Week 2

Week 2 January 14-18

This week I've kept up the morning routine that was established in the previous week to prepare the library for students. I've also grown a bit more accustom to assisting the students in looking for books and to checking out the student books. I'm working on talking to students and having conversations with them and also with remembering their names.

I have finished one of the lesson plans that I prepared for the English classes and two of the English teachers are interested in me doing the lesson for them. The objective of the lesson is to show that literature written even over 100 years ago still has a positive and profound impact in popular culture today. I'm using Sherlock Holmes as an example and plan on using various multimedia to accomplish the goal. I also checked to make sure that the lesson aligns with the standards and illustrated how they match in the lesson plan I presented to the teachers.

On Tuesday it was Library Day for the preschoolers, I observed and participated in the program and Mrs. Milner told me that I will be doing the one in March. Library Day consists of two different sets of preschoolers coming in at different times. A morning group and an afternoon group and their ages range from 3-6. An hour prior to the preschoolers coming down was spent with setting up the program and making sure that everything was prepared. This month's theme was bears. The craft consisted of a coloring page of a sleeping bear and cut out colorful pieces of paper. The students could color the bear and then glue the pieces of paper on to make the bear a blanket. Everything for the craft had to be set up and prepared before the preschoolers came to the library. Library Day started with Mrs. Milner having a hint to the theme of the day in a box, in this instance a blanket. She would give the kids a clue and let them guess and then give them another clue if they couldn't get it. It only took two clues in this instance for one of the kids to get it right. Then Mrs. Milner read a story, "Going on a Bear Hunt". Then everyone (including the teachers) stood up and danced to two silly songs. Then everyone sat back down and listened to the second story "The Bear Snores On". Then we danced to one more song and sat down to the craft. I participated in the dancing and was in charge of getting the songs set up on the CD player. Mrs. Milner read in a very particular interactive way. She had the students do motions to certain things in the story and did voices for different characters. She asked the kids questions and let them guess answers, but not to the point that it distracted from the story, and she had everyone say certain phrases together. After the second story everyone danced to one more song and then kids sat down to their craft. I participated with the dances and I helped the students with the craft. After they were done with the craft I then helped them find books if they needed the help. The preschoolers were all very excited and sweet kids. The liked to show their craft off and one of the little boys wanted to give me his. I've started brainstorming some of the ideas for the March Library Day that I will be conducting.

On Wednesday I began to get things set up for a different lesson that I will be teaching a group of students next week. I went through and searched for various digital storytelling tools and sites. I found some really great tools and set up accounts so that I can present them to the class and teach them how to use it. I also placed everything in my Toolkit so that I can present the sites and tools I discovered with Mrs. Milner and with the teacher I will be doing the lesson for so that we can choose which ones will be the best for their project. Also it will be great to keep these in mind for the future. Some of the digital storytellers include online video editing, online audio editing, idea planners and orgnaizers, places to create stories out of illustrations, 3D pop-up books, multimedia presentations, etc. There are so many great tools that are out there and most of them have free or educator options. It was very exciting to see the different ways that students can present information that would be exciting interesting to them. Thursday and Friday was spent preparing examples and the lesson plan for the digtal storytelling lesson. The embedded examples I created are below.

Creaza Cartoonist

I'm working on planning a lesson on digital storytellings for an English class. The assignment they will be given is to create a story for children. There are different online digital storytelling methods that I will present to the class including Cartoonist. Cartoonist allows creators to pick backgrounds, characters, and props and arrange them and add text to create cartoons or graphic novels. I made the below cartoon as an example.

 

This is a cartoon that I created using the Creaza Cartoonist program. The program has a free demo portion and is geared towards educators. Creaza itself has four different aspects to it: Cartoonist which allows the creation of cartoons such as the one below; MovieEditor which is a professional movie editing program; AudioEditor which is a professional audio editing program; and Midomo which helps to organize thoughts and projects. All these different aspects of Creaza are all online programs with storage and sharing capabilities.

 

Storybird

This is an example I created for the Digital Storytelling lesson. The lesson revolves around teaching the students how to use these different tools to create their own digital stories and use them, specifically for a later lesson English class, but also personally or for other presentations or projects.

 

Lesson Plan

This is a lesson plan for a lesson I'm planning to give to at least two different English classes on Sherlock Holmes and the relevance he has in modern popular culture.

ALA/AASL Standards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians Met:

Standard 3.3 Information Technology
Showing different forms of media and tools to students that they can then take and use for their own studies or personally.

Standard 1.1 Knowledge of learners and learning
Teaching the class how to use the tools that they need to know in a way that will keep them attentive and focused.

Standard 1.2 Effective and knowledgeable teacher
Using technology to promote digital-age learning experiences and assessments with classroom teachers.

Standard 1.3 Instructional Partner
Lesson was done as a collaborative partner with another teacher.

Standard 1.4 Integration of twenty-first century skills and learning standards
Used a variety of 21st Century digital storytelling tools in collaboration with another teacher to pass the skills onto her students.

Standard 5.2 Professional Ethics
Worked with the students to educate them on the importance of not plagiarizing pictures and presented them with a resource that will allow them to find pictures they can use freely without copyright issues arising i.e. Creative Commons.

Standard 2.2 Reading Promotion
Having preschoolers come in and anticipate and get excited about storytime will in turn help get them excited about reading.

Standard 2.4 Literacy Strategies
Working with the preschoolers using interactive reading and questioning techniques to get them involved in the story.

Standard 4.3 Leadership
Incorporated the library program into the lessons of the English teacher by instructing the student's in ways to create digital stories. This helped to assert the library as a resource in tool to the teacher and the students

Standard 4.2 Professional Development
Explored different internet resources (i.e. digital storytelling options, Google docs.) and practiced them and explored their options to see how they could be applied to the education field

 

Week 1

Week 1 January 7-12

The first week introduced a lot of the different programs and features of the Warren County Career Center library. The library is very technology oriented. There are laptops and kindles that can be checked out with the proper permission from parents, and laptops that can be used in the library and the school. There are also playaways and books on CD which help to accomodate readers' that have a lack of focus in the books. There is a wide fiction selection that is well-kept and frequently weeded so that most of the books look and are attractive to students. The same goes for the non-fiction section. The non-fiction section doesn't have a lot of intimidating large books, they have books that look enticing with great photographs and great information that would be attractive to readers and helpful for reports. There is an aisle of shelves dedicated to the preschool students that are taken care of at the Day Care Center and also worked with by the students in the Early Childhood Education program. The preschoolers come in once a month for library day. There is a wide magazine selection that range from popular magazines to magazines that can be appropriate to classes and to the specialized courses offered at the career center such as welding. The library itself is spacious with lots of natural light. The shelves are mostly kept to one side except for a few ailes created in the middle. There is an area of tables set up for students to work at and for classes to sit at when they come in. The tables are situated in front of a SmartBoard which in the one week I've been here has seen a lot of use. There are also a few comfortable seating areas that students can relax and read or do homework in.

Mrs. Milner got me started right away with learning the ins and outs of the library operation. Every morning when I come in I turn on the computers and log-in. I also turn on the televisions and set them to PC. On the televisions there runs a PowerPoint with different information about the library or book recommendations or anything else, and music through Pandora. The music varies by choice and plays through speakers softly. From there I proceed to check-in any books that have been returned and shelve them. Mrs. Milner informs me of any classes that are coming in today or any other special happenings. Some of the clerical duties that I've learned this week include, wrapping books, running reports for new books, inputting new books or call numbers into the system, and assisting students with finding books.

This week I observed how Mrs. Milner worked with some of the high school students. A junior class of carpenters came in and she was teaching them how to use VoiceThread to document their products and got them all set up on the site with web names. Also one teacher's English classes spent a day in the library looking for books to read. This was done in an organized fashion. Mrs. Milner had put together a PowerPoint slide of Book Recommendations that she then presented to the groups of students. These slides included book trailers. After the second time she presented and I observed how she did it, she allowed me to give the rest of the presentations for the day. I enjoyed presented the books to the students. After my first time doing it I took a few of the books that were discussed during the presentation and set them out on the tables for the students. They really seemed to like the easy access to the books that were being discussed and it made it easier to see what was still available and what had been checked out already. After most of the classes I found that I had to find more books to set out on the tables and I would switch my presentation slightly to accomodate the books that had been set out. It was gratifying to present a book and then put the trailer on and to look around and watch the students for signs of interest. Some of the students would grab the book immidiately. Others as soon as they walked in would look at the books on the table, and one upon entering even began to read one of the books that I had set out and ended up checking it out. This was the first occasion that I had presented to a group of students. One of the things that I learned during this process is the need to adapt the presentation in accordance with the interests of the students. For example, I went through some book topics more quickly than others because the students did not find them interested. One group consisted of all guys, mostly those in the police and fire programs, so I skipped through the genres that they didn't appreciate such as romance.

It was discussed between Mrs. Milner, my advisor, and myself that I should work on getting as much teaching practice as possible since my undergraduate background is not based in education and it is where I lack the most experience. Accordingly I'm working on a few different lesson plans and Mrs. Milner is discussing opportunities of having me teach some of the English classes a few lessons.

Prezi on Book Recommendations

This Prezi I created on books that students may like if they really enjoyed The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. There was a powerpoint with the information on it but Mrs. Milner thought it could use some more interaction. This is the fist Prezi that I've created and it was very simple and very intuitive to use. While I did take several of the book suggestions from the PowerPoint, I found several of the book trailers myself and I also wrote a few quick summaries to entice students. I would definitely use Prezi again and put the information online at the library websites and facebook page etc. so that students can access it easily. I think Prezi is a good way to get information to the students. It is more interactive and fun to look at then a regular PowerPoint slide which is very important when trying to engage students.

ALA/AASLStandards for Initial Preparation of School Librarians Met:

Standard 2.1 Literature:

Creating the Prezi shows that I am familiar with the popular young adult literature and themes.

Standard 2.2 Reading Promotion:

Giving the presentation on book suggestions to students as well as creating a book suggestion Prezi helps to promote reading in said students

Standard 3.3 Information Technology:

The Voicethread presentation and teaching the carpenters how to use it helped to show the different ways that information can be adapted to learning

 

 

Introduction

This site is to keep track and show my reflections and activities while interning with Ms. Milner at the Warren County Career Center library. I will post a daily reflection after each school day that illustrates what I did throughout the day and my personal reflections on the activities. I will also post any artifacts that I create during my time at Warren County Career Center.