Tag: youth services

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book review READERS

February READERS Meeting or Taking a chance on a book, and loving it!

READERS is a professional review group that meets to discuss literature for children and teens. It is comprised of teachers, teacher librarians, public librarians, authors, illustrators, UBC SLAIS grad students, BEd students, administrators and others who have a keen interest in the topic. It is supported by the Richmond Teacher Librarians Association. We meet at Kathleen MacNeeley Elementary School Library once a month to discuss children’s literature from picture books to storybook apps and beyond. It is a open, welcoming, flexible group where we talk about what we are passionate about.

The group is fairly new, it only started back in October or November, but it already has a good core of people who contribute literature and ideas from many different professions and points of view. This week was a small meeting with only five members attending due to busy schedules. Lots of things going on just before Easter, report cards, and spring break.

Discussion in our group is fairly fluid. Almost everyone brings something to share, but it’s not a requirement. Sometimes you haven’t encountered anything over the month that you’re really passionate about and want to share with colleagues, some months you just want to listen. We don’t always have time for everyone to share everything they brought, but everyone gets a chance to talk and we often get moving on a theme as you will see from the items mentioned this month. One item leads to similar or “read-alike” recommendations, or items that would be the next step or perhaps an easier read on the same theme.

Items Discussed:

Brushes is an iPad drawing/ painting application. It is more complex than Doodle Buddy with more tool options and a movie/animation option that kids love to play with and gets many oohs and ahhs. It has been used to great success at grade 1/2 library time.

 

 

 

One Gorillia by Anthony Brown. A wonderfully illustrated primate picture book. This book combines counting, introducing the reader to new or different primates than the usual, and has an interesting message about families and belonging. Great for discussions about family, evolution and related species, art, or just a good group read-aloud concept book.

This lead to a discussion of Browne’s style and a look at some of his other books including My Mom, and My Dad.

Simile books are apparently in short supply, and along with My Mom and My Dad mentioned above some other good simile books are: My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks by Hanoch Piven and Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood.

 

Wonder by R.J. Palacio is a middle-grades fiction novel about a young boy with severe facial abnormalities who leaves his sheltered home schooled life and enters the scary, judgemental world of a New York private school. It was anticipated to win several awards at this years ALA midwinter, but surprisingly left without any.

 

 

 

 

Gong Hey Fat Choy! As the Chinese New Year has just passed we have all spent the last month going over our Chinese New Year materials and purchasing new ones. Vancouver is a very multicultural city with a large chinese population and it is important to be familiar with and have resources for a variety of different cultural festivals from Chinese New Year to Valentine’s Day to the Up coming Vaisakhi ( April 14th). Here are a few of our mentions for Chinese New Year:

Celebrating Chinese Festivals by Sanmu Tang is a very comprehensive picture book covering many Chinese festivals.

What the Rat Told Me by Marle Sellier – An illustrated retelling of the Tale of the Zodiac

Chinese Festivals Series by Better Link Press

 

 

 

And of course a Valentines Day story:

The Yuckiest, Stinkiest, Best Valentine Ever by Brenda A. Ferber and Tedd Arnold (author of Fly Guy). This book breaks out of the sappy Valentine’s mold by adding some interesting thoughts and lots of humour. Leon has a crush on a girl and is making a beautiful valentine for her but just as he’s finishing it comes to life and runs away. The valentine is convinced it would be a terrible idea for Leon to give his crush a valentine and seeks out the opinions of those he passes during his escape run. This is a Valentine’s book even boys appreciate.

 

Moving on from the holiday theme we jumped to the non-fiction picture book I am a Pill Bug by Yukhisha Tokuda translated to English from the original japanese. This book has colourful, accurate Japanese styled illustrations made from paper collage that gives the pictures and engaging texture. (I even felt the page at one point to make sure the paper wasn’t glued directly onto the page.) This book was a group member’s favourite because of it’s international science class or home science connection as pill bugs can be found almost everywhere in the world. Oh, and it’s written from the perspective of the bug. So much fun!

Jumping up a few grades, one of our members demonstrated paper bag booktalks. She used Word Nerd by Susin Nielsen for her example. For the book talk the presenter gathers items significant in the story and collects them in a paper bag to act as memory aids and visual aides for their presentation. Much more fun than your average book report!

Each item is pulled out of the bag in sequence as the presenter talks about the book. The items serve as notes and visual aides.

 

 

Simple and loveable is The Black Rabbit by Phillipa Leathers. Adorable illustrations and simple text tell the story of a small white rabbit who is scared of his own shadow and goes to great lengths to escape it.

 

 

 

 

 

Willy & Max by Amy Littlesugar, illustrated by William Low is the semi-biographical story of two boys friendship and the theft of art during the Nazi occupation. Members of the group discussed how holocaust literature for elementary as body of literature has continued to grow over the decades and more stories are published every year. While the classics such as The Diary of Anne Frank are still popular with youth there are many more options out there for a wide range of ages and reading levels. Another book mentioned in the theme was Rescuing the Children, Stories of  Kindertransport by Deborah Hodge. This book is a collection of nonfiction, biographical stories with an informational section in the back giving the survivors’ stories more context for the reader.

 

 

 

I discussed The Alchemist (The Immortal Nicholas Flamel Series) by Michael Scott. As an avid reader of fantasy and fiction involving mythologies I approached this series with hope and caution. About a quarter of the way through the first book I was pleasantly surprised, and my appreciation for the author and series grew from there. This fast paced, well written series follows the twins Sophie and Josh as they are caught up in a supernatural battle between ancient beings once worshiped as gods, demi-gods, and heros. They are pulled along by Nicholas Flamel, the infamous, immortal alchemist from fifteenth century France. Nicholas has spent his immortal life protecting the Book of Abraham the Mage from the “Dark Elders,” brewing the Elixer of life every month from an ever changing recipe from the book. But now, Dr. Dee, servant of the Dark Elders, has stolen the book, except for the last two (vital) pages that Josh managed to tear out during a struggle. Now Sophie and Josh are involved an an immortal battle as both sides believe them to be the twins of prophecy and the key to victory.

The series is fast paced (the first novel takes place in 72 hours) and well plotted. World mythologies are woven throughout as new characters are introduced to the mix. But the most outstanding feature is the authentic, convincing, and engaging characterization of Sophie and Josh. I follow the series for them, not for the next magical battle (although those are fun too).

Recommended read-alikes from other members: Shadow Magic Series by John Lenahan and any of Rick Riordan’s series.

There most likely will not be a meeting in March due to spring break and many people taking holidays but we will be back for sure in April. If you are in the Vancouver area and are interested in coming out leave a message for me on the blog and I will get in touch with you. We are always welcoming new members.

 

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Aggregators: Worth the Time? or A comparison of Symbaloo and Netvibes, Part 1

What are aggregators? They are not domesticated alligators used in “back to nature” agricultural programs. They are applications and tools that allow a user to collect information from disparate sources and present it in one place. My colleges Alison Dodd and Michele Ramos have a very good definition of Aggregation on the HLWiki Social Media Glossary:

Aggregation refers to collecting content from multiple social media sites (such as Facebook or Twitter) with the goal to organize and simplify users’ social networking experiences. While individual sites may offer unique features specific to that site, social networking aggregation collects the content that is produced on several sites and delivers it in a less overwhelming way. Aggregating content is performed by using tools to draw information from different sites into a single space. Aggregation services provide tools and widgets — either downloadable or web-based — that function to consolidate friends, bookmarks, messages and profiles in easy, digestible formats. Aggregation is done by an application programming interface (API). Some examples of aggregation include FriendFeed, Flock, TweetDeck, SocialNetwork.In, SocialURL, Digsby, Trillian/Adium, YooNo, and OrSiSo.

As someone who, prior to this unit, didn’t even use an RSS feed (such as Google Reader) I found the introduction to all these different aggregators extremely interesting. But how useful would I find these applications personally and as an LIS student? So I took two of the aggregation applications presented in the module Symbaloo and Netvibes, set up accounts and tried them out.

This post will focus on Symbaloo:

Symbaloo is an aggregator that colourfully and graphically presents your personalized bookmarks, RSS feeds, and some commonly used web applications like Google search and Wikipedia search. It is presented as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) portal or a launch pad. There is a nice demonstration of the platform here.

The application is very simple and easy to use, but it does take time to customize the webmix for your personal use. I spent over two hours working on my “desk” webmix for all the bookmarks and feeds that I use regularly. I didn’t spend much time trying to make it pretty, but  a user has some options (tile arrangement, colour, icon) to customize the look of the interface to make it graphically appealing. This is what my personal webmix currently looks like:

My Symbaloo

I enjoyed making the webmix, but I don’t find it particularly useful for myself. I have my frequently used bookmarks well organized within my Safari browser and my less used bookmarks I currently collect on delicious. Sites that I check everyday are shown in my top sites display every time I open up a new tab in my browser.

For RSS Symbaloo works moderately well. If you click on the feed tile, the five latest posts will (usually) show up in the centre of the webmix, but it only displays the title of the post and the date it was posted. You have to click on the post to read it and there is nothing indicating if there is a new unread post.

The widgets that allow you to interact with different applications (like Google) from the centre box are few and most of them are already integrated into many browsers. Many of the widgets don’t work well and some not at all. I was excited to see a CBC Radio widget, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it to play.

For these reasons I don’t think I will continue with Symbaloo for my own personal use but there are a few ways I could envision using this professionally:

  • Webmixes are hosted in the cloud so if I was switching workstations frequently I could quickly and easily access all my bookmarks.
  • Webmixes can be made public, searchable and tagable. Webmixes would be a great way to share a collection of resources with your network in a friendly and appealing way. For example I found this great webmix for online children’s books:
  • Webmixes are very simple and visually appealing so they would be great portals for younger users. Here is an example of a webmix created by Melissa Techman, school librarian and tech lead, for students in kindergarten to grade two for curriculum related webpages.

Next up: Netvibes.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to…

Aggregators: Worth the time?

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LIBR559M

Creating social capital through collaboration or getting together to make it worth your while

So topic of the week in Social Media class is collaboration, more specifically collaboration with social media. We also worked in groups on a wiki entry. Our group did a wiki entry on social media for youth services:Social Strategies for Youth Service Librarians.

While doing research for the wiki I rediscovered a youth services program using social media and involving collaboration, (or maybe cooperation in some cases. For the difference see Jessica’s excellent post.) The program is TeenRC. It is a social networking site for teens that revolves around reading, writing, literature and other materials. It was developed and is administered by dedicated youth services librarians, but it’s content is teen created. Teens create a catalog of books they have read or would like to read, they can write reviews, share their own writing, have discussions (not just limited to literature) in the forums, and there are regular special events like author visits and interviews, or contests.

It seems like a fantastic site with a lot to offer but libraries have tried to run sites like this before and since without success. Either the administrators lose funding or interest or the teens don’t join. One of the things that really makes this site work is the number of libraries collaborating on the project. There are 332 participating libraries with TeenRC.  Not all of those libraries have creative control over the project of course, but they are involved and this means the site is available and suggested to a much larger audience. If you can get a small number of teens to join from each of those libraries you end up with a pretty good user base. If they like it, they will spread the word and you will get more teens joining in. And they are more likely to like it, the more people that are on it because social networking sites grow in social capital as they grow in size. This make a larger social networking site more valuable to an individual and more likely to stick around.

Now I’m only brushing on social capital which is a complex sociological theory and I can’t find the article I originally read about social capital and social networking sites (if anyone has a good link, post it in the comments!). As I understand it and remember it, social capital is the value we derive from our social networks (online, offline, professional, social, familial, etc.). The larger and more connected our networks the more value they have. The strength of the connections is important too, so there have to be a balance between quality and quantity. (Think of the person with 1000 facebook friends, does he really know all those people, does he get anything beyond a number on his page from them.) For a social networking site to be of value it have to have many subscribers, thereby offering it’s users the opportunity to expand and strengthen their social networks.

The same rules apply to libraries trying to use social media in programming. You have to use existing social media with enough social capital, or at least potential, or it won’t offer the user anything and the project will flop from lack of users. Or in the case of TeenRC, create your own social networking site, but collaborate with others to ensure a good start up group size and encourage growth from there. The collaboration also means reaching people geographically distant with is one of the great affordances of online social networks.

I really like TeenRC. I haven’t really gotten into the site because to take full advantage of it you have to be registered and to be a registered user you have to be a teen, but I like the idea and I will follow it’s development. I hope it continues to grow and change and live.

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