"Taking A Seat At The Table"

Old School by alamosbasement

I recently read the article in the New Yorker about Sheryl Sandberg by Ken Auletta. One of the points that Sandberg makes is that women should "take a seat at the table" and be part of the conversation instead of just sitting in the background waiting for things to happen.

With the recent interrogation of school librarians by LAUSD, the cutting of school librarians jobs across the country, and the lack of awareness of that librarians do and are knowledgeable about, as well as my participation at Lab School @ Punahou, I have been thinking about that phrase.

There are only a few librarians participating in this conference. My self,  Dave Wee and sometimes Deb Peterson. The rest of the participants are subject specific teachers, a lot of whom are part of their technology integration teams. But, where are the librarians? They are discussion digital and media ethics, integrating technology into the curriculum, gamification, the filter bubble, and so many more topics, that we in the library profession have been talking about for years and have been implementing.

Whenever I go to these educator professional development programs, I always feel like the loner. I know, I am very lucky to be working at the school where I work at, have the Library Goddess as our advocate, but what about the other school librarians out there? How do we become more a part of the conversation at these conferences?

Yesterday, I actually gave a brief demo about searching for images for reuse because the copyright and fair use question came up.  I had questions about how to teach kids about how to attribute and cite images properly. And at one point, one of my colleagues commented, "Wow..our librarian never even talked about this with us." 

Our colleagues do not even know what it is we know!!! My eyes about popped out of my head.

We need to share, we need to be at less librarian-specific conferences, we need to get out there.

We are now experiencing technical difficulties

Recently, Ambookgeek and I have been attempting to teach the kiddies about RSS readers, specifically Bloglines. I am a Google Reader user so I have been trying to familiarize my self with the Bloglines set up. We were so excited about having teachers who are interested in using this technology until we faced technical difficulties. Mainly, the fact that the site is blocked.

I am really not a fan of filters. First, you order these applications from companies and they are so secretive as to what their list of words are that are used to block sites. Second, it blocks things that are important, like medical and health sites. Third, they just hinder things more than "protect" children. For example, last year, one of the projects the kids had was to look for propaganda images. One of our students decided he would focus on cigarettes and decided to look up Joe Camel. One of the images that came up was (in the word of Michael K.) a peen! And other bits and pieces. Ok! So much for filtering. But to end that story, of course, the kid decides that it would be appropriate to show me. He had a good laugh and then we had the particular image blocked from the school server.

Filters do not really work and I think they are a waste of time.

Returning to the technical difficulties of today, for 2 days we tried to conduct a lesson on RSS aggregators for the journalism class and Ambookgeek tested to see if the students could access the site prior to the lessons. Each time he was able to access the site. But the second we need to demonstrate in class and walk the kids through the steps, they have been blocked. It is so frustrating. We want to be able to use these amazing tools that can help our students and enhance our teaching and it seems that time and time again, there are obstacles. These obstacles seem easily remedied but it is never that easy, is it?

On a positive note, at least we are learning to be pretty flexible and do not let these difficulties get in the way of a good lesson. Though how embarrassing is it when you start a lesson that you are excited about and then it does not work? Yikes!