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Upcoming Workshops

BlogPosts M1 SLS News & Info

Check out our upcoming workshops. (Click a title to open the registration page).

Create and Code Interactive Stories with Twine
This workshop has three portions to it. The series will open tomorrow with a webinar that runs from 3:00 – 3:45 pm. Registrants will receive a Zoom link tomorrow morning. During this time, we will introduce you to Twine and orient you to the program. We already have enough registrations to run it. There are a few spots left, so if you’re interested in registering, please do.

The second day in the series will be Wednesday (Oct. 30th). This will be in person here at 11 Linden from 3:30 – 5 pm. We will copy-code together and write an interactive story together while you learn to program the software.

The last session will be a facilitated work time, held on November 13th from 3:00 to 5:00 pm (again, here at 11 Linden), where you can come and work on a lesson or a story, and we will be there to help you with any questions you might have.

Intermediate LibGuides
November 5th from 3:30 – 4:30 pm

We will spend a small amount of time reviewing what we already know, and then we will move into color themes, banners, alternate box types, and generally honing and customizing the look and style of your guides. This will be customized to the attendees as best we can.

Library Makers: Sphero Robots
December 10th from 3:30 – 5 pm

Sphero are little round robotic balls that are not only fun, but can be used effectively in education. In this 1.5 hour hands-on workshop, attendees will learn to control Sphero, code with Sphero, and practice and discuss ways to use it to strengthen math and coding concepts.

Create Forms & Surveys for your LibGuides
December 19th from 3:30 – 4:30 pm

Learn to create forms and surveys using LibWizard. These forms and surveys can embedded into your LibGuides or library websites. This feature makes it easy to collect data or create sign-ups.

Mini Green Screens in Your Classroom
January 28th from 3:30 – 5 pm

Have you just eaten some pizza and don’t know what to do with the empty pizza box? Well one man’s garbage is another man’s Green Screen Studio! Join our workshop (where we will be using fresh, clean pizza boxes), and learn some great uses for green screen technology, made simply and easily.

Using iMovie on the iPad, we will teach you best practices when recording and talk about ways to integrate green screen technology into your teaching. We will also give information on how to borrow iPads from our multimedia department. This is a hands-on workshop, and each participant will take home a green screen pizza box.

 

Our Model Schools department also offers workshops for educators. Click here for a full listing.

Media Literacy Week! (Day 5)

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Friday, October 25th


This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week! The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

This wraps up our week-long celebration of Media Literacy Education. We hope you’ve learned about Media Literacy, gained an understanding of how important it is for our students, and found some new activities or resources that are useful to you.

We encourage all of you to keep the momentum going. Media Literacy Education should be reinforced year round.

Use our Media Literacy LibGuide to help you find information for your teachers on a regular basis. This guide links out to information from:

This LibGuide will be updated periodically to add new resources as we find them.

Some excellent books to help you continue your learning are available in our Overdrive/SORA account:

 

 

 

 

(Ctrl-click the picture to open SORA. Select your school, and then log-in using your regular school credentials – as if you are logging into your school computer). Please take this Post-Assessment, and give it to your students to see if their thinking has changed over the course of this week. (Results will be sent out to our librarians next week. If you are not in our region, please contact Liesl.)

Lastly, if you feel strongly about this topic and its importance in schools, Media Literacy Now has put together this call to action. Click the image below to get to the website.

 

 

 

Please share this with those who are willing and able to support this federal legislation.

 

Thank you for participating in Media Literacy Week!

Media Literacy Week! (Day 4)

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Thursday, October 24th

This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week! The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

Remember PizzaGate: when headlines stated that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C.?

Fake news. But a lot of people believed it, at least for a little while. Then there’s the terminology, “Fake News”, being bandied about by politicians to denounce real news. Why?

There’s a major misunderstanding between fake news, truthful news, and biased news. It’s a lot to digest, especially for a young person who may have only recently begun reading the news.

Look at these four headlines. Can you tell which media outlet wrote them? Do you think your students could tell?

  • “More than half the House of Representatives support impeachment inquiry”
  • “Mike Pompeo Blasts House Democrats’ Impeachment Inquiry: ‘Silly Gotcha Game’”
  • “White House Unveils Lightly Edited Memorandum Of U.S. Constitution That Specifically Declares Trump’s Innocence”
  • “Pelosi Announces Impeachment Inquiry of President Trump”

(Click here for answers)

There are luckily a lot of activities available for teaching students how to tell the difference between truth and bias.

This video from Common Sense Media gives five tips for spotting fake news.

(If YouTube is blocked in your school, you can find the video here: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/videos/5-ways-to-spot-fake-news)

These infographics were created by #1: EasyBib (a Chegg service), #2: The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and #3: eavi Media Literacy for Citizenship. (Right click each and open hyperlinks for full versions)

1.    2.    3. 

This online article from EasyBib tells us how to spot fake news: http://www.easybib.com/guides/10-ways-to-spot-a-fake-news-article/

 

But what about understanding biases in media?

ad fontes media posts an interactive chart showing the reliability and general biases of the most popular media outlets. They include information about their ranking methodology and they update it regularly as things change. Find it here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/

Students can take this News Lit Quiz by the News Literacy Project:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This poster is designed to help students understand opinion writing:

 

 

 

 

 

 

And when you’re completely overwhelmed, and tired from trying to navigate it all, you can always choose to watch https://newsforkids.net/ (which was created by a teacher), Teen Kids News: http://www.teenkidsnews.com (just be careful of the ads), https://www.cnn.com/cnn10 (news explained in 10 minutes),

…

or wind down watching this clip of 5-year-old Noah Ritter on his local news in 2014:

https://youtu.be/rz5TGN7eUcM

 

Media Literacy Week! (Day 3)

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Wednesday, October 23rd

This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week! The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

So far this week we have learned what Media Literacy is, examined our own media usage, and gained an understanding that all media messages are constructed. We also learned that the authors of those messages have a purpose for sending those messages and usually something to gain from them.

Today, we’ll discuss stereotypes in media messages and how to teach students to recognize them. We are all familiar with librarian stereotypes. Just type the word “librarian” into a Google Image search, and it returns a multitude of mostly white, mostly female, glasses-wearing, book-carrying, sometimes shushing images. Luckily librarians are trained to deal with this type of thing, and many of us have embraced this stereotype as a long-standing tradition. (See Nancy Pearl Librarian Action Figure, “With Amazing push-button Shushing Action!”). –>

Stereotypes are exaggerated beliefs about a person or group of people. By learning more about stereotyping and how to identify it in media messages, students will learn to understand their own exaggerated beliefs and perceptions.

Renee Hobbs, a professor and founder of the Media Education Lab, offered this activity idea in her twitter feed:

This activity can be adapted to have students re-design advertisements, reshoot commercials, or redevelop websites. Get creative! You can also use these resources compiled by Frank W. Baker’s Media Literacy Clearinghouse: https://frankwbaker.com/mlc/stereotypes/

See if your students can identify a stereotype in a form of media and bring it in to you tomorrow.

Media Literacy Week! (Day 2)

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Tuesday, October 22nd

This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week! The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

Yesterday we discussed Media Literacy: what it is, why it is important, and how we would use this week to jump-start our understanding. We asked our educators and students to answer some questions about the media they are consuming on a daily basis. This was to help them gain an awareness of the media that is all around them and what choices they are making in how they are accessing it.

Today we will focus on media messaging. The first lesson in becoming media literate is always this

ALL MEDIA MESSAGES ARE CONSTRUCTED.

Let’s get your students to think about the messages they hear in the media. Show them an ad.

Have them think about who is sending the message. Is it a company? Is it a political party or candidate? Have them consider why they might be sending the message. Is there a chance of monetary gain? Who might gain from the message? Once they understand this, you can have them think about who the intended audience is. Are there any unintended consequences of a message like this?

Show this presentation (from Jaclyn Siegel) and have them answer the questions from slides 2 and 7:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FIeTnywR8z_96o8zKuiaeFHJZYHEuZjM3WTNsRHaCL0/edit#slide=id.g41d1bf6412_1_15

After looking at a few different ads, websites or articles, ask them if they have seen a difference in their thinking when viewing media messages.

Media Literacy Week!

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Monday, October 21st

This week is U.S. Media Literacy Week, hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

We will help you celebrate this important set of skills by providing you with resources and lesson plans to help you educate your students on how to handle the flood of information that hits them every day. We will include information on advertisements, stereotypes, and truth and bias.

What is Media Literacy?

The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) defines media literacy as the ability to ACCESS, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, CREATE, and ACT using all forms of communication.

At its most basic level, media literacy is the ability to read media messages, analyze the meaning behind it, who it is coming from, and why they are sending it out into the world.

The video below by Alicia Haywood helps to explain what Media Literacy is and why it is so important.

How can we celebrate this week and educate our students?

All week we will be sending activities and resources for you. Today, start by pre-assessing yourself and your students. Fill out this brief survey, and have your student fill it out too. This will give us some baseline data, and your students will think about what types and how much media they engage with on a daily basis.

We will send the results out to the librarians in our region tomorrow. If you are not located in our region, please contact Liesl.

*Click here for the Media Literacy Week Toolkit from NAMLE.

FYI – Individual membership to NAMLE is free. We encourage you to join!

Children’s Book Festival Author Peter Catalanotto

BlogPosts Featured Resources

Check out Peter Catalanotto at the upcoming Children’s Book Festival held on November 2 at MCC in Henrietta.

Peter Catalanotto has illustrated 48 books for children, 18 of which he has written, including Emily’s Art, Matthew A.B.C., Ivan the Terrier, and Monkey & Robot. In 2008, First Lady, Laura Bush commissioned Peter to illustrate the White House holiday brochure. Peter currently teaches the first children’s book writing course offered by Columbia University and Pratt Institute. He has also visited over 1600 elementary schools in 40 states where he demonstrates his creative process from inspiration to final book. His newest book, Monkey & Robot, Friends and Neighbors, is due for release this month.

Peter is available to schedule school visits October 31st and November 1st. For details contact Wendy Petry.

Re-Imagined ESIFC Workshop Reflections

BlogPosts Professional Development

On Thursday of last week, we had the pleasure and privilege of spending the day with Dr. Barbara Stripling, Professor Emerita, Syracuse University, Former ALA President, and mastermind behind the Empire State Information Fluency Continuum (ESIFC).

Over the course of the last year, Barbara worked with a small team of librarians to go about re-imagining the ESIFC to adapt to our changing information infrastructure, and better align with our national school library standards, the ISTE standards, and the newest ELA content standards. While the Re-imagined ESIFC is very similar to the original version, we found some new aspects that covered topics such as design thinking, social responsibility, multiple literacies, and student agency.

The workshop began with the group brainstorming the changes that have occurred in education over the last ten years. Some of the responses included: 1:1 devices, makerspaces, and the downward slide in print book reading.

We then compared the ESIFC with the AASL standards, the ISTE standards and the Next Gen ELA standards. We examined the commonalities between them, and the unique features of each. This helped us gain an understanding of what is different in this re-imagined version and what aligns well with these new sets of standards. We dug into the framework, and the priority skills, and analyzed some of the new language that is embedded within it and what this new language means. The afternoon was spent personalizing our usage of the ESIFC for our schools. Librarians were grouped by grade levels, so even if they were from different districts, they still found that they had many of the same things in common.

The re-imagined ESIFC includes a large amount of graphic organizers (many are exactly the same), and keeps student learning at the heart of it all. The graphic organizers are licensed through Creative Commons, and can be used freely, and changed to suit your needs. All that she asks is that you credit the ESIFC.

Barbara is a joy to spend time with. Having been a librarian herself, she understands the daily life of a school librarian. Not only is she incredibly thoughtful and intelligent, she displays a soft-spoken humility and sense of humor. If you ever get a chance to see her in person we highly recommend you take the chance.

For more information, and links to the presentation and handouts, you can access the Monroe One ESIFC LibGuide.

Media Literacy Week is Next Week!

BlogPosts Media Literacy

Next week is U.S. Media Literacy Week, hosted by the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)! The mission of the week is to highlight the power of media literacy education and its essential role in education all across the country.

We will help you celebrate this important set of skills by providing you with resources and lesson plans to help you educate your students on how to handle the flood of information that hits them every day. We will include information on advertisements, stereotypes, and truth and bias. Check the blog daily!

Children’s Book Festival Author Jerry Craft

BlogPosts Featured Resources

Check out Jerry Craft at the upcoming Children’s Book Festival held annually at MCC in Henrietta.

Author and Illustrator, Jerry Craft, writes the books he wishes he had when he was growing up. New Kid is a middle-grade graphic novel that has earned five starred reviews, including one from Booklist magazine. The book centers around seventh grader, Jordan Banks, whose parents have decided to send him to a prestigious private school where Jordan struggles to fit in.

Jerry is also the creator of the comic strip, Mama’s Boyz, and the middle grade novel, The Offenders: Saving the World While Serving Detention! (which he wrote with his two sons Jayen & Aren).

His website includes a 3 minute interview with him where he discusses his inspiration and how he got started. (Scroll to the very bottom of the home screen to find it.)

Jerry is available to schedule school visits November 4th and 5th. For details contact Wendy Petry.