scientists interpret seismograph data to learn about quakes.  The morning of the lesson, I downloaded an app called iSeismo to my phone, which shows a seismograph-type display (little lines going up and down as vibrations shake the phone.)  The vibrations were provided by 12 eager 6 year-olds, who could immediately see what a seismograph recording looked like, and how the intensity of the vibration changed the way the lines jumped up and down.

I spent some time this weekend reading up on the apps other educators are using, and finding what folks are posting on Twitter using the #app4kids hashtag.  More on this later…

That depends.  Does she live in a small village in France, near the walled city of Great Zimbabwe, or in  the mountains of the Czech Republic?  Is it her fairy godmother or Godfather Snake she asks for help?  Cinderella might see the pumpkin patch from which her transformed carriage will come, or she might see a volcano with smoke rising from the top.  The wicked stepmother might keep Cinderella from visiting that castle down the hill, but then again, she might send her stepdaughter out to find violets in the snow.

Young children rarely have any perception that their own culture is not universal.  They assume that everyone dresses the same, eats the same foods, and celebrates the same holidays. Our first graders are working on a project–Cinderella’s Window–that will introduce the kids to the fascinating differences between countries, while understanding that some things–like storytelling–unite people the world over. There are lots of methods–history, world languages, maps, cooking–teachers can use to introduce children to the rich variety of ways people live, but folktales make a nice lens through which kids can begin to examine culture since so many traditional tales have been published in picture book form.

We decided to use Cinderella stories as the focal point for a project that will meet learning standards in Social Studies, English Language Arts, Information Literacy, and Technology. Our stories were drawn from around the world, with versions from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, India, and France. We gathered nonfiction books on each country, and the page I made for our library wiki links to pictures, text, and audiovisual links for our students’ research.  You can see our book list, graphic organizer, and unit outline here.

The children began by hearing Cinderella versions from other cultures, and comparing them to the version most familiar to them (think stepmother, fairy godmother, and glass slipper.)  They are now using pictures, books, and websites to find out more about the countries where the stories were set. In another week, they’ll begin writing a paragraph that tells several facts about the country they’ve researched, and they’ll draw pictures of what a Cinderella character would see through the window.  The project will end with a field trip to the arts center at a local college, to see a play…Cinderella!

I spent some time this afternoon looking at kids’ resources on climate change.  Now, if I have a pet peeve about the publishing world, it’s the continuing lack of quality nonfiction for early elementary kids.  There have been some marvelous strides forward, don’t get me wrong–things have improved greatly in the last ten years.  But I still find myself at purchase order time, swearing under my breath as I scan library periodicals, publisher catalogs and vendor websites trying to find excellent nonfiction for my young students.  Science books in particular are a challenge to find–some authors dumb down material to the point that the material is erroneous or incomprehensible.

So it’s a pleasure to discover some great print resources on climate change for the K-6 crowd.

• Spend some time reading the I.N.K. Blog: Interesting Nonfiction for Kids and you’ll find lots of children’s nonfiction to celebrate.  Marfe Ferguson Delano blogged on INK about her new book, Earth in the Hot Seat: Bulletins from a Warming World (National Geographic, 2009), describing the decisions she made about how she presented the facts of global warming.  The book scored a starred review from SLJ.
• For a younger crowd, there’s the picture book format Polar Bear, Why is Your World Melting? by Robert Wells (Albert Whitman & Company, 2008).  One third grade teacher I know used this book last winter as part of a persuasive letter writing project–kids wrote letters outlining their ideas for cutting back on carbon emissions.
• Another nonfiction picture book: Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? The Dangers of Global Warming, by Anne Rockwell (Harper Collins, 2006.)

Heaven knows there’s a ocean of information on the web about climate change–umm, a rising ocean, thanks to the melting of polar ice.  Here are a few rafts to cling to:

• From the EPA, the Climate Change Kids’ Site
• Recommended books & websites for science teachers from the  NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
• Time for Kids Special Report on Global Warming

Stay cool, y’all.

UPDATE:  I should have mentioned two other website / blogs:  Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears:  An Online Magazine for K-5 Teachers and Meltfactor.org, the blog of Ohio State professor Jason Box.  I also just picked up the children’s picture book, Once I Was a Cardboard Box…But Now I’m a Book about Polar Bears! by Anton Poitier.  It just happened to be in the Scholastic Book Fair we’re hosting.  It’s a cute concept–the book is printed on paper made from…well, a recycled cardboard box.  The text has two “stories” side-by-side: the story of the life and threatened extinction of the polar bear, and the recycling of the paper on which the book is printed.

The official Blog Action Day count was 13,398 blogs from 155 countries.

<!– –>

No, I don’t want little kids to be exposed to pornography or graphic violence.  But isn’t there some kind of happy medium? Take, for example, the website of Dr. Temple Grandin, noted author & speaker on living with autism.  She herself is autistic.  For no good reason I can see, her website is blocked by at least one widely used internet filter.

A quote from the blog post I linked to above: “I would guess that engaging in mythical battles allows us to construct all sorts of impressive armor.”  Wholesale internet filtering gives people a toasty, safe, St. George kind of feeling, as if they’ve slain the dragons of privacy invasion, online predation, and dangerously different ideas.  But if all sites with any kind of chat or social interaction are banned, how do students learn to protect personal information? Kids who are never taught to think about their online profiles are the ones who will lose out on job opportunities when potential employers view ill-considered posts or compromising photos.  If students are banned from e-mail at school, who teaches them what to do with the unlovely spam they get? And if teachers, counselors, and administrators can’t access Facebook or other social sites from school computers, how will they even know if cyberbullying, suicidal intentions, or threats of violence or  have been posted by their students?

As Angela points out, the sense of security is a false one, anyway.  If you’re never taught to recognize danger, you won’t know it when you see it.

Here’s a great quote from a fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold.  Her novels have nothing to do with internet filtering, but the words are right on target nonetheless:  innocence based in ignorance is unfit to protect itself.

Image courtesy of MorgueFile

Cushing Academy, a private school in Massachusetts, is making the move to a purely digital library–no more books.  Kids will access information only electronically.  The Library will have 18 e-readers for student use.

In general, the move toward digital information sources is a good one. Digital versions of books are often less than half the price of the library bound edition. E-books will never wear out, never get lost, never be chewed by a dog or left on the porch in the rain (though the e-readers will be, I imagine.) Students enjoy accessing information digitally–those that have them use cell phones and iPods and laptops and Kindles quite happily. Looking at the comparative weights of my daughters’ textbooks and a Kindle, I’m all for switching to digital.

Much of the reaction to the whole “coffee bar” idea comes from a sort of collective gasp over the cost. In a recession, with library budgets slashed, teacher positions cut, and families in financial crisis, it seems jaw-droppingly, over-the-top insane to spend that much money on a school coffee bar. (What would other schools do with $72,000?) However, this is not a school or a community in any financial difficulty. It’s their cash.

In the specific case, I cannot imagine why the administration (or the library staff) thought that 18 e-readers would be sufficient for a school with an enrollment of over 400. The $72,000 for the coffee bar would have purchased over 200 more e-readers. The original article did not address how kids without e-readers would access books. Perhaps, being the children of wealthy families, they all already have e-readers. Perhaps the library intends to license digital copies of the novels, poems, non-fiction, and reference books they’ve discarded. Perhaps.

A quick look at Amazon’s Kindle Store tells me they offer over 300,000 titles. The SONY e-Book Store looks to have a pretty comprehensive collection. But even the most cursory glance through what’s available show that there are holes. For example, Cushing will now have a school library with no Harry Potter books. I looked for the books our AP History kids read this summer, and discovered that you can’t get Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, in a digital edition.There are many, many more titles that exist only on paper. And–Cory Doctorow aside–I don’t see authors flocking to release their new works into the public domain or under Creative Commons license. And while many authors have licensed Kindle or e-book versions of their works, the books aren’t licensed for access on regular computers. If I’m a student with no e-reader, all the books in the Cushing library are closed books to me.

I also can’t quite imagine using an e-reader to read anything that relies heavily on graphics to support the text. Reading a graphic novel on a 6″ screen sounds like an exercise in frustration. And scrolling back and forth between an illustration of a physics experiment and the accompanying text doesn’t sound like a picnic, either.

It seems to me that there are still so many problems with access. The move to a purely digital library seems very, very, premature.

Image courtesy of MorgueFile

Every job requires the right tools.  For getting things done on the web, sometimes you need the internet equivalent of a Swiss army knife– that’s when you go to Google apps or a fancy interactive tool (or call the help desk.)  And sometimes you just need a toothpick or a pair of tweezers–a little tool designed for just one thing.

I just saw a request pop up on Twitter that I see all the time, there and on LM_Net and other group sites.  Someone will ask about a particular website, “Is this site down? Or is it just me? Or my browser?”  I’ve actually e-mailed sites to report a problem, only to discover I needed to clear my cache or update my browser.  That’s when “Down for everyone or just me” comes in handy.  Go to the site, enter the URL you’re wondering about, et voilà! “Down for everyone” will check on your URL, and report back on the status of the site in question. Now you know if it’s you, or if the site is really down.

Another handy little site is TinyURL.com.  Everybody needs a good URL shortener–my e-mail program is always garbling web addresses, and it’ll save characters in Twitter messages.  The best feature of TinyURL is their little bookmarklet.  When you’re on a webpage with a long URL you need to shorten, just click on the bookmarklet in your browser bar, and you’ll automatically jump to a page with the now-shortened URL.

One last useful little site is FileInfo.com.  I come across file types I’m not familiar with all the time, largely because I hover wistfully at the edge of the true ocean of geekiness, but don’t jump in.  .flv? .odt? .csv? .notebook? If you have no clue whether your brother just sent you a movie or a spreadsheet, FileInfo will be able to tell you what kind of file it is.

image courtesy of MorgueFile

I spent the morning unpacking several boxes of new books.  It’s one of my favorite tasks of the year–all those shiny new covers, each suggesting 1000 ways they could be shared with kids.  A gorgeous picture books about Alexander Calder will be perfect for the art teacher introducing sculpture.  There’s a contingent of (yes, mostly male) kids who are just going to flip over the new series of books on snakes and the biographies of NASCAR drivers.  And a couple of copies of The Butterfly House and Monarch and Milkweed should make the third grade unit on butterflies even richer.

What really caught my eye today, though, were the wordless and nearly wordless picture books.  Wordless stories offer a perfect opportunity for kids to invent stories, to try out the cadence and delivery of the storytelling voice, and to use new vocabulary.  Using pictures as clues to unfamiliar words is an important strategy for new readers.  Young kids love these; our school library has some well worn copies of the immortal Mercer Meyer’s A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog; older kids love poring over the details of David Wiesner’s Free Fall and Tuesday. And children’s publishers have given us some magnificent new titles recently.

The top of my list is the charming, softly colored The Wave, by Suzy Lee, in which a little girl interacts with a playful wave during a visit to the beach. The story is a perfect choice for an ocean storytime or a unit on water. With a  funny, comic-book feel to the pictures, Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug will pull in the early primary school set.  Author Mark Newgarden draws (yeah, pun intended) us in to the silly and unexpectedly sophisticated story of a dog who follows a bug.  Falling in the “nearly wordless” category are the Wow! books by Robert Neubecker.  The stories feature exuberant, enthusiastic Izzy, exploring schools, cities, and America.  Wow! City and Wow! School! can be “read” by the pre-literate child because the pictures give plenty of clues to the text–a page that says, “Wow! Books!” shows a busy group of kids, all with books in hand.  (Young kids reading Wow! America! need some grown-up help, since “Capitol”, for example, isn’t in every child’s vocabulary.)

My favorite wordless books of the last few years are five Owly books by Andy Runton.  The stories feature Owly the owl and his animal friends; their adventures are illustrated comic-book style, several panels per page, with the occasional full-page spread.  Children can easily decipher the story from the illustrations, especially from the expressions on the character’s faces.  “Dialog” appears in speech bubbles above the characters’ heads, but–and here’s the best part–it’s mostly pictures, not text.  When Owly is surprised, the speech bubble will have only an exclamation point in it.  When the little worm is asking about his parents, we see a speech bubble with a question mark and little pictures of Ma and Pa Worm. The books are as long as many grade-school chapter books–100 pages or more–and require a longer attention span and therefore an older audience than The Wave or the Wow! books.  This makes them a perfect choice for kids who aren’t quite ready for chapter-length books but are like, totally done,  Mrs. Gordon, with the baby books! on the picture book shelves.  My first graders ate them up–whenever they could get them away from the second and third graders.

Wordless pictures books are a valuable addition to classrooms and library shelves. Pick one up and hand it to a child.  If you ask nicely, he might tell you a story.

Making digital connections

School librarians are sometimes lonely.

We may be the only librarian in our buildings, or even the only librarian in our districts.  There’s no one with whom to share the triumphs (the kids TOTALLY saw how those two stories were related!) and frustrations (why is this book covered with snot?) of daily life in the library media center.

One of the great changes for career librarians in the last few years has been the rise of social media:  sites that not only let you share your own pictures, audio, text, and other content, but let others rate, comment on, or even change your content.  Static websites could provide information, but not much in the way of interaction.  E-mail, e-mail lists, and online forums were the next step.  Some, like the still-vigorous LM_Net, were among the first to make digital connections a reality for teacher librarians.  Then came a veritable explosion of blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, podcasting, video-sharing websites, and the virtual world was changed.

Using Twitter to communicate with a NASA teacher

Twitter is often described as a microblogging platform–a way of making tiny little 140-character blog posts, to which friends, family, and colleagues can immediately reply. I’ve written about Twitter before, when my science teacher husband showed me how NASA has been using social media to communicate with the public.  Twitter’s power lies in the brevity of the posts, and the immediacy of the feedback. My husband’s metaphor for Twitter is that it’s like walking through a huge crowd–you overhear lots of conversations, and after a while, you might venture a few words yourself.  Once you’ve met a few people, they introduce you to yet more.  (This reminds me irresistibly of the old Faberge shampoo commercials, featuring the girls who told two friends about their marvelous hair products…”and THEY’LL tell two friends, and THEY’LL tell two friends, and so on, and so on…)

Now that I am part of a network on Twitter and other social sites like VoiceThread, Flickr, Delicious, and a few other sites, I find that without expecting to be, I’m now part of a network–a Personal Learning Network–of educators who respond to my queries;  send me links to other teachers, articles and web tools;  guide me to best practices in education, and occasionally even profess to be amused by my humor.  I recently used Twitter, along with LM_Net, to gather ideas for a 15-minute conference with my new principal, and to follow the discussion at a conference I wasn’t able to attend in person.  (This is nothing like reading summaries or blog posts after the fact–I was reading comments in real time.  Pretty cool. )  I’m using a Twitter widget on my library website to keep families updated, and I’ve found some great school librarians to follow on the Twitter4Teachers wiki. I’ve met some fellow “tweachers, ” too, and contrary to public opinion about meeting “online friends,” not one of them was an axe murderer.

Thank you, PLN, I’ll never be lonely again.  Now, if you could only help me with the snot-covered book…