Take a break from post-holiday belt-loosening and Black Friday lines to reflect on what you’ve accomplished so far this fall. 

Is there a project that you’re particularly proud of?

Consider submitting it as a lesson plan to School Library Monthly! Details here.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving!  Feels great to have a few days to gather your thoughts and refocus, doesn’t it? To do all of the things that you don’t have time to do during the school year.

Now fast forward a month to the December holiday break.  Wouldn’t that be a great time to catch up on professional reading?

A few weeks ago, Beth Friese and I started talking on Twitter about Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels’ new book, Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action.  With Harvey’s expertise with reading comprehension strategies and Daniels’ role as a literature circles pioneer, we couldn’t wait to get our hands on this book.  And, apparently, neither could many of those who joined in our conversation!

So … Beth is taking the lead in organizing a book club on the Teacher Librarian Ning that will run over our holiday break.  Everyone is welcome, so please order that book (free shipping! on sale!) and join us!

As Beth says,

As some of you may have heard on twitter, we are putting together a book group for teacher librarians and other educators. For our first book, we’ve decided to read “Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles in Action” by Stephanie Harvey and Harvey Daniels. This book matches our current professional focus on inquiry, and promises to give all of us some practical ideas to implement in our schools. We hope this book will be relevant to all librarians, regardless of your school level.

Currently, this book is on sale from the publisher and offered with free shipping here:http://www.heinemann.com/products/E01230.aspx

We are planning to read the book over the winter break. I haven’t quite decided how the discussions will be structured. I’d love any suggestions you have about starting dates or other points such as: should we have a weekly synchronous chat? If so, where? Should there also be a discussion board where you can post anytime? What other modes of communication would enable a rich discussion?

If you are interested in participating, please post your information here so I can keep you updated. (And if you have already posted your info to another book group post here on the Ning, once is great.) In the mean time, order the book and get ready for some great conversation!

Thanks, Beth Friese
Twitter: @librarybeth

Many of us have our copy already and are fighting the urge to read it now.  (My district colleague, though, said she read the first few pages and cried.  She promptly took the book to her principal, who is offering it as a schoolwide read — wow!)

Let’s use this book as a chance to build on the excitement about inquiry that we felt at AASL 2009!

Our school district continues to adopt new 2.0 tools and give students a greater online voice.  A lot of excitement comes with the introduction of these new ways to share what we know.  As we roll out these tools at the elementary level, we spend a lot of time talking about online safety and etiquette.  Digital Citizenship, after all, is one of the key ideas of the NETS*S.

And unfortunately, danah boyd’s recent audience hadn’t gotten the Digital Citizenship lesson when, at Web 2.0 Expo a few days ago, the conference organizers placed a large Twitterwall displaying live Tweets prominently behind her onstage.  Unable to see what others were saying about her and her content, she felt the audience slip away from her and into their own cycles of negativity, a sort of mob mentality focused directly on her.

Backchanneling, or the process of giving live commentary on a face-to-face presentation, it was used to great effect at the SLJ Summit this fall and has, for me, been a real benefit.  I like hearing the Big Ideas emerging from other sessions and feel it gives me a more holistic sense of the value of the conference.  And in LibraryLand, the Tweets tend to be thoughtful, if not plain old complimentary.

So danah’s experience (you can view her keynote here, though the Twitterwall is not represented in the video) shook up many of us, and we engaged in a passionate impromptu conversation on Twitter.  Buffy summarizes both danah’s experience and our conversation on her blog.  Please take a look. 

And after you have, take a moment to think about these questions (Buffy also has some thoughts for you to consider):

1. What Web etiquette lessons have we not yet taught well enough in our K-12 environments so that this can be minimized in the future? 
2. The audience that Tweeted most likely had their real names affiliated with their Twitter account, so we can’t really chalk up this behavior to the oft-referenced idea of online anonymity.  How can we help our students recognize, as Steve Dembo often says, that their online life is their “New Permanent Record”? Could this situation be a teachable moment for our students to practice empathy?
3. Many of us, in some point in our careers, will sit on a conference planning committee.  How did the physical placement of the Twitterwall screen play into the outcome danah experienced? Would moving the Twitterwall so it no longer shared the stage with the keynote have changed the tone of the experience?
4. Before this month’s AASL conference in Charlotte, the AASL Forum listserv had a passionate discussion of live blogging or Tweeting from sessions.  Some saw it as a way to compliment the speaker, other speakers found it rude and a sign of inattentiveness to the moment.  I have to say that in my session in Charlotte, someone sat right up front and was clicking on her cell phone the whole time.  The nerve! I thought, in my best Nathan Detroit accent.  It was only afterwards, when I skimmed the Tweets tagged #aasl2009 in Twitter, that she had thoughtfully Tweeted what she saw as my most meaningful ideas.  It really helped me see where my presentation had resonated.  But if such behaviors hinder you as a presenter, should you have the right to request that people close their laptop lids and put their cell phones away?

Oh, yeah.  And Happy Thanksgiving. :)