Workshops
NeverEnding Search: Becoming a More Powerful Searcher: As teacher/librarians, we have a a major campaign to wage. We must prepare and empower our internet-confident students, to be truly effective users of a changing and beautifully chaotic impressive information landscape.
Searching is a creative and an interactive process. Good searching is a combination of a few basic strategies:
We can make a dramatic difference in students' ability to locate and evaluate information. Join me as we arm ourselves with rich searching tool kits and strategies for using them and teaching with them.
If a Tree Falls in the Forest . . .Strategies for Making your Library Media Program too Noisy Not to Hear! Do the people who determine your resources really know what you do during a typical day? Do they know (do you know) your direct connection to learning? Do they understand your role in the total learning culture of the school? This workshop examines how evidence-based management can help you reflect on and improve your practice, and help you describe your impact. Learn how to go beyond the hunch, beyond library advocacy, to use planning and reporting strategies to improve services to learners and teachers and more effectively define your role.
Changing the Questions: Improving and Elevating Students' Research: "All of us, young and old, learn best when we tackle questions which are important to us. The students themselves must do the work, energetic work which arises from engaging questions." Theodore Sizer, Coalition of Essential Schools. As our students and teachers grow increasingly Web-dependent, many of us are seeing a marked decline in the quality of their research across grade levels and disciplines. Papers and presentations look perfectly polished, better than ever before. But how much original thought has really gone into these works? Are they truly “cut and paste” efforts? Take a close look at the bibliographies. Are the entries attributed to curiously unknown authors? Are critical works being overlooked? If kids have found it easy to slack, we're all to blame. Death to topical research! Death to the state (or the country, or the animal , or the president) report! In an information-rich world, it makes little sense to present students with assignments that ask them simply to retell. School research is not busy work. It is a training ground for solving information problems in real life. When it looks like busy work, kids recognize it for exactly that. This workshop explores strategies for encouraging thoughtful problem solving and meaningful research. We have to change the questions!
"The Times they are A Changin'": Creating New Information Landscapes for Learners: 21st century learners need 21st century librarians, 21st century teachers, and 21st century learning landscapes. Our libraries should now have two front doors, and one of them should be virtual. The effective virtual library pulls together, in one unified interface, all of a library's resources--print and electronic. It offers guidance while it fosters independent learning. It models careful selection. It offers valuable public service and can redefine “community.” It can even lead users back to print. It values and incorporates the work of the whole learning community. A good library Web site offers implicit (and explicit) instruction and projects an important image of the librarian as an information professional. During this workshop lay out plans for your own virtual library--whether html or Web 2.0-based.
Information Literacy--We're All in This Together: Because the Web affords all researchers new research independence, we are at a critical impasse with the N-Genners we serve. We may well be the last stop on their information literacy learning journey. We are all on the same information literacy team. In every library where librarians interact with teens—public, school, academic--teens must hear consistent language and a strong message about the importance of effective information seeking and using strategies, about information ethics, and about information quality. We all have opportunities to teach--through our Web pages, through the resources we highlight, through our simplest reference transactions, through our public relations materials, through our over-the-shoulder practice. Consider the impact, the power of a combined three-prong, collaborative, immersion effort reaching beyond our facilities and crossing ALA divisions and library formats! Imagine, academic, public, and school librarians, all seriously invested in the information success of young adults.
Spreading the Gospel of Information Fluency—Translating 21st Century Library Practice across the Curriculum.
What happens when the whole school is recruited for the information fluency team, when the bar is raised and everyone is responsible for the delivery of a shared “research standard”? Joyce will explore the roles teachers, administrators, and librarians play in delivering skills in information seeking, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, and communication and toward inspiring a culture of improved questioning, problem solving and decision making. And she will examine how teacher-librarian-principal leadership, collaboration, and professional reflection contribute to shared goals of improving practice and enhancing achievement. Joyce will share before and after clips of “real students” illustrating the cognitive issues, as well as the prevalent attitudes and behaviors that challenge the acceptance of the information fluency message.
Web 2.0 meets Information Fluency: Designing Projects for 21st Century Learners:
To be most effective, workers of the future will need to creatively blend several relatively traditional skills with emerging information and communication tools. And they will need to practice those skills in an information landscape that is genre-shifting, media-rich, participatory, socially connected, and brilliantly chaotic. To be most effective, students will need understandings of traditional information structures as well as understandings of the shifts in the way knowledge is built and organized. Through my librarian visioning glasses, I see two threads—information fluency and Web 2.0-- beautifully woven into rich 21st century cloth as teachers and librarians who value thinking skills, inquiry, ethical behavior, and innovative student work hone their craft on a funky and vibrant 21st century learning loom, with learners as collaborators. Together we'll examine new formats for student projects, projects that foster learning and exploit the potential of Web 2.0, the interactive and media-rich "read/write Web."
On Plagiarism Download PowerPoint
Profile for conference brochures:
Joyce Valenza has been the librarian at Springfield Township High School (PA) since 1998. For ten years, she was the techlife@school columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Joyce is the author of Power Research Tools and Power Tools Recharged for ALA Editions. She is a Milken Educator and an American Memory Fellow. Her video series, Internet Searching Skills was a YALSA Selected Video for Young Adults in 1999. The video series Library Skills for Children was released in 2003, and her six-volume video series Research Skills for Students was released in Fall 2004. Super Searchers Go to School, was published by Information Today in 2005. Her Virtual Library won the IASL School Library Web Page of the Year Award for 2001. Joyce is active in ALA, AASL, YALSA, and ISTE and contributes to Classroom Connect, VOYA, Learning and Leading with Technology, and School Library Journal. Joyce speaks regularly about issues relating to libraries and thoughtful use of educational technology. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of North Texas.
A full profile is available at http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/jvweb.html
Contact Joyce at joyce_valenza@sdst.org