Are you looking to engage your upper elementary students and teachers in online learning activities? Then please consider participating in this popular Web-based simulations activity this term. Many of my past and current students work as behind-the-scenes mentors and role-playing respondents within the story activity — and it’s all free!

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Posted on behalf of UM’s Interactive Communications and Simulations:

UMsimulations - ImagineNation Matters via kwout

Using web-based writing and role-playing, ImagineNation Matters brings to life the stories of significant events, places and ideas in our nation’s history, as well as in our lives today. We think of our project as a kind of embodied storybook, through which upper elementary students can explore a variety of stories ranging from tales of the Underground Railroad, to contemporary stories about healthy eating and physical fitness.

Faculty from the Schools of Information and Education jointly teach a class that runs in conjunction with ImagineNation Matters, in which we work with the University students who serve as ?mentors? to your students, as they in turn act as your teaching assistants with the goal of helping to nurture an array of writing and thinking skills.

Each of our modules is in the form of a story that involves protagonists of the approximate age of your students. As the students “turn the pages” of their virtual storybook, they are prompted with questions to consider and respond to. These questions typically connect a moment from the story with something familiar to the students, framed by an invitation to think critically or to analyze an event that has taken place. Here’s one such prompt from the Our Green State module: “Are there recycling bins in your school lunch room? If you wanted to convince your principal that your school should have recycling bins, what would you tell your principal?” The students’ comments are, in turn, responded to by the university student mentors, who speak in the voices of the characters from the stories. Our belief is that this element of imaginative play, in which students converse with a Great Lakes seaman, or talk with a boy trying to decide whether he’ll risk defending a new friend from the teasing of other friends, can create interesting expressive possibilities for kids, while also presenting them with an engaged, and an engaging audience for their ideas.

If you visit our informational website , you?ll find our story modules for 2012; we’re pleased to be adding a module about economics (”Bracelets, Partners and Economics”) that is based on around students engaged in charitable work. At this site you’ll find descriptive information about each module, including a downloadable document that lists relevant Michigan GLCE standards and benchmarks, and directions on how to view the actual modules and the teacher resources. You’ll also find a link to our public site, where you can view all of our modules in their entirety.

ImagineNation Matters will begin in January 2012, and will conclude in mid-April. You may start in January or later, as suits your schedule. You can participate at a pace that is comfortable for you…each password-protected “tour” is created for the exclusive use of your students and their UM student mentor. I would be happy to respond to any questions that you might have, and my colleague Maurita Holland and I would love to have you join us if you’re interested in doing so. There is no cost to participate–all you need is web access.

Thanks!

Jeffrey Stanzler
University of Michigan School of Education
Director, Interactive Communications & Simulations
Faculty, Educational Studies/Secondary MAC Program
http://ics.soe.umich.edu
stanz [at] umich [dot] edu
(734) 763-5950

UMsimulations - ImagineNation Matters via kwout

The marvelous Peg Sullivan of Smith read yesterday’s post about libraries really focusing deeply on creating conducive learning spaces for students with disabilities. Peg is a great thinker about how library spaces can be used to promote deeper thinking, and as a long-time member of the AASL Standards and Guidelines Implementation Task Force (yup, that’s a mouthful), she has a deep commitment to the AASL Standards that we now refer to as L4L (Peg coined the term).

She said:

“One comment: if I ruled the world, we would be burning traditional carrels. I always find them dark and lonely, sort of like a “time-out.” I would only use them for privacy in the school office or something. There are better ways to “nest”; for example a small table by a window. People need light to think. Carrels are the sleep pod for overworked college students.I had a friend who purchased a number of rockers and put them into a quieter area of her library for the autistic students.  The rocking motion helped them focus, calm down and near by windows and picture/coffee table style books gave them something to look through during bad times.  It seemed to work extremely well.”

She added that she has an upcoming article on study rooms and will give a heads-up when it’s published.

The conversations of the past 24 hours reminded me of something else (really, people, even though I had a Major Birthday this year, did I have to get a sieve where my crackerjack memory used to be?).

One of my former students got her principal to agree to remove the tops of the carrels and open up her space. A very clever repurposing from a very clever librarian. (See her detailed information in the comments below.)

Addie noted on Twitter last night, “Maybe we need to create study carrels 2.0 - focused spaces that don’t feel like detention.”

I’d love to hear from you about Addie’s thought. What IS a study carrel 2.0? Is there still a need for individual learning zones in a school library or learning commons?

I was excited to have one of my grad students visit today. Yay! It’s fun to catch up and hear what people are up to, even if they ARE already done with Mockingjay and you haven’t even started it yet.

Here is one of the many things we talked about today that is resonating with me hours later.

So … we’re making these libraries that are more stimulating, more social, more cooperative, and more interactive.

What are we doing, as a movement, as a profession, as an association, to protect quiet spaces for the kids who can’t function with additional stimulus? Those who would benefit from being squirreled away, perhaps working alone, in a quiet study carrel? Those students — students with Asperger’s or autism, for example — who need hushed comfort to help them focus?

Our classroom colleagues talk all the time about meeting the individual needs students with various special learning or developmental needs.

All. The. Time. In hallways, in professional journals, in books, on podcasts, at conference.

But let’s turn the mirror the other way and reflect on our own practices. As a movement, as a profession, as an association, what are we doing to make sure that our learning commonses (is that a word?) are truly embracing all kinds of learners BEYOND diversity in reading materials?

So, thinking I had just offered up a thoughtful nugget for you to chew on, I was about to click “Publish” when I glanced at the back-to-school issue of School Library Monthly. Well, look what’s on page 52 — “Meeting the Needs of Students with Disabilities,” by Kendra L. Allen and Sandra Hughes-Hassell.

Beaten to the punch by folks far more expert than I!

(Though I hope I get some credit for learning-by-osmosis. My mother was a resource room teacher, my father was a special education director, and my stepmother still works with pre-primary impaired students. Y’all be careful coming to our house for dinner if you don’t enjoy table talk about special education.)

Here are three statistics from Allen and Hughes-Hassell’s article:

- Did you know that almost 14% of K-12 students have disabilities?

- That 90% of surveyed North Carolina school librarians scored themselves a C, D, or F when it came to their knowledge of best practices in special education?

- That only 1 of the 67 survey participants read all of the IEPs for her school? Which, umm, by the way, is kinda like against the law for school librarians to be doing if they consider themselves teachers of those students.

Those are some pretty scary numbers that tell us that this is a huge area for our professional growth!
Whether you’re a Southerner about to enter Month Two of the school year or a Midwesterner just about to start, let’s take a moment and think … if we had taken Allen’s survey about our special education practices, what grade would we give ourselves?

And here’s one final thought. Did y’all know there are books out there about collaboration and the SPECIAL ED TEAM, just like there are reams of published information about collaboration with school librarians? Do we see our special ed colleagues the way THEY want to be seen? As instructional collaborators, co-teachers, and partners? If not, what does THAT tell us?