findingEducation’s Digital Teachers’ LoungeTips and insights from the findingEducation team.

As the founder of the Global Coalition Project, Bill Reilly has united classrooms around the globe through his vision to promote peace and global understanding. A social studies teacher at Bethlehem Central Middle School in Delmar, N.Y., for the last 16 years, Reilly was named one of Disney’s Educators of the Year in 2006 for his exceptional ability to teach “real world” lessons. Two years prior to that, he was chosen by the American Councils for International Education to represent the United States in a Eurasian/American teacher exchange in Azerbaijan.

FindingEducation met Reilly while attending the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS) conference last week. Reilly described watching his students meet another group of students in Belize for the first time through an online video conference. “It was like two groups meeting aliens for the first time,” he said. “They were such different and diverse cultures, and they had such an interest in learning about each other.”

fE: What made you become a teacher?

BR: I was an archeologist for a few years and then an owner of a rare coin store. So I always had a love for history. I then walked into a children’s home one summer, thinking that I would work with kids for a summer until I decided what business to go into, and I never left working with children after that. I teach ancient history to sixth graders.

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Subject: History, Social Studies
Tags: Educator Profiles

Last week, findingEducation interviewed our second anonymous teacher blogger, Mr. B, also known as Bronxteach. Mr. B writes the blog, “Is Our Children Learning?” He also teaches third grade at an unnamed school in the Bronx. Prior to that, Mr. B taught fourth grade for two years at another public school in New York.

When asked why he’s such a tough critic of his own teaching abilities, Mr. B told findingEducation, “I’m doing this because I want the kids to be able to go to college … I just feel like the stakes are really high. I honestly think it’s life or death. That’s how important a good education is for these kids.”

fE: What made you decide to become a teacher?

Mr. B: Towards the end of my senior year of college, my roommate at the time had already been admitted to NYC Teaching Fellows. So he told me about it and I applied. It made sense to me because I’d already done a lot of work volunteering, doing after school tutoring, mentoring and things like that. I thought I would go in and make a difference, so to speak, and then move on to whatever else I found.

fE: Your first year of teaching was a difficult year. Do you think that if you went back and taught the same students that you taught then, you would have a better handle on them now?

Mr. B: Oh definitely! Throughout the year other people would say to me, “Oh, you have just such a tough, such a horrible group.” But I held myself responsible. You set the tone for the environment and the student will get away with as much as you let them get away with. I think it would be a much safer, calmer environment now, but I can think of at least three students who definitely would have been a challenge in any classroom.

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Subject: Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

Alex Grossi.

While studying international development in Kenya as part of his final semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madision, Alex Grossi was inspired to find ways to improve the educational opportunities for students there. After returning to the U.S. and graduating from college, he and a few friends created the Kenya School Libraries Program.

FindingEducation interviewed Grossi, now living in Oregon, over the phone last week. “I never went to Kenya with the intention of doing something like this,” he said. “The opportunity just happened upon me and I couldn’t really say no.”

The Kenya School Libraries Program is slated to have 22,000 books delivered to 12 or 13 schools in Kenya by the beginning of the next school year. The organization’s next fundraising event—a dinner, raffle and silent auction—will be held in Denver, Colo., on March 1. The auction will include original artwork from the Maasai tribe of East Africa.

fE: How did the Kenya School Libraries Program get started?

AG: During my time in a place called Maua, which is in central Kenya, I got to know a principal and a librarian. The principal’s name was Nick Nyagah and the librarian’s name was Eliphas Kimathi. They spent a lot of time talking with me about development and where they saw their country going.

We realized that the excessive amount of [educational] material we have in the U.S could be easily transferred to places like rural Kenya. In essence, the plan was not to build libraries but to furnish them.

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Subject: Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

Shannon McClintock Miller is the district teacher librarian and technology coordinator at the Van Meter Community School in Van Meter, Iowa.  In addition to teaching students and teachers about social media and emerging technologies, she is a sponsor for the National Honor Society (NHS) program, and a wife, mother and artist.

Miller spoke to us about how student voices are transforming education, how her students are taking advantage of their 1:1 laptop ratio and the many ways students and faculty are meeting Van Meter’s mission to “think, lead and serve” in their school and their community.

“I feel that Web 2.0 and these new ways to communicate using technology are two of the main ingredients that are transforming education,” Miller said. “We have laptops, but they’re just tools. What’s changed is the way that we’re thinking and the way that we’re teaching.”

Follow Miller on Twitter at shannonmmiller and the Van Meter Library VOICE at vmlibraryvoice.

fE: What made you choose to become a teacher librarian?

SMM: I always had a love for the library. My mom was a teacher until I was born, so we had a great collection. And my sister Heather and I would play library for HOURS. I share a lot of my old books with my students, and I show them my little cards in the front that Heather and I made up.

I went to college (Iowa State University and University of Northern Iowa) and I majored in elementary education and art and design. After I graduated from college, I stayed home to raise our three children (ages 15, 13 and 4) for 13 years.

I just started teaching in the last three years. When this job opened, because of my art background and my elementary education background, it was the perfect fit. I teach at my kids’ school because that’s my number one job: being a mom and wife.

I also started back to school right away—because in Iowa you have to have a master’s in library science—and I won a couple different scholarships and awards. I graduate in May.

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Subject: Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

Miss Brave is an anonymous blogger and second-grade teacher in the New York City School District. A quick look at the “Labels” section on the right of her blog, miss brave teaches nyc, reveals that she’s had some pretty rough days: breakdowns (22), infinite wisdom of the DOE (14) and school politics (24). But tucked among these categories you’ll also find happy thoughts (32) and kid quotes (35). Every morning she manages to start fresh, because “every day is a new opportunity to recover.”

In an e-mail interview with findingEducation, Miss Brave explained a mantra that she adopted from one of her colleagues: “‘Close the door and teach.’ If I want to sing Sesame Street’s ‘The People in Your Neighborhood’ during social studies, or skip word work one day in order to read the class a book about volcanoes, I’ll close the door and teach.”

fE: What made you choose to become a teacher?

MB: My high school required its students to complete community service in order to graduate, and to complete my hours I volunteered as an assistant at my temple’s religious school. At the time, I had never been around small children before and was terrified of them! But over time, I came to enjoy myself and decided to get my teaching certificate in college.

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Subject: Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

Photo by Jan Muzyczka.

At the National Council for the Social Studies conference in November 2009, the Carter G. Woodson Book Awards honored Dr. Robert H. Mayer for his book, “When the Children Marched: The Birmingham Civil Rights Movement.” Mayer was recognized for “accurately and sensitively” portraying an issue related to ethnic minorities.

FindingEducation spoke to Mayer about locating primary documents, understanding “historical thinking” and examining the civil rights movement.

Images of the African-American children that were marched to jail, decades earlier, still resonate for Mayer. “They experienced the degradation of segregation as much as their parents. So to see in their faces the lack of fear—it just says a lot,” he explained.

A social studies teacher for 12 years and a professor at Moravian University since 1987, Mayer also authored “The Civil Rights Act of 1964,” and numerous essays on teaching.

fE: What sparked your interest in history?

RHM: I’ve always had some kind of interest in history. As a child, I always enjoyed reading about things in the past. I grew up in Cincinnati, OH, and I remember reading about William Henry Harrison, the ninth U.S. president, and being fascinated, because his statue was downtown by the library.

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Subject: History, Other History, Social Studies, U.S. Government, U.S. History
Tags: Educator Profiles

Last week, findingEducation spoke with Michael Stephens, an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University in River Forest, Ill. As the 2009 CAVAL Visiting Scholar in Australia, Stephens spent five weeks of his fall semester riding camels on the beach, as well as lecturing and researching the impact of the Learning 2.0 self-directed technology program.

Stephens coauthored a column in Library Journal for more than two years. He recently shared a column in Digitale Bibliotheek, a Dutch library journal, with Jan Klerk, and engages with readers on his blog, Tame The Web. In 2001, he published a book, “The Library Internet Trainer’s Toolkit, and between 2006 and 2007, wrote two library technology reports on Web 2.0.

fE: What made you choose to teach library science and why technology skills, specifically?

MS: I spent 15 years working in the public library setting. In 1995, the library that I was in was the second in the world to have a Web page. This was at St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Ind. Some of the jobs that I had there revolved around teaching staff what the Internet was, and what we might do with it. I started doing public classes and found that I liked to introduce people to technology.

I got my Master of Library Science in 1995. I started teaching as an adjunct for Illinois University, and realized that this was something I wanted to pursue more. Luckily an announcement about the program funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) at the University of North Texas came into my inbox with a couple weeks left to apply. They funded 10 people to get a doctorate in information science, so they could go into teaching positions in library schools. I applied and got in!

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Subject: Integrated Technology, Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

Before the holiday break, findingEducation spoke with Sarah Houghton-Jan, also known as the Librarian in Black, about her roles as a blogger, lecturer and the digital futures manager for the San José Public Library.

Houghton-Jan told findingEducation that when she’s teaching a customer or student something new, she tries to pretend she’s speaking to her mother because “the unknown is really creepy. And that causes me to show a certain level of respect and patience,” she said. “[M]aybe that will work for other people [but] only if you like your mother,” she added with a laugh.

Houghton-Jan was chosen as a Mover & Shaker by Library Journal in 2009. She is also a consultant for the Infopeople Project and a member of the Library & Information Technology Association’s Top Technology Trends Committee.

fE: Could you tell us how you became the digital futures manager for the San José Public Library?

SHJ: I started out not even wanting to be a librarian, and not being very techy. I was just handed our library’s Web site, at the university where I went to library school, and they said, “You’re responsible for maintaining this part of the Web site. Have fun!” I had no HTML training. So I did just a lot of self-training. And I took what few Web-based classes were available.

When I got out of library school, I was looking to relocate to the San Francisco area and one of the jobs that was available was for a combination Web site manager and technology trainer.

I’d been a teacher for a while, and I’d also now managed a Web site, so that was perfect.

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Subject: Integrated Technology, Other, Uncategorized
Tags: Educator Profiles

FindingEducation met up with Elizabeth Devine at the annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference in Atlanta, Ga. in November. At the conference, Devine was named as one of the NCSS Outstanding Secondary Social Studies Teachers of the Year for 2009-2010. She also hosted a panel focused on helping teachers integrate the study of human rights into their curriculum.

Devine teaches human rights, government and AP history, and she team-teaches an American studies course with an English teacher at Hall High School in Hartford, Conn.

We recently spoke with Devine over the phone. She shared some of her own strategies for helping students take positive action in their communities and on a global scale. “When you talk about how to address the problems of the world it all comes down to one thing, and that’s education, because education is hope,” Devine said.

fE: Tell me about how you got started as a teacher, and how you began the human rights course at your school.

ED: I started teaching in 1978 in West Hartford and one of the first people who had an impact on me was a Holocaust survivor. She was a teacher at the school. We became friends, and together we started to write the Human Rights manual for the state of Connecticut.

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Subject: Social Studies
Tags: Educator Profiles

We first met Sarah Brannen, children’s book author, illustrator and blogger, at the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) conference in Charlotte, N.C., where she cohosted a panel on censorship.

FindingEducation recently reconnected with Brannen over the phone to learn more about her first book, “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” (UBW), published in 2008. “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” features a young guinea pig, Chloe, who is worried her favorite uncle won’t have time for her anymore because he’s getting married.

“The fact that it’s a same-sex wedding is absolutely irrelevant to the story,” Brannen says. But according to the American Library Association, “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” was one of the top 10 most challenged books in 2008, due to ”homosexuality” and because it was deemed to be “unsuited to age group.” The book was also selected as an American Booksellers Association Book Sense pick for Spring 2008.

“Some of the stories that I write are about people, and I illustrate them with animals to keep the story universal,” Brannen told findingEducation.

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Subject: Art, English & Literature, Other
Tags: Educator Profiles