Re: Bay Area National Digital Library Fellows Project-Lessons Learned

From: Kathleen Ferenz (kferenz@SFSU.EDU)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2001 - 13:13:52 EDT

Next message: Judy Drummond: "Re: Your feedback needed, PLEASE!"

Previous message: Leni Donlan: "Re: Bay Area National Digital Library Fellows Project"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@LISTSERV.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Kathleen Ferenz <kferenz@SFSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Bay Area National Digital Library Fellows Project-Lessons
Learned
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks everyone,

FYI - One of my teams are 'fellas' coming this summer! They are from
Pinole Vally High and have an interesting project they will work on. We
will welcome them to our list soon.

I thought I would share our "lessons learned" from this project. Three
and a half years of research and development. Our teacher and librarian
teams from 12 schools working together using digital resources have
demonstrated the lessons learned below. Also included are lessons
learned from our digital library partner, the Bancroft Library at the
University of California Berkeley.:

<fontfamily><param>GillSans</param><bigger>BANDL Lessons Learned and
Documented

Using multiple sources from digital libraries for instruction is best
used in inquiry oriented classrooms. Inquiry oriented classrooms need
new structures and forms of collaboration among students and the
teacher. We call this building community. Building community in the
classroom expressly focused on inquiry will change the look and feel of
the learning environment by:

o changing how students and teachers interact with each other

o making questions as important as answers

o requiring a diverse repetoire of instructional techniques and
assesments by the teacher

o making the classroom environment a welcome place for everyone to
learn and exchange ideas

o promoting respect, responsibility, and clear reasoning

o engaging more students in higher order thinking skills

o allowing for more students to engage in challenging tasks and
distribute the learning so that the knowledge is not held by one
person, but created collaboratively by many

o allowing students to make meaningful connections between the content
and their lives

Curriculum development matters when using materials from digital
libraries. A coherent curriculum helps everyone understand how all the
pieces fit together. When teachers work together and with their
librarian to develop an inquiry-based curriculum it:

o aligns what is actually taught in the classroom to standards

o organizes learning with focus questions not just the content

o effectively aligns classroom strategies that engage students of
diverse interests and abilities

o builds teacher quality as they work together to plan and reflect on
student results

o ensures equity to high standards with public accountability

o transforms teaching from an isolated role to a professional practice

School librarians are teacher leaders who can help teachers in their
school design standards-based curriculum that goes beyond the textbook
to use multiple sources of information. They can:

o help identify new ways to use digital resources with students in
their learning

o design digital pathfinder web pages to support teacher and student
research and inquiry

o be recognized as a resource to the whole school and therefore central
to the reform effort

When diverse groups of teachers come together to work over time within
a professional learning community, they can support each other, despite
dissimilar school contexts, with profound results. Professional
learning communities can support teacher innovation, experimentation,
and reflection. Being a member of the K-12 Digital Fellows Learning
Community:

o influenced how curriculum is developed

o changed how teachers view and use standards

o increased the capacity and desire to learn to use inquiry more
broadly in design and delivery of classroom lessons

o developed new forms of collaboration between the librarian and
teachers

o facilitated new forms of collaboration between teachers from diverse
disciplines

o helped identify new ways to use digital resources with students in
their learning

o increased the capacity of the librarian to become a resource to the
whole school

o advocated for increased awareness and developed new skills in
teaching new forms of literacy such as information literacy, visual
literacy, and multimedia literacy

o introduced a site-based coaching model to support innovative uses of
digital materials in curriculum development and classroom teaching that
utilizes the information resource skills of the librarian

The use of primary historical resources (whether real or digital) in
classrooms fosters inquiry and innovative teaching strategies because
these raw materials provoke so many questions. Primary resources
available online via digital archives require another layer of learning
by teachers and students. As a primary resources provider, the Bancroft
Library has learned that we must minimize the difficulties of using a
digital archive, by:

o designing the archive with novice users in mind; helping people get
right to the images and texts they're looking for, without prior
knowledge of archives

o providing curriculum tools (visual literacy strategies, information
literacy tools, lesson plans, etc.) that help teachers & students use
primary resources effectively

o finding out what topics are most important to teachers and students,
to help us direct funding towards digitizing the "right stuff"

o providing ways to point users to related textual, graphical, and
audio materials in our own and other digital archives

Best,

Kath (class of '97)

</bigger></fontfamily>>Hear, hear!!!!!

>I was honored to participate in the BANDL Institute last summer. They

>really shaped up a model of what education can be.

>Kudos and cheers for my AMF '97 partner, Kathleen Ferenz. We, at the

>Library of Congress, were sooooo sorry we couldn't be there. (Up to

>our necks in this year's Summer Institutes).

>Leni

>Class of '97