Cell phones, ereaders, and NATC

This week, more than 500 educators from 9 systems and 5 private schools came to Sparkman High School for the North Alabama Technology Conference, expertly coordinated by Vickey Sullivan for the sixth year.

My first session Wednesday introduced iNow, the new student information system. I sat with two members of my school faculty, which made the workshop more useful.

I found the keynote, delivered by retired detective and FBI consultant Richard Love and entitled "Child Sexual Exploitation via Media and Technology,"  to be designed to manipulate his audience in the worst possible way. I think using a clip from Saturday Night Live (which was itself terrible dated, as were Love's references to AOL chatrooms) really brought down the tone of his whole presentation. His caveat never to post a picture of yourself online seemed to somewhat contradict his proviso that we set up a facebook account to experience what younger people are doing. I found it quite telling that his own wife had ignored his expert advice. I think Love is a Luddite and a reactionary. Sexual offenders have always existed, and I have seen studies that instances of child sexual abuse have actually decreased over the last few decades because of awareness campaigns. I resent the implication that technology has facilitated this sort of predation, when it has simply recast it. I am disappointed that the conference chose to begin on a fear-mongering note rather than focus on constructive and innovative uses of technology. I think media awareness and literacy can largely mitigate the uninformed and reactionary anxieties that Love has evidently made his career feeding.

I gave a 3-hour workshop Wednesday afternoon on the Instructional Uses of Cell Phones (slides below, but the website may be more useful). Ironically enough, we didn't have cell phone reception in the classroom, so chose to make a series of field trips in search of a signal. There was palpable excitement as the participants practiced SMS-ing Google queries, responding to polleverywhere surveys, and writing to wifitti walls. Again, twitter let us down, only a handful were able to create new accounts, but I think they got the idea of backchanneling.

I won a 500GB hard drive in Wednesday afternoon's door prizes. It only seems to work with the Mac, but I guess it will be my new Time Machine device.

Thursday morning, I decided to forgo the Moodle session in lieu of some shorter concurrent session. The first I'd chosen was cancelled, and I ended up in another on Moodle after all, this time for language arts. It discussed some really interesting elements of Moodle design. When I mentioned these capabilities to two of my Moodle-using colleagues, they told me that they aren't able to upload a picture to the Madison County district Moodle server. That is the only disadvantage I see in having so many practice-based workshops with teachers from different districts -- the local policies and technologies do vary radically.

Then the next session I'd planned to go to was cancelled as well, so I ended up in one on Glogster... I had used a glogster for the splash page for my afternoon workshop. The presenter was a librarian who had seen the poster technology at AIMA (now ASLA) in June.

There was a small but enthusiastic crowd for my concurrent session on ereading (slides below). I had a petting zoo, too, so they could experiment with Kindle, Stanza on iPod Touch, iBooks, and Tablet ereader applications.

I ended the day as the only participant in a session on VoiceThread, so it became a private tutorial. The presenter put together a VoiceThread where second graders talked about their favorite books. Instead of a series of photos with a single voice or two voices in tandem, which is how my students have always used VoiceThread, these students all spoke over a single piece of clipart. It was interesting to contrast those different uses. She helped me figure out that you can only use the doodle tool when in recording mode with a live mic, and I had an educator account, which allowed me more VoiceThreads, which was something she had only just learned about at AETC.

It was a good conference, full of sharing and rather practical tips. I was really gratified to see so many teachers from my school faculty there as well as many librarians I knew. It seems to bode well for our district.

A new adventure

Last week, I started classes towards an administrative certificate with a cohort of teachers from my district. The program is offered through Samford University, a small Christian school in Homewood. There are seven of us altogether.

A couple of years ago, I wouldn't have envisioned moving in this direction professionally. I love the library and I love technology, neither of which requires this sort of experience. And I've still got that dissertation thing hanging out there, after all, with no foreseeable end in sight (if you know a good freelance statistician willing to take on an interesting project....you know where to find me)

But in the ed tech world, I started seeing some amazing young administrators who were leading who faculties in these really creative ways using technologies. Two standouts are Chris Lehmann from the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, who I met at the Google Teacher Academy, and Kipp Rogers, a middle school principal who uses cell phones in all sorts of transformational ways. I began to see a potential for a realm of influence far larger than my current one in the library. And some really bright women emphasized the gender imbalance in secondary administration, appealing to my feminist bent.

An additional factor is the impending retirement of my exceptional administrators, Tommy Ledbetter and Sarah Fanning, from Buckhorn High School. I'm hoping we will have them on campus for another two years, but I may overestimate. I realize a lot of my role as the school librarian is really at the liberty of the administrators, and I have been shown a considerable amount of support. The main impetus for me in taking the educational leadership classes is in maximizing my opportunities in the advent their successors don't support the library in the same palpable way.

The ARC & the agony...

Another post-ALA note. My friend Laura was surprised I didn't mention our whirl around the exhibits Friday night. Cathy Nelson writes about learning about the seats at the back of the Newbery Caldecott banquet... Laura taught me that Friday night is the definitive time to visit the exhibits, in terms of ARC aquisition.

I probably didn't mention it because I feel quite ambivalently about ARCs, the advance reader copies that publishers use to promote upcoming titles and distribute to review outlets. Thanks to the work of  Liz Burns, I know they are more expensive to produce than trade editions. I first started running across them as a book review writer for the newspaper, in another era. But I do think they are an important tool for librarians as well as reviewers. I do think we need to know about the new books to help generate buzz. But I am NOT about getting ARCS of every title, especially when I can tell at a glance I would never read them. It's hard to plan what you get at the exhibits, and while I scored The Duff by Kody Keplinger, I left without Matched, the Ally Condie dystopian, and Forget-Her-Nots, on the language of flowers by the delightful Amy Brencount White. I have found ARCs seem most abundant for sophmore efforts.

But it seems like there are some better options to carrying these weird, unsellable, uncollectable volumes across the country evolving. I think NetGalley is the most brilliant concept ever. Even though I have to read them as .pdfs on my Kindle, it's still well work the dollar or two to convert a book for your own hardware. It was through NetGalley I found Sources of Light by Margaret McMullan, my favorite YA read of the year. But with eGalleys, I won't have a parent chase me down a year later to tell me how terrific her daughter thought it was that I brought her the Pendragon prequel, "a book that wasn't even published yet." And that will be a parent who will always support the libraries.

ALA Annual, 2010

I've been in Washington since Thursday, attending the American Library Association's annual conference. It's been a working meeting for me for the most part, rather indistinguishable from Midwinter. I chaired a preconference for YALSA on Friday, and have spent much of the subsequent time recovering from the anxiety that coordinating those 14 speakers induced. Here's the introduction I prepared for that event, in case you are interested in what all transpired:

My name is Wendy Stephens, and on behalf of YALSA and the preconference committee, I am happy to welcome you here today.

When then-YALSA President-Elect Linda Braun approached me about chairing this preconference, she had come up with the title “WTF? They ARE Reading?” Many of my files related to the conference still contain that acronym, but someone at YALSA thought “Promoting Teen Reading with Web 2.0 Tools” might be a little less questionable in case your library board was picking up your preconference registration expenses.

When talking about the changing nature of both books and the reading experience, I thought of course of Dr. Eliza Dresang whose ground-breaking theory of Radical Change has informed an entire generation of youth services librarians who recognize the truth in her exploration of how contemporary text has begun to mimic hypertext and web conventions.

I know I look to the Pew Internet and American Life project regularly for the up-to-the-minute statistics about young people are using technology.  The group’s assistant director, Dr. Kristen Purcell, will give us the hard facts about what young people are doing in terms of content consumption and generation.

We know that texts are changing as are teen media consumption habits, but what about the production of texts and how those producers are interacting with their readers? We as librarians usually remember the first time we met an author whose work we cherished, realizing that they ate and breathed, but many young people today will never have had that experience, because they are interacting with their favorite writers almost daily through social networks including facebook, livejournal, YouTube, and twitter, as well as closed social networks like nings.  I am curious to know if whatever authors might forfeit in terms of mystique is more than compensated by the deep and reiterative relationships with readers.

The author who has most conspicuously harnessed his readership using the power of social media for forces of good is John Green, whose nerdfighters are a testament to the community that literature can generate.  Joining him is his collaborator, David Levithan, who almost dialogic collaborations also hint at a changing model of authorship. David is also well-known as an editorial director responsible for the Push imprint at Scholastic, the publisher responsible for some of the more interesting multimodal books, so perhaps he will give us an inkling about the editorial process for books involving web or video content.

We will be hearing from Malinda Lo and Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, three first-time authors who used social media to create buzz well ahead of their publication dates, eventually earning the Morris award for 1^st time authors, and from Melissa Walker, a young adult author and journalist will speak about using online forums as incubators to create a range of online conversations around the work of new and established writers alike as well as pioneering online projects like her teen consumer blog I Heart Daily and her latest venture, Before You Were Hot.

After hearing how reading, writing, and authorship are all changing in the digital landscape, our panel of all-star practitioners will give some practical extensions for teen readers as well as mechanisms for the facilitation of author-reader interactivity. Among other topics, we will hear about fan fiction, digital book trailers, virtual author visits, and author guides which highlight user-generated content. For teens who can’t get enough of a particular fictitious world, bringing the considerable amount of associated media into your library is a way of expanding your collection and offering them new literacy opportunities.

We hope that you will enjoy the afternoon thinking about the changing nature of reading and writing, much of it technologically facilitated, and that you will discover opportunities for your teens to experience the social side of reading.

I was absolutely thrilled to have some of the most amazing practitioners around share their work: Angie Manfredi, Bobbi Newman, Buffy Hamilton, Kelly Czarnecki (who was also on the preconference committee), Liz Burns, and Tiff Emmerick. I owe them all tremendously for their time and generosity. 

I've had some other fun, too -- a tea for Katherine Paterson Saturday afternoon was a real highlight. I actually got to have a conversation with her, about Jacob Have I Loved, and Vermont, and Read for Your Life, the electronic collections of her speeches I had read to bone up. She said she didn't know anyone else who had bought them!

At last night's Newbery/Caldecott, I sat with the DC Kidlit Group, spearheaded by the amazing Susan Kusel. She started an ambitious project to gather original art from everyone in the room, and brought the creative supplied to facilitate that.

This morning, I went to the first meeting of a new committee charge, as an "intern," no doubt the world's oldest individual in that capacity, but it's with the ALA Web Advisory Committee, so it's giving me all sorts of new insights into our professional organization, which can seem so monolithic and bureaucratic. It's a new world for me.  

Alphabet Soup: AIMA, (now ASLA), Library Media Symposum, & AETC

Alabama educators met in Birmingham for the Alabama Educational Technology Conference (AETC) and its offshoots this week, many of them clutching their iPads and iPhones, postponing summer break for a little bit. It was the end of an era as the Alabama Instructional Media Association (AIMA) resolved to change its name to the Alabama School Library Association (ASLA). I will admit, I prefer that option not only because of the nice parallel with the American Library Association but because so many people are flummoxed by the possessives in the other possibilities (Alabama School Librarians' Association, Alabama School Librarians' Association.)

Monday was the annual day-long AIMA conference, this year at Hoover High School. Dr Carolyn Starkey from Alabama State University led two sessions on e-readers, and I was happy to share my 2nd gen Kindle hardware, iPhone Kindle app and the PC software version on my tablet during both of those. Carolyn has a 1st gen Kindle and the larger format Kindle DX, Dr. Averil Loague from ASU showed the Kindle for iPad and iBooks, and Becky Thomas from Shades Valley shared her Nook, so we had a great range of hardware.

I was able to sit in on a third session, featuring Derrick Waddell, a dynamite teacher from West Point in Cullman County. His district saved $30,000 in moving from a sharepoint server to Google apps for email alone. In Derrick's session and in other throughout the week, I sensed that cloud computing was really gaining momentum, and the undeniable truth behind that interest is that many schools don't have the funding for printers and copiers.

Tuesday was the Library Media Symposium, a sort of preconference for the Alabama Education Technology Conference. I worked the registration desk all morning, and facilitated two sessions, one by our Renaissance Learning reps on using the Neo 2 for Accelerated Reader testing and other applications (including Google docs!), the other by ASLA president-elect Leanna Mills on web 2.0 applications.

At the AETC , Peter Reynolds, an animator and filmmaker and author of the creativity manifesto, The Dot, was the keynote speaker Wednesday morning. Over the two day conference, I learned about some new features of APTPlus, our state's public television educational arm and got to play with our state's new virtual library interface, which uses geolocation to authenticate users, meaning no more issuing of virtual library passwords! One of my favorite sessions was Lisa Buck's talk on using GPS in education. She has a wealth of resources on the topic. I was lucky enough to get to have dinner with the Discovery Educators Networks Stars and Danny Forster from Discovery's Science Channel production, Build It Bigger at Cafe Dupont.

Some things I found interesting:

Mypluick, which offers a simple interface for easily synchronizing uploaded powerpoint with audio files. which I head about from Discovery's Jennifer Dorman in a session called "Beyond Streaming."

Derrick Waddell shared a great use for Google Tasks -- keeping track of your day's conference sessions on his phone. I cam going to adopt that strategy for ALA. He also gave a really credible testimonial for the Droid and Verizon, though I am not quite ready to make that leap.

Leslie Fisher, a conference regular whose rapid-fire, lecture-format presentations suit my learning style precisely, lead nonstop sessions over the two days. As a hardware geek, I sat in on one on gadgets and one on iPhones. In her gadgets talk, Fisher said that, among memory cards, speed varies radically, so she recommends SandDisk Extreme and Lexar Professional media. With that and the subsequent the App store recommendations, Fisher's sessions were expensive!

What everyone else found interesting:

Throughout the week, the two applications I heard the most chatter about in the halls seemed to be Glogster
and Prezi. They're both graphical in nature and produce a sort of less linear presentation experience. Hmm. That and Mac's market share is increasing in a palpable way. It's exciting to see so many Alabama educators getting excited about using technology, and exciting to hear about all the hardware for student access out there in some districts, too.