Alaska Bush Library Service

“For some people, if the answer isn’t in the first few results it might as well not be there,” said Gary Price, founder and editor of the ResourceShelf blog and director of online resources at Ask.com. “No matter how smart and helpful search engines get, they’re never going to replace librarians. Great article, one person responded by saying that librarians think too highly of themselves. I feel that I did a pretty good job letting him know what a great profession we are in.

Last Monday I traveled to Gambell Alaska for my first trip out for the school year. I worked with the elementary students on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Great lessons in how to come up with ideas for research. I bring in Jelly Bellies, a movie on how they are made. This takes about seven minutes and then we discuss why I would choose Jelly Bellies if I could research anything. I then move the third through sixth grade students into Ebsco Student researcch databases so that they can find magazine articles on anything that interests them.

I work with the kindergarten through second graders on our statewide Battle of the Books program.

The big news comes next, on Thursday, I head to the jr. high and high school area. One of the seventh grader students comes up to me and says, “I remember you. You taught us how to use Worldbook Online last year.” I was blown away. I mean I remember that I did teach his class how to use Worldbook Online. They got to use the laptop lab which was new to the school. The class was great and by the end of the lesson, I could allow them to sit anywhere because they did a good job of staying on task. I remember most lessons that I give in each school so that I can build on them and/or ask teachers how it is going later, but I didn’t expect to be remembered by a student.

I am in Savoonga this week. Here, I will give the same lessons. In addition, I will do a lot of library maintenence. This school wants to implement Accelerated Reader. We have a $5,000 Laura Bush Grant to purchase books. That will help a lot to purchase books that the students here will enjoy. I have talked to teachers about which books they would like to see. I will tallk to students this week to see what they want to see.

URL: Making Time for Web 2.0

The question I get the most from library friends, “How do I make time for all this new stuff?” David King is currently the Acting IT Director at Kansas City Public Library. He has some good ideas for making time for use to learn the new technologies.

Interesting tidbit - Being out here in rural Alaska, I sometimes forget how many people are using libraries.  I just went to Technorati and did a blog search for “library”.  I was thinking I would get blogs that maybe I hadn’t seen before and could subscribe to.  What I got instead was a listing of blog entries that use the word library.  In the past 60 minutes, over 100 people mentioned library in their blogs.

Anansi and the Moss covered Rock is a book the Alaska Battle of the Books program. He was kind enough to send me two pictures. (I wasn’t clear the first time that I wanted him to be holding the book.) It was interesting as he seemed a little surprised and pleased to have his book picked to be a battle book. Look back soon as I also have picture of Gary Paulsen that should be a READ poster by the end of the day.

Today is the day of my first school trip.  I am on my way to Gambell.  I will be there until Saturday and then move onto Savoonga.  Usually I only go out for a week at a time.  I am trying something new this year.  The cost for going to the island is so much more than anywhere else so I want to stay for two weeks and get more bang for my buck.  I will work through the weekend in Savoonga because their library program needs some loving care right now.  Savoonga’s library aide works hard, but he only gets one and half hours a day.  I am impressed with him that he sees all of the elementary students in a week’s time.  They are due to get a new school in two years.  Until then they are pressed for space.  The library is used as a classroom in the mornings.   I will also be implementing Accelerated Reader in the school.  Hopefully, all of this along with working with students will get done in seven days time.

I know I will achieve my goals in Gambell.  I will work with the library aide and with classrooms of students to cover the topic of online research skills.  My special lesson this year is one involving Jelly Belly’s.  I have a movie of how the candy is made, guides for what kind of Jelly Belly the student has, and best of all - two pounds of Jelly Bellies per school.  I think this will be a fun lesson.  The purpose of the lesson is notetaking from movies.

The reason to have a union catalog is that you will only have to update it once.  I am updating all the libraries in my district with Lexile reading levels.  The library software we use is set up so that you have to add the fields you need and then upload the records, the reindex the catalog twice.  I still don’t know why it needs to be done twice, but it never works the first time.  You do the same thing the second time and it works.  I didn’t think computer programs worked that way.

I am off to Anchorage for a class in marketing your library.  I hope I gain a lot of insight in what I can do better.

Today I finished some online lesson for students in fourth-sixth grade on how to use the Alaska Statewide Databases. The first lesson was to introduce the students to magazines and have them answer the questions about why they would want to learn from magazines. The second lesson was on one of the specific databases. This lesson went well, you could tell that I was more familiar with the lesson building software.

The students were told at the beginning that this project had been done as a project for a class for me. The only improvement comments they had for me was to add pictures to the first lesson and one spelling error to fix. I think the students enjoyed critiquing my work.

I enjoyed learning a new software program/language. The online modules are writen in XML language. Somewhat like HTML, but not really. The program that I used was Connexions. Connexions is a non-profit start-up launched at Rice University in 1999 that aims to reinvent how we write, edit, publish, and use textbooks and other learning materials. While it was a rough couple of days to get my brain around the program I think this will be a great format to provide lessons for anyone in my district or Alaska.

Connexions is an open source software program that allows people to write these modules.  You can work in groups.  The material is licensed under Creative Commons license so anyone can share the work and make the modules better.

One of my favorite aspects of library service is when we have just the right material for a teacher, right when she needs it.  Twice in the last 24 hours I have been able to experience that.  The first was when an SFA facilitator asked to borrow four copies of “Danny and the Dinosaur”.  I checked the out and put them on the desk of the person who was traveling to the school today.  I got back to my desk, checked my email, and found a note from the person traveling.  She asked for four copies of “Danny and the Dinosaur”.  I let her know that they were already on her desk.

The second time was with a teacher that I invited into the library yesterday afternoon so we could talk about a project that I want to do with her students.  I wanted to collaborate with her about teaching some research skills to students.  I didn’t tell her that part as her class was coming in and I didn’t want to take much of her time.  Imagine my surpise when she emailed me an apology for not showing up, this morning.  She included a couple of sentences that she wants to talk to me about teaching some Internet research techniques to her sixth graders.  I am going to use the program at Connexions to build a module today and teach it tomorrow.

I am vehelment about librarians need to know about and embrace Web 2.0 in all the ways it can help our patrons. I feel that I am fortunate with the vastness of my job that I work with both adults and students to meet all their neeeds. I really liked this Library 2.0 article from Library Journal

I found the links at the end of the article to be particularly useful.