GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION WE WILL LEAD THE NATION IN IMPROVING STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT Media Matters VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 AUGUST 2004 Guaranteed success! Are you new to the Media Center? Follow these tips from veteran media specialists for guaranteed success. Make friends with the custodian and secretaries!! These people can do so much for you, and they usually know how/where to find stuff you need. And all you need to do is ask! Join the GaMedia list service and the DOE Media list service to network with colleagues, find out information about policy, conferences, opportunities, and more. Join your state/regional professional associations. Make friends with other local school and public librarians; they will be your best resource and support group! Attend conferences (COMO, TLC, GLA Summer Camp, GaETC, ALA, and others). Network: No matter how pleasant and how friendly your new colleagues are, they do not understand your job. As a new media specialist you will have plenty of specific questions that only another media specialist can answer. Don't hesitate to go to professional meetings, either in your district or at the state level. Request site visits to/from other media specialists. Attend the Open Houses of the Exemplary Media Program recipients...even if on a different grade level than you. Learn how to use any library automation systems before school starts. Know how to check stuff in/out, look up titles, add and edit patrons. Once the students are there you won't have time to figure things out. Discover Georgia Learning Connections. (www.glc.k12.ga.us) Show the teachers the vast resources, use the newsletter feature to dazzle your students, parents, and staff.. Inside This Issue TOTY/Retiring 2 Gwinnett Library 3 Science Class Why I love being a 4 media specialist Idea Corner 4 GALILEO 8 Zoom 9 Calendar 10 Information is a wonderful thing, but it is not knowledge. You wouldn't be educated if you managed to memorize the entire encyclopedia. You would just be weird. Historian David McCullough Some of these ideas were adapted from LM_net More ideas in next month's issue PAGE 2 VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 Hurrah! More Media Specialists are Teachers Too! A salute to the media specialists who were chosen as Teacher of the Year in their system or school was published in the May 2004 Media Matters. A few names were sent in after publication but we still want to congratulate these teachers! Kristi Bearden: TOTY for Kilough Elementary (Dawson County). Christi Badowski: TOTY at New Mountain Hill Elementary and TOTY for her system (Harris County). Lisa Golden :TOTY for Mt. Carmel Elementary and TOTY for Douglas County. Retiring: Nancy Davis: Southeast Bulloch Middle (Bulloch County) Sharon Rothrock - Tucker High (DeKalb) Becky Prince: Thomas County Central High (Thomas County) Penny Johnston: Norcross High School (Gwinnett) Kathy Cox remarks on May 13, 2004 at the State Board of Education meeting: A key component of a quality excellent education for all Georgians is to have wonderful media programs in all of our schools and systems. I personally know what an active, viable, collaborative media center can do for the entire school program and for teachers' efforts to raise student achievement. Don't ever think no matter what happens in the budget over there (pointing across the street to the Capitol) that you and what you do for schools, teachers, parents, students, the whole education community is not valued by the superintendent or this state board (I think I speak on their behalf). I know first hand how vital they (the media centers) are and it is always the first or second place I want to go when I go to a school--I want to go to the media center to see what is taking place--so congratulations to all of you and keep up the good work. PAGE 3 VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 Gwinnett's Library Science Course for High School Recruiting and retaining the best for teaching positions is a common thread of most educational reform research. I know because in my first year as a media specialist, when I was selected as my school's teacher of the year and as one of six finalists in Gwinnett County, I wrote one of my competition essays on this topic. A first year media specialist and former high school language arts teacher, my heart wrote that essay focusing on the need for traditional classroom teachers, but after completing my fourth year as a media specialist, I have internalized what I wrote in that paper and have applied it to my personal list of job responsibilities as a media specialist. My new job description includes doing my part to recruit and retain excellent candidates for school library media centers. Fulfilling this personal goal, I have served as a mentor to new media specialists (most of us have), but my search for prospects is going a bit further into the future. I am a part of ongoing curriculum development of Gwinnett County's Library Science academic elective course. This course concentrates on three major standards: Classification and Location, Operational Procedures, and Information Access and Use. Each standard has various benchmarks that indicate academic success. This course affords me the opportunity to offer students a chance to fall in love with what we love: research, reading, technology, and people. In two years of teaching Library Science, I have taught students who are avid readers, salutatorians and students in the top 5 percent of their class, cheerleaders, athletes, quiet students, and very charismatic students. Together, these students from all walks of life have started a chapter of the Georgia Association of Media Assistants and have promoted literacy through various Open Mic Nights and fundraisers for Phi Delta Kappan's Books for Babies. These students all have the potential to be great at whatever career path they chose, and I am proud to say that several in the past two years have concluded the year saying, "I really think I would enjoy being a media specialist." With our role constantly changing, we must be active recruiters for the future of media enters. As we promote lifelong learning and prepare students to be lifelong readers, we also give them the tools to be information literate. Ensuring that our work will continue to impact education, let's all work to also expose students to a career in librarianship. Carla Whitehead North Gwinnett High School PAGE 4 VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 Why I love being a library media specialist! As the day began on March 2nd, I was giddy with anticipation. Our school was poised for its Seussentennial celebration. I was sporting Cat in the Hat pajama pants, a red bow tie and, of course, an official "Cat in the Hat" hat. The doors to the media center welcomed visiting readers with an eight foot sign "Happy 100th Birthday, Dr. Seuss." The media center was littered with striped top hats and Cats in Hats. The smiles and laughter bounced from person-to-person and from classroom-toclassroom. On days like this I can truly say, "I can't believe I get paid for this job." Kathy Cranford Crawford County Elementary Roberta Ga 31078 Idea Corner NASA has a brand new service that is wonderful for K-5 and the academically struggling students in middle school-1 minute streaming videos, follow-up explanations, activities & resources, and even computer graded quizzes at http://ksnn.larc.nasa.gov Log in as a guest to checkout what they have. Contact NASA's Langley's Center for Distance Learning to set up a site login and password. This site can be set for Spanish also. Lynn Sears, LMS Carver Middle School Harris County MEDIA MATTERS PAGE 5 A LIBRARY BALL GAME FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY Join the Major Leagues @ your library is a 21st century literacy program that features an online baseball trivia contest and a trip to the 2004 World Series for one lucky prize winner. It's a one-stop shop for family programming. To get the program started @ your library, visit the Join the Major Leagues Web site WWW.ALA.ORG/@YOURLIBRARY/JOINTHEMAJORLEAGUES for free tools to promote the program. The program contains complete sets of the program trivia questions for four different age groups and an entire kit that will have the program up and running at your library in less time than a seventh-inning stretch. Free promotional tools include: Join the Major Leagues Toolkit Downloadable program logo Poster artwork Bookmark artwork Mascot artwork Web button Librarians must go through a short registration process to access the tools and are eligible to receive a free program poster courtesy of Major League Baseball while supplies last. All of the elements of the program, including the tools and trivia questions, are available in both English and Spanish. Developed by ALA and Major League Baseball, the program runs through September 10 and is designed to complement summer reading efforts. New incentives and prizes will also be offered this year for the top five libraries that bring in the greatest number of entries. http://www.ala.org/ala/pio/campaign/sponsorship/jtmlhome/joinmajorleagues.htm PAGE 6 VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 Crossroads School Gets Library Books Dawson County Crossroads School recently started their own reading library. Over 900 "nearly new" books were donated to the school by a middle school in Cherokee County. "Each year," says Booth Middle Media Specialist Martha Gingles, "E.T. Booth Middle School collects nearly new books and donates them to school that have small libraries or none at all." This year, Crossroads, an alternative school for middle and high school students, was the grateful recipient of the collection. MEDIA MATTERS PAGE 7 While we use computers constantly in our library media center and school, we also find print newspapers useful. The Newspapers in Education (NIE) program of the Tifton Gazette sent a representative who met with the media specialist and five teachers and now sends a prescribed number of newspapers one day per week for these teachers to use in classes. The NIE Web site has a Web page of lesson plans. Students in career education can check the want ads while Social Studies and Language Arts students search for current events and work on class reports among other activities. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also sends 20 copies one day per week. Our teachers and students look forward to receiving the newspapers. Our school is very active in extracurricular activities so we clip articles and photos of school activities from the hometown newspaper which we keep in manila folders so that they can be used by teachers and students. Old newspapers are stacked in the media center and later taken to be recycled. Nick Hopper Fitzgerald High School Ben Hill County Ms. Colleen Mills Williams, media specialist from Apalachee High School (AHS), was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities receiving 15 titles from the We The People Bookshelf. Apalachee High School was one of 500 schools from around the United States to receive this award. The 15 titles in the We The People Bookshelf collection address the theme of COURAGE which is also a component of the Georgia Department of Education's Character Education initiative in its Citizenship segment. PAGE 8 VOLUME 3, NUMER 1 New GALILEO Databases K-12 schools now have access to these nine new resources for 2004-2005: SIRS Researcher Discoverer WebFind (SIRS) SKS WebSelect (SIRS) Kids InfoBits (Gale) Encyclopdia Britannica Online Enciclopedia Universal en Espaol (Britannica) Encyclopdia Britannica Online School Edition Annals of American History (Britannica) WorldCat Training sessions are being planned so that media specialists will be able to help both students and teachers with these new databases. MEDIA MATTERS PAGE 9 Zoom out the vote with your elementary students! ZOOM wants kids to play a critical role in the November election. The ZOOM Out the Vote! guide will help kids get involved in the democratic process and increase voter participation in their community. Read on to learn how you can order a set for your library. ZOOM's election guide for kids, ZOOM Out the Vote!, makes the case that every vote counts and shows kids how they can increase voter turnout in their community by hosting a voter registration drive. This guide also outlines ways kids can become involved in politics locally and nationally and lists additional resources kids can use to learn more about the US political system. To order a set of 50 guides for the kids in your program, e-mail a request (including your name, title, organization, address, phone, and work e-mail) to zoom_intoaction@wgbh.org. Packets will be distributed starting in August. Also, check out pbskids.org/zoom in August for downloads and printouts your kids can use to launch their voter registration drive. Let's ZOOM Out the Vote! Please share this with your teachers. Library Media Specialists wear many hats. They are teachers, information specialists, and instructional consultants. Studies throughout the United States have proven over and over again that schools that have a library media center that is well funded, well staffed, and offers extended hours have a direct relationship on the academic achievement of the students. Many Georgia Library Media Specialists offer extended hours during the school year and open the media center doors during the summer and on weekends. Most of this extra duty time is done without compensation except for the knowledge they are helping students. The AJC wrote an article about several media specialists who open their doors during the summer. You can access the story at:http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/cherokee/0704/21johnston.html You may need to register with the AJC before reading the article, but it is a free service. August 2004 SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT 1 Herman Melville born: 1819-1891 2 Birthday of James Baldwin: 1924-1987 3 Christopher Columbus sets sail: 1492 4 Percy Shelley born: 1792-1822 5 6Alfred, Lord Ten- Conrad Aiken's birth- nyson born: 1809- day: 1889-1973 1892 7 Ralph Bunche born: 1904- 8 Birthdays of Sara Teasdale and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 9 P.L. Travers born: 1902-1996 10Herbert Hoover born: 1874-1964 11 Alex Haley born: 1921-1992 12 Edison invents the photograph: 1877 13 East Germans begin building the Berlin Wall: 1961 14 Russell Baker born: 1925- 15 Sir Walter Scott's birthday: 1771-1832 16 Birthday of Matt Christopher: 19171997 17 Birthday of Davy Crockett and Ted Hughes 22 23 - Birthday of Will 24 Hobbs: 1947- Birthday of Edgar Lee Jorge Luis Borges and Ray Bradbury: Masters: 1869- born: 1899-1986 1920- 18 19 20Birthday of Virginia Dare born 1587 Paula Danziger: 1944 Ogden Nash born: 19021971 Orville Wright: 18711948 Benjamin Harrison: 1833-1901 25 26 Leonard Bern- 27 stein born: 1918-1990 Patricia Beatty born: Theodore Dreiser 1926- born: 1871-1945 29 30 31 , Oliver Wendell Holmes born: 18091894 Birthdays of: Virginia Lee Burton, Donald Crews, Mary Shelley Birthday of William Saroyan: 1908-1981 21Hawaii enters union: 1959 28 Birthdays of Rita Dove and Tasha Tudor