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

Alex Grossi.

While studying international development in Kenya as part of his final semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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!

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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

Helene Blowers is the digital strategies director for the Columbus Metropolitan Library in Ohio, which was recently rated a five-star library by Library Journal for the second year in a row. Named a “mover and a shaker” by the same publication in 2007, Blowers created the Learning 2.0 project, which has been duplicated by more than 700 organizations worldwide.

Blowers also writes a blog called LibraryBytes where she examines trends and offers constructive advice for other lifelong learners.

fE: What made you choose to become a librarian?

HB: By some people’s definition I may not be a librarian because I do not have formalized training. But I have worked in libraries for 17 years.

I work in libraries because I’m passionate about learning. I started as a library page at my hometown library when I was in high school and ended up also working in the library in college, processing interlibrary loans as part of my work-study program. My degree is actually in organizational communications and after college I started doing a lot of  technology training. That was in the early 1990s. From teaching technology at the community college, I then jumped back into libraries from an education standpoint, becoming Charlotte Mecklenberg’s public library’s first library resource trainer.

Now, I’m the digital strategies director for the Columbus Metropolitan Library and although my specific area of focus is mostly in the digital space, it’s really the learning  aspect that keeps me here.

(more…)

Subject: Integrated Technology
Tags: Educator Profiles

danah boyd in a photo by Gilad Lotan.

Last week, findingEducation caught up with Dr. danah boyd at the American Association of School Librarians National Conference in Charlotte, N.C. boyd is an internationally recognized social media expert researcher for Microsoft Research New England, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and an ethnographer, blogger and contributing author to the book “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media.”

boyd explains on her blog that “there are a lot of reasons … some personal and some political” as to why she decided to omit the capital letters in her name. A keynote speaker at the conference, she drew from her research on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to explain how kids use these tools to communicate and to “create digital bodies” to express themselves.

In her online biography, boyd describes herself as a bored and rebellious student that went to “smart kids camp” in the summer but had trouble fitting in until she went online. “The Internet opened the door of possibilities to me. I found other smart kids year round … Strangers taught me so much about the world and about myself,” she wrote.

“Unstructured environments are critical to social learning,” boyd said in her talk. Educators must “work with the grain, not against it.” She told findingEducation, “It’s not about getting kids to be passionate about the things that librarians and teachers are passionate about, but using what kids are passionate about as gateways to learning.”

(more…)

Subject: Integrated Technology
Tags: Educator Profiles