A Weeding We Will Go...

A team of five media coordinators from across our district converged upon Central Elementary to help Ms. Smith with weeding. These observations are as much for me as they are for anyone else who wants to use them, and these are not intended to lay blame. The present media coordinator inherited these situations from other media coordinators who inherited them from their predecessors, so on and so forth-- ad infinitum. These are situations that exist in many media centers, and because they have the potential to create collection development nightmares, should be avoided:

1. Failing to check copyright before making purchases. Several of the books in nonfiction were technically too old when they were added to the collection, and many were already four or five years old when they were added. Your collection will be better off in the long run if you allow minor gaps to avoid purchasing "old books". If patrons ask why you haven't purchased for a particular area, simply explain to them that no one has published a suitable book on that topic in the past one to two years.

2. Beware: Celebrities and bulging biography collections. Celebrity biographies are high interest materials, but should a celebrity meet an untimely death (think Heath Ledger), all of a sudden, the biography has inaccurate information and should be removed. Also to be considered, several weeding guidelines suggest removing biographies in general according to demand. It is so easy to crowd the biographies by falling into the what-if rut: Q: "It's not that old; what if I take it off the shelf and someone asks for it?" A: You will make a note to replace the one you removed and you will replace it with one that has a more current copyright.

3. Pretty is not always a good sign. Don't be tempted to breeze over a section of books that are in emaculate condition. These "pretty books" may be exceeding their shelf life, because they never leave the shelves. If your media center's circulation system is web-based, wireless laptops are an excellent tool to use during weeding, because you can key in the item barcode and check to see how many times it has been circulated. If it is not being used--get rid of it. Your patrons have to search for the other books they want in the midst of all those pretty...I mean, pretty useless books.

4.

Walking in a Wiki Wonderland

Spent a good bit of time today updating Wiki 101, HESMedia and MCNNC wikis. The information shared at NCAECT really helped me get a better grip on the outline and structure that wikis should follow. I realized that I created Wiki 101 and HESMedia needlessly; I could have just added them as a page to the existing MCNNC wiki. Now I need to decide if I want to consolidate.

Excited to share the idea of students using the wiki to publish their booktalks in a medium that their parents can see. I hope their classroom teacher gives me the go ahead.

Not really surprised at all the edits to the Educators wiki at PBWiki--lots of new pages added/edited today. Curious to see if PBWiki will send me a presenter pack, considering that I have already presented.

Dewey Is Not Dead

Phyllis and I gave our kids a very telling, but very unintentional pop quiz on how to locate materials in the media center.
We had long been lamenting the state of the upper end of our E materials, because our E SHA all the way through E Z were all smashed together on regular shelving and were perenially out of sorts. We decided that if we moved the materials on the other side of the shelving, that we could spread out our E materials and be able to keep them better organized. Doing so required us to flip our F section (our shelving is on casters, so we literally turned the shelves around).
After the switch we began to encounter many students who were asking questions like:
"Where did the Captain Underpants books go?"
"Where are all the Louis Sachar books?"

Once being reminded of the shelf labels, the kids were like, "Ohhhhh---", but this little experience emphasized that our elementary readers are creatures of habit. Our kids were familiar with where things were located, but their familarity more closely resembles spacial familiarity, not expert use of the Dewey system. They were sort of on Dewey Auto Pilot.

Funny to watch, and also neat to see them use the signage and find what they were looking for.

High Tech in a Hurry

Kudos to our Dept. of Instructional Technology and Media and Maintenance
Departments for working together to install ACTIVBoards in what will be 6 21st century classrooms. Looking forward to all the great things that will result from this initiative. Hoping that we will be successful with grant cycle II--I think we have 18 teachers interested in writing a grant. If we continue at our current rate, we will hopefully be fully outfitted with 21st century classrooms by the end of 08-09.

Surprise--It's a snowday:)

Checking back through some of the projects that I have been slack with, and this is one of them. Going to begin sharing this blog with other elementary media coordinators in my district, because we never seem to have enough time--just to talk about all the directions we are moving in. Really great break out session yesterday seemed to help gear us up to try some new things, then wouldn't you know it---SNOWDAY--plan E--only 12 month employees are to report today:) Good day to catch up around the house and make a big pot of noodles. Going to Blue Man Group in Winston this p.m.

Is Anybody Out There???

Just spent a pretty good bit of time looking at the possibility of acquiring online pen pals, and I stumbled over E-Pals. Curious to see if the questions I left in my profile will generate desired results---responses to those questions from people all over the world. And in particular, answers from people who have first hand knowledge. If I am able to get students into E-Pals, I look forward to them being able to share their knowledge about the U.S. with sudents in other countries to hopefully get an understanding that everyone has information based on our day-to-day experiences that is needful to others. Now, the tricky part--waiting.....

Time Flies...

Beginning to realize that unless I share this blog and let others generate content, that it will become one ball that gets dropped when things get chaotic as they are right now. Thanksgiving was great and everything at school is pretty much business as usual.

Anyway....the faculty reception of the wiki for the book study was mixed, as I had expected that it would be. But for the most part, once everyone realized that the wiki behaves pretty much like a word processor, everyone was pretty cool with it. An added bonus, was that one of the team members that presented the first session this past Monday (11/26), absolutely loved the wiki. In just a few editing sessions, she uploaded all the files she used into the wiki, and delivered her group's presentation via the wiki. Later, I posted her group's "homework" onto the wiki, and during this past week, the faculty have posted their homework by editing that wiki page. Our principal was extremely pleased when I informed her on Thursday (11/29), that not only had everyone completed his or her homework, but that they had also completed it, digitally, either via wiki or via email that was then pasted into the wiki.

I am currently scouting faculty members who want to experiment with letting students build a wiki as a research product and in the meantime I am trying to think of other practical products that I could use wikis for.