Readers' Advisory: How to Talk About What You WantWhen What You Want Is a Good Book

One of the best parts of any day is when I get to help a student find "a good book." In the library biz, this process is known as "Readers' Advisory." I often call it a "personal consultation," and have a bunch of questions that help me get an idea of what the student is looking for.

What kind of book do you have in mind?
(fantasy, realistic fiction, non-fiction, adventure, mystery . . .)

Robots or dragons (two main branches of sci fi/fantasy)?

Funny? Happy, sad?

Long or short?

If you think of the perfect book for right now, what would be happening in it?

Even when a reader can name a favorite book and wants one like it, it's helpful to go deeper with questions. Two students who love the same novel (say, I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You by Ally Carter) may like it for different reasons -- one may enjoy the action/adventure, and the other likes the characters and the touch of romance. In that case, the Gallagher Girls reader in it for the gadgets and adventure might like Anthony Horowitz's Alex Rider series or Jennifer Barnes' The Squad books, while the reader who loved the strong female characters and the romance might instead go for a Chloe & Levesque mystery, novels by Joan Bauer, or a fantasy like Graceling.

A recent article in School Library Journal has given me a handful of additional questions that I can use to really get at the heart of student reading preferences.

"Are the characters and plot quickly revealed or slowly unveiled?

Is there more dialogue or more description?

Is the story's focus on a single character or on several whose lives are intertwined?

Is the focus of the story more interior and psychological, or exterior and action oriented?"

The answers to these questions give me additional insights into what the student finds appealing in favorite books, so I can suggest books in different genres, fiction and non-fiction, that have similar qualities. Also, just asking the questions encourages students to think about the books they like, and why.

At least one junior high homebase class is planning to develop a group of "class librarians" to coordinate the class book collection and be able to recommend titles to their classmates. I'm looking forward to working with them, teaching them a tool kit of "appeal terms" to hone their Readers' Advisory skills.

Wednesday Website:Open Culture

This one is for all the life-long learners out there. Subtitled "the best free cultural & educational materials on the Web," Open Culture is a project of Dan Coleman, the Director & Associate Dean of Stanford's Continuing Studies Program. As he describes it:

Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community. Web 2.0 has given us great amounts of intelligent audio and video. It’s all free. It’s all enriching. But it’s also scattered across the web, and not easy to find. Our whole mission is to centralize this content, curate it, and give you access to this high quality content whenever and wherever you want it. Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content — it’s all here. Open Culture was founded in 2006.

There are other sites that pull together great educational materials. Many top notch colleges and universities such as MIT and UC Berkeley post readings, syllabi, and video or audio lectures for many of their most popular classes through Open CourseWare projects or iTunes U. TED posts videos of its inspiring and thought-provoking talks on its website for the world to view. Free Technology for Teachers is an award-winning collection of all kinds of freely available websites, with ideas on how they can be used to benefit student learning. I love them all, but a very nice thing about Open Culture is that it's very inclusive in topics and formats, which makes it an awesome place to start.

Students who want extra help, or to learn a language not taught at Paideia, there are links for you. Want to go further into Roman Architecture than you did in World Civ? Learn from a professor at Yale. Psyched to travel, or catch up on the classics of literature? Open Culture links to 20 different top quality travel podcasts and dozens of free audiobook classics you can download to your iPod. And the blog has daily posts that link to all kinds of just really cool stuff -- on Monday it led to a transcript of a 1939 lecture by Alfred Hitchcock on the art of suspense, a great find for all film buffs with hungry minds.

Being a school librarian is a great outlet for a hungry mind. As we work to satisfy student learning needs, we get to learn at the same time. And then pass it on. If Paideia students graduate into a vocation as life-long learners, we'll have done our jobs well.

Alternate Endings

Emily Dickinson meets Dylan Thomas . . .

Friday Poll:Junior High Summer Reading Bowl Favorites

Here it is -- the first Friday Poll of 2010-2011! This one is for Junior High students. Y'all, if you haven't read at least 3 of the following books so you can participate in the Summer Reading Bowl, there's still time. The library has copies of each book, and most of the homebases have copies as well. Send me an e-mail if you'd like to get one from the library.

So, of the six books on the Summer Reading Bowl list, which one was your favorite? Vote in the poll, and if you want to elaborate (or let us know which were your second and third faves, or even if you absolutely hated one of them), go ahead and leave a comment below.

Details about the Summer Reading Bowl will be posted as soon as we figure out the date.

After you vote you'll see the poll results so far.

Wednesday Websites: For Journalism Students (and everyone else)

On Tuesday I talked with the staff of The Forum in Jennifer Hill's journalism class, about Internet research, finding reliable web sources, and fact checking. As I prepared, it occurred to me that all of these skills are the same techniques that all students should be using for their classes and for their personal information needs. Teachers and other grownups would benefit from researching like a journalist as well.

In class we went over a few main points:

• using websites dedicated to verifying (or debunking) political and social rumours, urban legends, chain mail claims, and the like (Snopes.com, PolitiFact.com, and others)

• Google is fine, but use the power tools (+, - and "") to get better quality searches. Consider that Google hits may be weighted in various ways, and go beyond the first few to find more solid sources. Use clues from blogs or Wikipedia to lead you to the information in quality sources. Double-check all facts by finding the same information in one or more quality source (CNN, US government website, primary source, etc).

• make sure that multiple sources are actually different sources (not just the same Wikipedia article in different websites). Do your sources all quote the same primary source? Find the primary source yourself.

• use the Paideia databases (SIRS and ProQuest) as a way to find sources (reports & articles, including AJC archives back to 2002) that have been through some sort of filtering process before being included. CQResearcher has comprehensive reports on current social and political issues

• questions to ask of any website in deciding whether it's reliable enough to stake your journalistic reputation (or grade) on its content
  

Links to all of the websites mentioned in the session are on PiLibrarian's Recommended Websites list, with the tag Journalism.

Welcome Back! (to students and returning books)

Today is the first day of school, and we're in full swing. Yesterday was orientation for all new High School students (reminder -- read your library info flyer very carefully!), and today we've seen groups of junior high students coming to check out a book for a scavenger hunt. Tomorrow and Thursday will be joint Technology/Library FirstClass and library account orientations for all 7th graders, given down in the computer labs.

New book displays are up. After the scorching summer we've had, this theme was a no-brainer:


And this one for junior high students who may be a little behind on their Reading Bowl preparations (check this list to see which titles are available for checkout right now):


And as for all those summer checkouts? The books have enjoyed their time out of the library and they're coming back daily, but no need to rush. The due date for all summer checkouts is not until Friday, September 3, so you're not late yet. Bringing them back next week is fine too. And if there are any that you or your family want to continue reading, just call or send me an e-mail to renew for another 4 weeks (JH students and up).

Welcome back to school!

Wednesday Website:TED & William Kamkwamba

Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED sponsors two annual conferences, one in California, the other in Oxford (UK) to bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). The best talks and performances from TED are made available to the world, for free, on TED.com. More than 700 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. I like to download interesting-sounding TEDTalk videos to my iTouch, and watch them when I have waiting time (like at the doctor's office).

One of this year's Junior High Summer Reading Bowl choices is The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, an autobiography/memoir by a young man from Malawi, William Kamkwamba. When he was a young teen William had to drop out of school. Unwilling to stop learning, he read science books from his village library and managed to build a windmill that generated electricity for indoor lights and a radio. Five years later, when he was about 19 years old, William first spoke about his achievements with co-author Bryan Mealor at TED Global 2007, in Arusha, Tanzania. He was very nervous.






Two years later, after many more achievements and triumphs, William spoke again, at TED Global 2009. A much more confident and experienced speaker, this short talk tells his story of determination, ingenuity and wonder.



Since 2007, William has been able to attend a pan-African boarding school for emerging leaders, begin a foundation to support similar self-help projects in Malawi, and write a blog. A short film about his windmills is being turned into a feature-length documentary. His book is one of my top books of the year (as well as an Amazon.com and Publisher's Weekly Top 10).

And all because 14-year-old William wanted to read his books after dark.