Ideas from March/April 2015 American Libraries

Gamification

What learning/circ challenges can you present your students in the guise of a game? Bohyun Kim points to thefuntheory.com for lots of examples of gamification influencing consumer behavior. I wish the article include specific ideas for libraries. But I guess that's up to us! I've found that any time I present an assignment as a competition between teams, the kids' engagement goes up exponentially.

Edited to add this from summer 2016 issue of Entrsekt: Gamification strategies include leveling up, missions, visual maps, rules and obstacles, and extended simulations.

Pegagogy/Curriculum Development

An article by Joan Lippincott suggest several ways in which librarians can support "new types of assignments that require students to produce projects using a variety of technologies as a means to:

• increase student engagement with course content
• provide students with opportunities to explore new media technologies and innovate in their academic work
• increase individualization of assignments, which can also reduce plagiarism
• facilitate student expression in media that are not purely textual"

FMSS Library

The article is geared towards academic libraries, and I have to say, one of the scariest sentences in the article is " ... it is also often noted that few faculty have had any formal preparation for teaching. Similarly, there are many academic librarians who have had no formal preparation to take on teaching roles." Yikes!

Luckily, K-12 librarians do have some (but not enough) teaching training before they arrive in their own classrooms. Often, however we are closer to our grad school courses than the classroom teachers we work with. I die a little inside every time I hear of a PowerPoint being assigned (especially if the kids are given a limit on the number of [way too text-heavy] slides and not expected to credit image sources). There are so many more options including:

• "creating a website or a video
• working with other students on a group project
• collecting, analyzing, and presenting data
• solving problems
• incorporating special collections materials into a media product
• conducting an interview with someone in a remote location
• making a physical object"

My PGG next year may involve collaborating more with classroom teachers to create more authentic learning assignments.

School Librarian as Learning Alchemist

Things I want to do this year:

• have kids bring their own devices with them to try out web sites/apps and do research
• make all extra-credit assignments available online for those who might want to go back at the end of term to add more points to their scores
• spend more time on fact v. opininon, which ties into "teaching students how to evaluate the credibility of information"

Search Engines for Kids

Oh, my, look at this gorgeous site from DK.