Dog-eared & Overdue

Category: Knowledge Creation

  • My First MOOC

    MoMA’s Art and Inquiry I’m half-way through my first MOOC, and I am so happy I picked a good one. Last semester, one of my classes considered MOOCs for different ages and types of learners, and during my investigation and learning I saw that the Museum of Modern Art in New York offered an “Art…

  • Cool Tool: Storybird

    I have written about Storybird before, and tonight I was able to share some of my Storybird learning with my Information Technologies in Educational Organizations classmates during a webinar. I wanted to provide a few additional resource links here as a follow-up to that experience, and I wanted to share the learning with anyone else who may…

  • Technology in Schools

    “We do everything we can to get tech into the hands of our kids, and then we do everything we can to prevent them from using it.” -Scott McLeod at TEDx Des Moines What do you think? Look for my thoughts on this topic throughout the week.

  • Library Learning Blogs

    Teacher-librarians can use blogs in their school libraries to connect with students and the community, to support learning standards, and to give students a voice in collection and program development. I like the idea of a blog written by the school librarian(s) that promotes library activities and resources; a blog written by students in which…

  • Library Learning Standards

    Teachers, Did you know the American Association of School Librarians has learning standards that align with the Common Core learning standards you use in your content area teaching? The AASL Learning Standards & Common Core State Standards Crosswalk contains a number of connections that can provide a basis for collaboration with your school librarian. The crosswalk…

  • Mobile Learning Tools at School

    I am excited about the learning that can happen on mobile devices (mLearning). In this post, I’ve included a few thoughts about using mLearning in schools, as well as a useful chart for choosing appropriate mLearning tools and a brief description of an activity that will engage even our youngest students in meaningful mLearning. There…

  • Death To (Assigned) Summer Reading! Long Live Summer Reading!

    Alexander Nazaryan’s article Trust Me, Assigning Summer Reading Is Totally Pointless has set off a rather passionate discussion about summer reading among book-lovers and library-types. I’ve been baffled to see Nazaryan’s article characterized as anti-summer reading. I found the opposite in the article. I think the way to encourage summer reading, and the love of reading in…

  • Encourage Making Over Using

    The following is an actual question, posed by an actual school librarian:   You can’t use citation generators–why?? That is awful–we need to prepare kids for the real world. In the real world we use the generators. The original post that inspired this “question from an actual school librarian” was by a school media specialist asking…

  • Initiating Collaboration for Guided Inquiry

    In this post, I explore some of the challenges new school librarians face in collaborating with educators who are already strapped for time and stressed out about the pressures of their ongoing transition to implement the Common Core Standards. Collaboration takes time, and if teacher librarians want to be included in learning partnerships with classroom…

  • Failure is Always an Option

    At our house, we love the Mythbusters. As soon as we saw the “Larry’s Lawn Chair Balloon” episode we were hooked. We love the Mythbuster’s enthusiasm for investigation, their willingness to look at things from different perspectives, and we especially love their willingness to fail, and fail, and fail again to prove or disprove a…