Sonya's Teaching Blog

In spite of having surgery today, I am going to get out an IMWAYR post this week because I have just read so much amazing stuff!  Speak  by Laurie Halse Anderson is an incredible book that I first need to mention comes with content warnings for sexual assault, self harm. These are difficult and yet necessary topics to discuss with young adults - they are sadly a reality for many youth these days and need to be discussed in classroom in supportive ways. Anderson, Laurie Halse (1999). Speak . New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. The book itself includes resources for youth needing support related to sexual assault, though they are USA centered. The first thing I recommend if you are going to discuss this book in a classroom setting is gathering resources that are local and useful to students in your class. Chances sadly pretty high that someone in that class will need these resources. Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak . Book cover care of goodreads.com Laurie Halse Anderson t...

The last bit of my life has been spent creating a website designed for the absolute beginner to learn how to use a 3D printer for education. This project really challenged my skill set, but I am so glad I did it. Introducing: DIMENSIONS: Beginner's 3D Printing for Education This TED talk by Stephen Elford might help spark your interest in 3D printing in education. Creating this project really combined and built on many skills I have learned during the LIBE 477 course. I decided that the best way to make a tutorial on how to 3D print for teaching would be to actually go through the steps of trying to do it myself. One of the most important skills I built up during this course was how to develop, maintain and take advantage of my own personal learning network. It's incredible the help people are willing to offer if you just ask. A good friend has a 3D printer, so I enlisted his help to try setting up a print myself. He recommended software and helped me when I got stu...

Digital Resources: Evaluation and Improvement Plan Resource: ERAC BC Digital Classroom , grades 9-12. Includes WorldBook Online Reference Centre, KnowBC, EBSCO Secondary Mini-suite, Gale in Context Series, and myBlueprint. Analysis: Riedling (2013) recommends analyzing indexes and databases for Accuracy, Authority, Format, and Scope (pp 90-91). Accuracy and Authority : The ERAC BC Digital Classroom is a trusted resource and the available databases are from trusted authorities and are considered to be highly accurate. Format (including accessibility) : Most of these resources are easily searchable, but require some added training to perform more complicated search functions. Some of these resources can be used in accessible ways. For example, EBSCO products support text-to-speech technology, provide transcripts for videos, and a few other tools to improve accessibility. The Gale In Context Series also offers text-to-speech and translation into over 20 common languages (...

One of the great struggles in maintaining a reference collection is the struggle to keep reference materials current. Riedling (2013) recommends that many reference materials be replaced after only 5 years. As the type of person who never likes to throw things out, I struggled with this idea. But it boils down to a quote from Riedling on page 21: "A good reference source is one that serves to answer questions, and a bad reference source is one that fails to answer questions." If a source is out of date, it likely won't answer all questions or, even worse, may answer them incorrectly. Reference librarians connect people with questions to sources with answers. Image care of Careers 360 . The quote by Riedling above gets to the heart of the role of the reference librarian. Be it maintaining collections, educating students, or performing reference interviews with students, we need to do our best to make sure questions are answered. But how do we do this in the age of ...

This week I discovered the amazing book The Singing Bones  by Shaun Tan. Shaun Tan is best known for the wordless narrative  The Arrival , a somewhat abstract (and yet universal) look at what it is like immigrating to a foreign country. The Singing Bones  is inspired by the classic tales by the Brothers Grimm. Cover of Shaun Tan's The Singing Bones . Image from Amazon.com Each of the Grimms' tales is represented by a single image. Tan first created sculptures for each tale, and then placed them in a scene before taking a photograph. In the book, each image is accompanied by one or two paragraphs from an English translation of he original tale. "Little Red Cap", from The Singing Bones . Image care of My Best Friends Are Books . The images are beautifully done and convey so much expression and each really does tell a story.  "Hansel and Gretel", from The Singing Bones . Image care of Booktopia . Even the tales I was unfamiliar with, I rea...

In one of my classes, we have been discussing books in a weekly cycle, inspired by the Twitter hashtag #IMWAYR (it's Monday, what are you reading?) so I thought that I would share my thoughts on some of my book discoveries here on this blog on Mondays! I'm going to discuss adult books, children's books, but mostly young adult books, as they are a favorite of mine. Hopefully you will be inspired to do some reading of your own. This week, I want to share with you an amazing children's book by Rukhsana Khan called The Roses in My Carpets . The Roses in my Carpets  book cover care of goodreads . This book was published first published in 1998 and is now many years old, but I think it is becoming a classic and must-have of children's books in schools. It's an incredible story exploring some deep and deep themes in a way that makes them accessible for young people. The story is of a young boy living in a refugee camp and experiencing many hardships, but creat...

Reading Dalton and Grisham's Love That Book: Multimodal Response to Literature , the authors describe using "glogs" as a response tool for students showing their learning from a piece of literature. Glogs are multimedia posters created digitally - they can contain images, graphics and text like a regular poster, but also video, audio, links or even 3D, virtual reality, or other manipulable features. A screencap of a glog that appeals to the geologist in me. Access the interactive version from Glogster here . They are meant to be interactive and give multiple ways to respond to an inspiration such as a piece of literature. More and more, teachers are incorporating student choice into projects they use to show their learning. I have particularly been inspired by author and educator (and one of my professors during my B.Ed), Jennifer Katz (2012) and her work in this area, as well as educator and advocate for inclusive education, Shelley Moore. Jennifer Kat's...