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Opening Session - Information Literacy Standards, Dan Pink October 25, 2007

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : AASL2007 , 1 comment so far

The room is full! AASL President, Sara Kelly Johns, announced the new “standards for 21st century learning”. At the end of this session the standards will be available for download.

The main part of the session is the keynote speaker Dan Pink. His book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future,” is the one book one conference read.

He started with the observation that any good speech presentation has three componentes;
brevity, levity, repetition. He also shared a quote “Prepare our kids for thier future not our past”.

His speech followed the outline of the book pretty well. While I have already read the book, it is interesting to hear the outline as opposed to reading it. The levity component was there.

Economic factors;
The path to middle class was to get good grades, go to college and have a profession.
The new path will be to keep some “left brain” attributes but we will need more “right brain” attributes in order to compete. This is due to;

Abundance

Asia
Automation

Sic abilities that will matter most;
Design
Story — where the library can especially effective
Symphony
Empathy
Play

Meaning

Debbie Stafford

Exploratorium

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : AASL2007 , 2 comments

Thursday afternoon from 1 to 3 pm was the Exploratoruim. This event is similar to poster sessions at other conferences. There were 55 tables ranging from assessment, to reading incentives, to information literacy and including library advocacy.

My favorites were;
TRAILS (Tool for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literady) www.trails-9.org — I have used this site before but was happy to talk to the people who developed it. Presenter was Kathy Lawrence

Free People Read Freely — This table focused on a project with high school students and banned books. Presenter was Karin Papenhausen
He Sees/She Sees: How School Libraries Can Foster Gender Equity in Visual Literacy — I had not meant to stop at this one but did. Much good food for thought, some things I had not thought about. Presenter was Lesley Farmer

Debbie Stafford

Designing School Library Media Spaces for Now and the Future

Posted by Debbie Stafford in : AASL2007 , add a comment

This session was a half day preconference session on Thursday morning. The presenter was Dr. Thomas L Hart who has a book out on the topic “The School Library Media Facilities Planner” published by Neal Schuman. The handout included a table of contents for this book and it looks like the book has some specifics concerning room space, furniture and planning.

After a presentation giving some basics and highlighting some high school libraries, we broke into groups based on school level to compare floor plans. We ranged from floor plans for a library that hasn’t been built yet, to floor plans for existing libraries in hopes of a rearrangement. One statement that got a big group reaction; “Don’t put in a special class sized room in the library. The reason: it will almost immediately get taken away from you to become a classroom!

Discussion items from my sub group;
Shelving — low shelving or high shelving. Consensus seemed to be for low shelving if possible but people were interested in shelving that stood up off the floor so that the bottom shelf was not on the floor.
Reference Shelving — consensus was to keep a small reference section but to integrate former reference with the rest of the collection
Non Fiction Shelving verses Fiction — consensus was that non fiction shelving is still needed but fiction will be the larger section.
Genre shelving - much mixed opinions but all pulled out graphic novels
Integrating computers in the library verses a separate computer area — consensus was to integrate as much as possible.
Special furniture for flexible environments — shelves on wheels, tables on wheels, tables with flat screen garages, three position chairs and other items.

It was a good session but I was a little disappointed in that we didn’t have to time for everyone to show their floor plan and get ideas. Since everyone had a floor plan and everyone wanted input, it was hard to really focus on one person at a time. It may have been better for the session to have been a whole day session.

Debbie Stafford

AASL Preconference - Library Media Specialist 2.0

Posted by charvey in : AASL2007 , add a comment

If any of you have ever seen Annette Lamb and Larry Johnson, you know this dynamic couple comes with a power punch of information and work to share as much of it as they can into their workshop.

The preconference they presented yesterday called Library Media Specialist 2.0 was no different. In a power packed full day they covered a ton of web 2.0 resources and gave tips and tricks on using these with students.

Larry and Annette post all their materials on their website for everyone to enjoy, so check out some of the links and resources at:

http://www.eduscapes.com/sessions/slms2/

It was a great way to start the Reno conference!

Carl Harvey