The day in the life of an Elementary Innovative Learning Specialist.....what I am doing, adventures with students, my thoughts, and what I have learned.
One of the best products of my trip to Finland was meeting with two educators from a Finnish school north of Helsinki. We collaborated and put a plan in place to set up penpals between our classrooms. We wanted our initial letters to be hand written so that the students felt they were more personal and they got the feeling of receiving something in the mail from another country. From there, they could then continue corresponding via email or post (whichever they preferred). We also planned to share projects that we were doing in class to help give our students a real global audience to which they could share their learning. To do this, we set up a blog called Bridging Communities (this ties in with the Building Bridges theme from the Global Education Foundation).
Last week our first letters arrived and the students were ecstatic to receive them. For the most part we were able to pair them one to one, boy to boy and girl to girl, with a couple sharing a pen pal or receiving two. The students read their letters and immediately were sharing with each other and asking some questions of me, such as what team is Oulun Kärpät (a Finnish ice hockey team), what is floorball, and what is a pedal car. The letters lead to lots of discussions about similarities and differences from Finland to the USA.
When most of the discussion had died down, the kids asked if they could begin writing their penpals back. My response was of course. They began writing and you could have heard a pin drop until they began sharing what they had written, asking for ideas of what to share with their penpal, and wondering if it was okay to say Americanized things in the letters like football or tv show names.
I'm so excited to continue this collaboration into future school years. The engagement level for our students has increased for wanting to create projects to share, have time for writing, and we are building relationships that could span a lifetime.
Today I met with other educators from my area for a digital content curation training for WISELearn, a Wisconsin educator portal. The educators were made up of different grade levels, content area, and positions in the districts of Dane, Green, Jefferson, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Walworth counties in southern Wisconsin.
What is WISELearn?
WISELearn is a portal being developed by DPI that will provide all Wisconsin educators with a place in which to collaborate and learn and where they can find content for their teaching and their own development.
WISE Learn will provide a social networking platform to support professional learning communities and repositories of a broad variety of digital material related to educators’ teaching duties and professional learning objectives.
Open Educational Resources, or OER, is one category of content that will live in WISE Learn. Our project involves beginning to build WISELearn’s OER collection.
Project Goal
Our collective goal is to build a high quality starter collection of teaching resources for WISE Learn. In particular, we interested in an OER collection
That was curated by Wisconsin educators, who reviewed and offered guidance for using each item;
That was vetted using criteria drawn from Achieve’s OER rubrics and EQuIP rubrics; and
Whose items have been correlated to Hess’s cognitive rigor matrix.
Ideally this portal will be released in the Fall of 2015. Some of the curation has already been completed by a couple of CESAs (Cooperative Educational Services Agencies) already in Wisconsin. The fact that many CESAs are collaborating on this brings a variety of grade levels and content area expertise to the table.
The term OER (open educational resource) can be defined as "a general term referring to teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use." The open movement is partly making materials available and sharable with limited restrictions. All resources will be free and available for everyone.
Copyright is a huge issue when curating information. With each resource we checked their copyright status and the policies aligned with the webpage we found the resource on. WISELearn will honor the rights of authors and creators. Curators of resources will identify the license associated with the resource.
I won't say that this is an easy process, but the end result is going to be very beneficial to educators. The process forces me to really look deep at the content and analyze what is there, how its used, the opportunities for deeper learning or critical thinking, and how it aligns to the CCSS (Common Core State Standards). Questions were assessed using a rubric for how well the resource is aligned to the intent of the ELA CCSSs and what is the quality of instructional support materials, assessments, subject matter explanation, and student engagement.
The day itself allowed for a lot of collaboration to take place. I think this is very valuable in the curation and assessment process. Multiple viewpoints allowed for insights that one may not have gained on their own. I know I value feedback on things I write before finally punishing them just because I worry I am not using the right words or if I am missing an important piece as an oversight. This makes this a better resource in my opinion.
Keep an eye out for this great resource to be available this fall!
*definitions and screenshots from DPI WISELearn documents and training information.
It's been like Christmas for me the last few weeks as much of my new furniture and kits have arrived at my LMCs. I love opening the different items for the kits and getting excited about my ideas all over again. I have also been putting out the furniture as it has been arriving and listening to the kids as they get excited over it. My favorite comment came from a fifth grade who said, "It's starting to look like a real library in here." That sparked a good conversation about why it wasn't already a real library. the biggest feedback I received is that it wasn't comfortable before to read. We just had hard chairs and hard tables.
Today I was involved in a webinar done through DEMCO. Amy Koester, the youth & family program coordinator at Skokie Public Library in Illinois, presented on "STEAM & the Maker Mentality for School-Age Youth". This was one of the better webinars I have attended in awhile. I got lots of useful information and was not overwhelmed with too much information. Everything that was suggested was doable, the supporting information helpful, and the project ideas low-medium in cost. All good and supportive in a public elementary school on a public elementary school library budget. The best part is it will help when I address staff so that there is more buy-in.
I guess I should jump backwards a little bit to kind of explain what STEAM is and means. STEAM stands for:
Since the the early 2000's, the focus on teaching arts and science together has been a hot topic. Even Mae Jemison said in her 2002 TED Talk that "The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity." The ultimate goal with STEAM is to foster the open-ended exploration in the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. We need to share with the kids that there is no one right way to do things which will help their problem-solving skills.
Amy shared some important reasons for why we should have STEAM in the library. First and foremost, the kids love it. They enjoy the time for exploration and personalized learning. Also, literacy is multifaceted. Other reasons are that we foster that lifelong learning in all ages and that interest is a powerful motivator. Carl Sagan said, "Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist." Let's teach kids that it is okay to be daring, innovative, and to fail and try again.
Besides STEAM activities, adding the maker mentality to your LMC is also important. The maker attitude allows for the exploration of new skills and to create something meaningful like a product or an experience. Allowing for making in the library is a way of offering new programs and services, like STEAM it promotes lifelong learning, you can facilitate community engagement and it helps to put the library as third space (home, work/school, library). They don't have to come to the library, they choose to come. The best thing about having making in your library is that if you need to, you can really make it a low cost activity. You don't need speciality materials or have a lot of experience to make. You can also bring in community players to help facilitate the making workshops like artists.
Amy shared some go to resources that I encourage you to check out. They help to give ideas or materials to make STEAM and MakerSpaces a part of your library.
