Media matters, Vol. 9, Issue 3 (Oct. 2010)

October 2010

Media Matters

Georgia Department of Education

A newsletter for people who care about Library Media Programs

Volume 9 Number 3

GALILEO News
Effective September 16, 2010, the K-12 community no longer has access to the SIRS suite of resources on GALILEO Researcher, Discoverer, Interactive Citizenship, SKS Webselect , KnowledgeSource; nor the recently provided complimentary resources from ProQuest-ProQuest Research Library; and ProQuest Newspapers.
Given the current budget environment, the Georgia Department of Education is not able to provide the necessary support to maintain GALILEO at the current level for FY2011, therefore SIRS has been cancelled. This difficult decision was made after a meeting on September 7th. An email was sent out on September 10th. I apologize that you were not given more notice.
GaDOE and the Board of Regents have been meeting, talking, planning for several months and we were hopeful that we would be able to maintain the resources for our students, teachers, schools, and systems. Unfortunately, we are not able to do so.
GaDOE will continue to provide support with the funding provided by the General Assembly through the Special Funding Initiative as we have done in the past. Possible solutions to this dilemma would be to ask systems and/or RESAs to help cover the additional costs, and/or search for grants that could help support GALILEO.
Hopefully, when the economy rebounds, GaDOE will be able to restore this valuable database.

Inside this issue

Athens Banner-

2

Herald

Manifesto

4

Survey

6

Peach Award

7

Film Clips for

8

Character

Education

Collins Hill HS!

9

13 Novels every

10

American

should read

Reading Bill of

11

Rights

Common Core

12

Calendar

14

Never confuse motion with action. ~ Benjamin Franklin

21st Century Library Media Specialists We read. We lead. Get used to it.
Martha Hickson

From librarian to media maven
By RYAN BLACKBURN - ryan.blackburn@onlineathens.com Reprinted with permission from the Athens Banner-Herald

When Jerry Lynn Pope started her career as a school librarian, the job was about books.

As media changed, Pope adapted to the new challenges of a digital world - while at the same time keeping focus on reading, said Martha Avery, who worked alongside Pope in the Clarke County School District as a media center paraprofessional.

"Pope embraced just about all of the changes," Avery said. "She would make every effort to learn everything she possibly could to help the students so she could help the teachers - she was all for going forward."

Pope began her career as a librarian more than 20 years ago at Fowler Drive Elementary School and later transferred to Timothy Road Elementary School, where she took on the emerging role of the media specialist in 1990.

She died in 2007, but her efforts to promote reading in all its various forms will be immortalized at the new media center at Timothy Road - which was named in her honor.

When Pope started her job, most Clarke County schools only had books and a card-cataloging system to check them out. While keeping track of each schools' assortment of books by hand, Pope and other librarians would read to children and often were the first to expose them to the inner workings of a library, according to Angela Nowell, the principal at Timothy Road Elementary.

"What they mainly did at that point was read stories to students and provide comprehension activities," Nowell said. "We didn't have as much technology, we didn't even have e-mail at that point."

A few years later, as schools began to embrace and use computers more, Pope's job - and that of other school librarians - changed forever.

Nowadays, schools employ information technology specialists to maintain the complex network of computers within each school. When Pope started work, librarians were the ones who fixed problems and explained how things worked, Avery said.

"A lot of them have had to learn how to fix things, not just through the media center, but the entire building," she said.

Pope was one of the few media specialists to take on and run an elementary school television station through a University of Georgia journalism school grant, and she converted the media center's old Dewey Decimal System into an automated book checkout system.

A new curriculum for media specialists also emerged, as did requirements to work more closely

with teachers to reinforce students' reading skills.

Continued on next page

Page 3

Today, media specialists regularly help students on presentations and reports using digital cameras, iPods and interactive whiteboards.
"All of the media specialists have a lot more responsibility now. It used to be they were just responsible for the media center itself, but now they've got all these other add-ons," Avery said.
Andy Plemmons, media specialist at Barrow Elementary School, represents the next generation.
On any given day, Plemmons may have up to four different lessons to teach or may work with other teachers as they conduct research that's now done primarily on the computer not in books.
"Now it's just about the flip side of that," he said. "The Internet is the first place kids go to research a topic, and books come second. I try to teach kids what's the fastest way to find information, and sometimes the Internet still is not the fastest or most reliable way. ... There's so much misinformation that I have to teach kids to be evaluators of information - what's reliable and what's not. I really have to push them to question what they're looking at."
Plemmons still reads books to students, but when he does, he will pause to incorporate video or audio clips to help students better understand what they're reading. In one project last year, Plemmons supervised students who produced a book report using computer software. The end product was a digital report edited with graphics, video and audio, and resembled a movie trailer.
"I try to find multiple ways to connect with students, families, the teachers - something I do your old school librarian didn't do," Plemmons said.
In August, Barrow Elementary won an Exemplary Elementary Media Center award from the state Department of Education.

Georgia Educational Technology Conference GaETC 2010: Explore - Engage - Empower November 3-5, 2010 Georgia International Convention Center College Park, Georgia

COMO is coming! COMO is coming!
Celebrate with One Voice!
October 13-15 Classic Center
Athens

Page 4

If you don't read anything else today....READ THIS!

Volume 9 Number 3

Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarians

By Joyce Kasman Valenza Reprinted with permission Attribution: Non Commercial
VOYA October 2010

A couple of summers back a young school librarian, fresh out of library school, asked a very honest question at one of our state retreats: We're all doing different stuff. The other school librarians I know are not doing what I am doing. Some maintain Web sites and blogs; others do not. Some have seriously retooled; others have not. In the 21st century, what does a school librarian do?
Well into the 21st century, it is clear that the concept of modern teacher librarian practice is not clear. There is no textbook for what effective practice looks like in continually morphing information and communication landscapes. What I know for sure is that if the Joyce who graduated from library school in 1976 (and again with a school specialty in 1988), heck, if the Joyce from the 2007/2008 school year, were to visit my library today, she would be stunned by the differences in my/our practice. In the past few years many of us have re-imagined school library for learners using the array of new tools and abilities in front of us today. And in my humble opinion some aspects of emerging practice are nonnegotiable.
You know you are a 21st century school librarian if . . .
Reading You consider new ways to promote reading. You are piloting/supplying learners with downloadable audio books, Playaways, Kindles, iPads, Nooks.
You share ebook apps with students for their iPhones, droids, and iPads and other mobile devices (Check out Gale's AccessMyLibrary, School Edition)
You market, and your students share, books using social networking tools like Shelfari, Good Reads, or LibraryThing.
Your students blog or tweet or network in some way about what they are reading
Your desktop screensavers promote great reads, not Dell or Apple or HP.
You link to available free ebook collections using such tools as Google Books, International Children's Digital Library (See ebook pathfinder.)
You review and promote books in your own blogs and wikis and other websites. (Also Reading2.0 and BookLeads Wiki for book promotion ideas)
You embed ebooks on your websites to encourage reading and support learning
You work together with learners to create and share digital booktalks or book trailers.

Page 5
Information Landscape You know that searching various areas of the Web requires a variety of search tools. You are the information expert in your building. You are the search expert in your building. You share an ever growing and shifting array of search tools that reach into blogs and wikis and Twitter and images and media and scholarly content.
You open your students to evolving strategies for collecting and evaluating information. You teach about tags, and hashtags, and feeds, and real-time searches and sources, as well as the traditional database approaches you learned way back in library school.
You organize the Web for learners. You have the skills to create a blog or website or wiki or portal of some other type to pull together resources to meet the specific information needs of your learning community.
You make sure your learners and teachers can (physically & intellectually) access developmentally and curricularly databases, portals, websites, blogs, videos, and other media.
Your presence reflects your personal voice. It includes your advice and your instruction, as well as your links. You make learning an engaging and colorful hybrid experience.
You think of your web presence as a knowledge management tool for your entire school. It includes student-produced instruction and archived (celebrated) student work, handouts, policies, and collaboratively built pathfinders to support learning and research in all learning arenas. (Checkout Pathfinder Swap for examples.)
You help learners put together their own personal information portals and Knowledge Building Centers to support their research and learning, using widgets, embedded media, and personal information portals like iGoogle, PageFlakes ,and NetVibes and wikis and Google Sites.
You intervene in the research process online while respecting young people's need for privacy.
You work with learners to exploit push information technologies like RSS feeds and tags and saved databases and search engine searches relevant to their information needs.
Your own feeds are rich with learning content, evidence of your networking. You embed dynamic widgets (including your own database widgets) wherever students live, work, and play.
You integrate dynamic interactive features in your library's websiteGoogle calendars, RSS feeds, delicious bookmarks, Flickr photo galleries, online presentations, blogs, surveys, polls, as ways to interact with and teach students.
To be continued in next month's issue

Page 6
One question survey: How well is your school Library Media Center tied in with classrooms? How integrated are your school library information literacy initiatives with everyday classroom work? o Great. Can't tell one from the other. o Pretty good. Lots of overlap, but could be better. o Not so good. We need help. o Dismal. Where's the library?
From Tech & Learning Magazine

Volume 9 Number 3

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Important
For several years a Lexile score has been provided to each student who takes the Reading Criterion-Referenced Competency Test or the English Language Arts Georgia High School Graduation Test. The Lexile Framework places a student's reading ability and a text's complexity on the same scale. The Lexile score can be used to assist in the selection of reading material at an appropriate level for an individual student.
The Georgia Department of Education is interested to learn if schools find the inclusion of the Lexile useful. To that end, a short survey consisting of six questions has been developed. Please take a moment of your time to complete the school-level survey.
To access the school-level survey, please click on the following link: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22B5DFDMEFR
Again, thank you for your time. Should you have questions about the Lexile, please feel free to contact Dr. Dee Davis via email (medavis@doe.k12.ga.us) or phone (404.657.0312).

When in Rome, do as you done in Milledgeville. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Page 7
The Georgia Peach Award has a brand new site that features online voting. Link this to your Library Media Center homepage. The Georgia Peach Book Award works to promote reading and literacy skills in teens. Each year, a committee of school and public librarians reads widely to choose a list of twenty nominated titles. Then young adults choose books from among that list to read and rate. The books that earn the highest number of readers and ratings become the Peach Book and Honor Books. Congratulation Peach Committee! Beautiful job! http://www.georgiapeachaward.org/years-top-20
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm. ~ Vince Lombardi
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Page 8

Volume 9 Number 3

Every public school (K-12) in Georgia should have a set of Film Clips in their Library Media Center. Film Clips now offers site server packages and streaming subscriptions. Please contact them directly for more information.
Cherokee County served as the pilot for this new method of viewing the programs and they have found it very successful.
Don't have the 6 DVDs? Unless your school was built in the last 2-3 years, you should. New school? Let me know if you never received the Film Clips for Character Education (I have a few extra sets). Be sure to look around, ask the counselors, etc. before emailing.
jserrite@doe.k12.ga.us

Page 9

Check out this Georgia Library Media Center WebPages!
Want to add pizzazz and information to your current webpage? Check out these outstanding pages.

Check out this fabulous Library Media webpage from Collins Hill High School
http://www.chhsmediacenter.com/ Maybe you will get an idea or two for your page!
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one. ~ Mark Twain
When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. ~ Alexander Graham Bell

Page 10

Volume 9 Number 3

From Nashville Public Television: In honor of its 50th anniversary, we recently reread Harper Lee's iconic To Kill a Mockingbird. The book was even more amazing than we remembered, and our first thought when finishing it was, "wow, we wish every American would read this." We started thinking of other books, novels especially, that we thought every American should read, and quickly started compiling a list. There are plenty of literaryminded people here at Nashville Public Television, including the incomparable host of A Word on a Words for over three decades, John Seigenthaler. So we asked Seigenthaler and the staff , "If you could pick a novel that every American should read, what would it be?" We asked them to go with obvious classics if they felt strong about them hence, the appearance of ... Mockingbird, Catch 22 and Uncle Tom's Cabin, but the notable absences of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath -- but to also not be afraid to go left or right of center, and to not dismiss contemporary novels.
25 Books All Young Georgians Should Read
The inaugural list of books for young readers was compiled in 2010 by the Center for the Book's advisory council members after extended discussions and includes books in all categories, from tots to teens.
http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/Read-Georgia-Books/Young-Book-List.php
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Reading Bill of Rights
A Child's Right to Read
Today we live in a world full of digital information. Yet reading has never been more important, for we know that for young people the ability to read is the door opener to the 21st century: to hold a job, to understand their world, and to know themselves. That is why we are asking you to join our Global Literacy Call to Action: We call this campaign: Read Every Day. Lead a Better Life. We are asking parents, teachers, school and business leaders, and the general public to support their children's right to read for a better life in the digital world of the 21st century.
Here is what we believe about reading in the second decade of the 21st century. We call this The Reading Bill of Rights:
WE BELIEVE that literacy the ability to read, write and understand is the birthright of every child in the world as well as the pathway to succeed in school and to realize a complete life. Young people need to read nonfiction for information to understand their world, and literature for imagination to understand themselves.
WE BELIEVE that the massive amounts of digital information and images now transmitted daily make it even more important for a young person to know how to analyze, interpret and understand information, to separate fact from opinion, and to have deep respect for logical thinking.
WE BELIEVE that literature and drama, whether on printed pages, screens, on stage or film, help young people experience the great stories of emotion and action, leading to a deeper understanding of what it means to be truly human. Without this literacy heritage, life lacks meaning, coherence and soul.
WE BELIEVE every child has a right to a textual lineage a reading and writing autobiography which shows that who you are is in part developed through the stories and information you've experienced. This textual lineage will enable all young people to have a reading and writing identity which helps them understand who they are and how they can make their lives better. In short, You Are What You Read.
WE BELIEVE every child should have access to books, magazines, newspapers, computers, ereaders, and text on phones. Whatever way you read, you will need to figure out what the facts are or what the story tells you. No matter how and where you get access to ideas, you will need the skills of reading to understand yourself and your world.
WE BELIEVE that reading widely and reading fluently will give children the reading stamina to deal with more challenging texts they will meet in college, at work and in everyday life. And every child should be able to choose and own the books they want to read, for that choice builds literacy confidence the ability to read, write and speak about what they know, what they feel, and who they are.
WE BELIEVE that every child has the right to a great teacher who will help them learn to read and love to read. Children need teachers who provide intentional, focused instruction to give young people the skills to read and interpret information or understand great stories they will encounter throughout life.
WE BELIEVE that in the 21st century, the ability to read is necessary not only to succeed but to survive--for the ability to understand information and the power of stories is the key to a life of purpose and meaning.
Join Scholastic's global literacy campaign by sharing The Reading Bill of Rights with your friends and family. www.scholastic.com/ReadEveryDay

Page 12
We will lead the nation in improving student achievement.
1754 Twin Towers East 205 Jesse Hill Jr. Drive Atlanta, Georgia 30334
Phone: 404-657-9800 Fax: 404-656-5744 E-mail: jserrite@doe.k12.ga.us

Brad Bryant, State Superintendent of Schools

Volume 9 Number 3

State Board of Education Adopts Common Core State Standards The State Board of Education has adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These state-led academic standards were initiated by the National Governor's Association (NGA), co-chaired by Governor Sonny Perdue, and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). The CCSS for grades K-12 were developed in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders including content experts, states, teachers, school administrators and parents.

"The State Board's vote to adopt the Common Core State Standards is a huge step toward giving us a meaningful comparison of our students' achievement with that of students in other states," said State Board of Education Chair Wanda Barrs. "Our students will be competing for jobs with students from all over the world and we must be able to compare ourselves to the rest of the U.S. and other countries to ensure that we are providing students with the tools they need to be globally competitive."

The CCSS is a state-led initiative - not a federal mandate. Georgia teachers and other experts in standards setting have been at the table since the process began. When the expert development groups that the CCSSO and NGA pulled together began writing the standards in mathematics and English language arts, they built off of the work of states that had already developed rigorous college- and career-ready standards. Georgia was one of these select states, and when reading the CCSS, it is clear that there are many elements of the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) throughout. Therefore, the adoption of the CCSS in Georgia will not be a drastic change for either teachers or students. Some of the standards are introduced at different grade levels, but teachers have, essentially, been implementing the CCSS while they've been teaching the GPS.

"Georgia has been ahead of the curve in the development of rigorous standards," said State School Superintendent Brad Bryant. "The Common Core standards enhance the Georgia Performance Standards and ensure that all of our students will be taught a world-class curriculum that will prepare them for college or a career."

The Common Core Georgia Performance Standards (CCGPS) define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school fully prepared for college and careers. The standards are: Aligned with college and work expectations; Clear, understandable and consistent; Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills; Built upon strengths and lessons of current state standards; Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and Evidence- and research-based.

"Today's students must be prepared to compete in a global economy," said Governor Sonny Perdue. "These state developed standards make sure that our students are prepared for college and the workforce."

Page 13 It is vital that Library Media Specialists across the state become familiar and knowledgeable about the Common Core/Georgia Performance Standards (CCGPS). http://www.gadoe.org/pea_communications.aspx?ViewMode=1&obj=1957
Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. ~ Pooh (A.A. Milne)

Su nday

October 2010

Georgia Department of Education

Mond ay

Tuesday

Wed nesday

Thu rsday

Fr iday

Satu rd ay

1

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1890: Yosemite Birthday of

Nati onal Park Gandhi :1869-

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1924-

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What president Louise Fitzhugh's American Library Birthday ofYo

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2002: Jimmy Carter1492: Columbus 1792: White

wins Nobel

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Peace P rize

world

stone laid

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Lois Lenski: 1893-1974

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Barry Moser:1940-Birthday ofNoah Webst er, Oscar Wi lde, Eugene O'Neill

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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. ~ Mark Twain