The OLD Top Shelf

There has been some debate on the state librarians’ listserv recently about whether or not Kindergarten students can do research. In my district, they most certainly do – at least twice during the year. In fact, one of our elementary librarians made the following video of her Kindergarten students doing research with 4th grade buddies. The 4th graders help the students get to the selected online resource then read the onscreen information to the younger students. The kindergarten students wrote down answers to the research questions and told the teacher about what had been read to them. While not a full-blown “research paper” activity, these kids are not only learning things about mammals, but also that they can use resources other than themselves (or their parents and teachers) to find answers to their questions.

Click on the link to watch the video and then answer the question for yourself. Can Kindergartners do research?

NoodleTools now has a My Notes feature that allows students to take their notes online and connect them to their citations. Read more about it on Joyce Valenza’s blog posting. This might be something we’d want to explore for our secondary campuses. What do you think? Would your teachers be open to moving away from the traditional note card? Leave a comment with your thoughts…

Congratulations are in order for Marnie Cushing and Teresa Wells. They each contributed a collaborative unit to Toni Buzzeo’s new book, Collaborating to Meet Literacy Standards: Teacher/Librarian Partnerships for Grade K-2.

Collaborating with Teresa to write the unit “Life Under the Big Top” were Thompson Kindergarten teachers Jana Burchett, Tracy Work, Bridget Kline, Angela Mead, and Amanda Tyler.

Mackey 1st grade teachers worked with Marnie to create the unit “Black Americans Who Changed Lives.” They are Nakisha Cluff, Laura Hernandez, Amber McMillan, Rebekah Richter, and Lisa Zellmer.

The book was published in January by Linworth and is currently available from Follett.

Way to go, ladies!

Did you know that Bloom’s Taxonomy was revised in 2001? The APA web site tells us that “Anderson and Krathwohl have adapted Bloom’s model to fit the needs of today’s classroom by employing more outcome-oriented language, workable objectives, and changing nouns to active verbs. … Most notably, knowledge has been converted to remember. In addition, the highest level of development is create rather than evaluate.” Here is a public domain graphic from Wikipedia that depicts this new incarnation of Bloom’s:

(Interesting side note – when I did a Google search for Bloom’s Taxonomy, Wikipedia was the only site in the first 10 results to include information on the 2001 revision.)

As I looked at the changes, it occured to me that this fits in perfectly with the type of research we are trying to encourage in our libraries. The Research Cycle, with its emphasis on essential question and making new meaning is right in line with this. When kids are answering essential questions by creating new meaning they are operating at the highest level of Bloom’s! This really validates what we are trying to do and should spur us on to make an even greater effort to make sure that this type of thinking is going in the library all the time.

Information Fluency
http://21cif.imsa.edu/tutorials/

…a collection of tutorials and practice challenges to help sutdents (and fellow educators) attain mastery of 21st century information fluency skills

Try the Search Challenge and see how well YOU do. Some of them are pretty tricky!

Google now offers a way to clip and collect information from web pages and keep it online – the Google notebook.

• Clip useful information.
  You can add clippings of text, images and links from web pages to your Google Notebook without ever leaving your browser window.
• Organize your notes.
  You can create multiple notebooks, divide them into sections, and drag-and-drop your notes to stay organized.
• Get access from anywhere.
  You can access your Google Notebooks from any computer by using your Google Accounts login.
• Publish your notebook.
  You can share your Google Notebook with the world by making it public.

For more information about the Google notebook, see the overview page.

Using Google Notebook requires that you create a Google account and download a small piece of software. It is free and easy to do – just follow the directions on the site.
I can see lots of uses for this tool. What if teachers required that all web sites used for research be collected in a Google notebook? It would make it very easy for them to check resources used.

Play around with it and see what uses you can come up with.