UPDATED

A three-day meeting organized by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, or NLS, will bring together students, librarians, educators, and other specialists in the field of Braille literacy. The Braille Summit (June 19-21) will address five primary topics—Braille Readers, Braille Selection (or collection development), Braille Production, Braille Technology, and Braille Literacy & Promotion—with panels and breakout sessions focusing on each. Representatives of the Department of Education, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, and the Council of Schools and Services for the Blind will also participate in a conversation about higher-level Braille policy. Exhibits associated with the summit will showcase new Braille technology in interactive ways.

The meeting takes place at the the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Mass. A complete event schedule is posted online.

According to the Library of Congress, the summit is the first Braille-centered event of its size and scope. However, advocates for improved access to reading regularly participate in major literacy-focused meetings. Karen Keninger of NLS gave a presentation at last December's International Summit of the Book in which she discussed services for blind readers in the context of large-scale book digitization projects and other emerging reading technology, pushing for the development of more and better reading options for the blind. The upcoming summit may help accelerate such developments with Braille—which Keninger calls "the only true form of literacy" for the blind—as a vehicle.

Posted by Amy Wickner at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I imagine that you are all chomping at the bit, ready for summer to be here so that you can rest, relax, and spend some time outside of the classroom.

If you are looking for material to read that has a little weight to it, I've been collecting titles that seemed like they'd be interesting to peruse over the summer. They are all education-based, so you can enjoy (or dislike) them guilt-free! And once you've read them, feel free to drop us a note here at BookMarks. We'd love to hear what you thought.

Enjoy.

The Autistic Brain : Thinking Across the Spectrum, by Richard Panek and Temple Grandin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential, by Deborah Kenny (HarperCollins, 2012).

Confessions of a Bad Teacher: The Shocking Truth from the Front Lines of American Public Education, by John Owens (SourceBooks, Forthcoming: August 2013).

Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy, by John Wood (Viking, 2013).

Educating All God's Children: What Christians Can—and Should—Do to Improve Public Education for Low-Income Kids, by Nicole Baker Fulgham (Brazos Press, 2013).

From Village School to Global Brand: Changing the World through Education, by James Tooley (Profile Books, 2012).

Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America's Children, by Sarah Carr (Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City, by Barbara J. Miner (The New Press, 2013).

May This Be the Best Year of Your Life, by Sandra Bornstein (CreateSpace, 2012).

Memoirs of a Recovering Teacher, by David Peterson with Peter Davidson (Sweet Memories Publishing, 2013).

No Citizen Left Behind, by Meira Levinson (Harvard University Press, 2012).

Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America's 45,000* Failing Public Schools, by Ron Berler (Berkley Publishing Group, 2013).

Saving the School: The True Story of a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids and a Year in the Crosshairs of Education Reform, by Michael Brick (The Penguin Press, 2012).

Searching for Hope: Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America, by Matthew Tully (Indiana University Press, 2012).

A Teacher Grows In Brooklyn, by Albert Mazza (Mill City Press, 2011).

Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America, by Heather Kirn Lanier (University of Missouri Press, 2012).

Tilting at Windmills: School Reform, San Diego, and America's Race to Renew Public Education, by Richard Lee Colvin (Harvard Education Press, 2013).

"We Live in the Shadow" Inner-City Kids Tell Their Stories through Photographs, by Elaine Bell Kaplan (Temple University Press, 2013).

Posted by Catherine A. Cardno at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A boy takes time away from the bandsaw to practice cello in the middle of the machine shop. Teenagers stay up all night coding, pound some sodas, and stay up for a few hours more. A short girl alternates between machining custom parts and helping test a robot chassis by standing on it. A class cheers as a longshot design fix miraculously works.

Such scenes pepper the pages of The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts (Crown, 2011), journalist Neal Bascomb's profile of a Dos Pueblos High School team's quest for victory at the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship. The team was drawn from the senior class of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy, brainchild of teacher and FIRST mentor Amir Abo-Shaeer. As the push continues to raise engineering's profile among the STEM subjects, Bascomb's book offers a look at an established program for engineering education.

FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway (among other devices and technologies). Following the January announcement of a year's challenge, FIRST teams are given a kit of parts and four months to build robots that will compete head-to-head or in "alliances" in multipart sports-based trials.

The 2009 game, Lunacy, incorporated basketball-like elements—download animations of the game from the FIRST online archives to see more. Education Week bloggers profiled the 2010 and 2012 iterations of the FIRST competition: robot approximations of soccer and basketball, respectively. The 2013 competition required students to build robots capable of hitting targets with frisbees.

Bascomb sets up a "ragtag band of misfits" narrative in The New Cool early on: "The group had a 'bad spirit' about them," he writes. He is careful to emphasize the diversity in personalities and talents among the students on the Dos Pueblos team, but manages to elide the fact that the D'Penguineers (as the team dubs itself) were one of the more affluent teams competing in the 2009 FIRST challenge. The contrast between the money, supplies, and services available to them and those accessible to some of the other teams profiled in the book can be jarring.

Reviewing The New Cool in the Christian Science Monitor, Kate Vander Wiede wrote, "Amir's academy is the kind of solution that could fix public education; Kamen's vision might save the nation." Never mind that money for FIRST teams and their space and equipment has to come from somewhere. While FIRST provides a kit of parts to each participating team, the more affluent teams have the money and tools to grow their projects far beyond the basics.

FIRST figures in the STEM AmericCorps initiative announced in April, which may at least help alleviate the gap in advisor expertise between FIRST teams. Growing attention to—and outside funding for—STEM projects may encourage schools to found their own robotics or engineering challenges, as 2013 National Teacher of the Year Jeffrey Charbonneau did.

While The New Cool has been described as a "feel-good story," it actually illustrates how difficult it can be to balance different definitions of success: Is it possible to win and to learn? For a team to be inclusive and competitive? Amir Abo-Shaeer offers his students this nugget of wisdom about what their collective goals should be: "It's more important we build something cool than win the game."

His attitude echoes what school technology specialist Laura Reasoner Jones wrote in a 2009 essay about her after-school robotics program:

How can I allow them fail? ...I want each child to learn from mistakes, to take risks and experience the consequences of risk-taking. I don't want to rescue kids. I want them to learn to rescue themselves.

In the initial meeting of the new Dos Pueblos High School team, organized to hash out first priorities and a work plan, Bascomb observes:

At the end of the strategy session, Amir made two other additions to the first column. The first: 'fit and finish.' He wanted their robot to look professionally made—even beautiful—not a machine that looked cobbled together in the dark. In a way, this is a rejection of the Maker movement as an aesthetic and philosophy of openness in design.

Abo-Shaeer values craftsmanship but, more than that, he does not want a final product with its guts showing. The scene reminds us that FIRST is no homegrown Maker project; it's sponsored by major corporations and a kit of parts is provided. Funding for Abo-Shaeer's Engineering Academy at Dos Pueblos hangs on the D'Penguineers' success; all the more reason their robot needs to look good.

The tone Abo-Shaeer sets for his team is halfway between "fail quickly"—an entrepreneurial standard—and "measure twice, cut once" common sense. As a former architecture student with plenty of model-building experience, I found myself nodding in recognition at the machine-shop scenes, shaking my head at every instance of careless planning. Bascomb aims for balanced descriptions of the design-build process for a general audience—neither too detailed nor vague—and mostly succeeds. Abo-Shaeer has an engaging way of breaking down physics concepts, and Bascomb does a good job of documenting his explanations as well.

One of the best scenes in the book comes early on, when the challenge kickoff event has ended and students rush the pit to rifle through supplies and wildly imagine robot designs. Lest we forget—what with their talents and professionalism—they're kids at play.

More than a book about robotics, business involvement in education, or the perils of coding while sleepy, The New Cool's greatest appeal for teen readers may lie in how it completely throws out the antiquated jock/nerd dichotomy. Bascomb recognizes that high school is often organized and experienced more through networks and multiple, overlapping associations than through cliques or hierarchies, and has produced a positive portrait of such dynamics in action.

Read an excerpt from The New Cool below (posted by Crown Publishing Group on Scribd):

The New Cool by Neal Bascomb - Excerpt by Crown Publishing Group

Posted by Amy Wickner at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank seems fairly established in the canon of young adult nonfiction. Most of us have read it, mostly before graduating from high school. It was even turned into an interactive iPad app earlier this year. First edited for publication by Otto Frank, Anne's father, the diary was republished in a Definitive Edition (Doubleday, 1995) that restored numerous passages redacted from the original document.

According to School Library Journal, a parent in the Northville, Mich., public school district has brought a challenge against the district's use of the Definitive Edition in classrooms. She argues that several of the restored passages are too sexually explicit for middle school readers, though others see these parts of the text as key elements of Frank's coming-of-age story. Marta Murvosh of SLJ interviewed the parent, Gail Horalek, and offers more background on the challenge.

Murvosh also spoke with several librarians, including Barbara M. Jones of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, who reflected on the ethical and professional pressure that parent challenges bring to bear upon school librarians. As we've seen in numerous recent instances of banned or challenged books, processes for approving and revising reading lists vary from district to district, and even resolved challenges can be re-opened or even reversed when new voices enter the conversation. It can be hard to predict when broad community support will and won't sway the outcome of a book challenge.

Posted by Amy Wickner at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Today the New York Public Library revealed a new design for the Donnell Library Center, part of the library's flagship building on 53rd Street in Manhattan. The award-winning design by TEN Arquitectos centers around multi-floor stadium seating and features a large glass facade for natural daylighting from the street level. Stacks line the perimeter of each floor but, as The New York Times reported, the new library "emphasizes places to congregate more than shelves for books." Read the Times article for background on the real estate dealings behind the new library launch—the building is slated to re-open in 2015—and the NYPL press release for more images of the building.

Could this kind of design succeed in a school library? How are school libraries using architecture to emphasize play, social interaction, and creativity?

Posted by Amy Wickner at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's been a while since we've done a book list here at BookMarks, but I have a growing pile of books at my desk from the last academic year that I thought would be fun to share. They involve unusual lesson plans and ideas that you might be interested in as summer approaches, things wind down, and you have time to decompress and think about your plans for the coming year.

Being Visual: Raising a Generation of Innovative Thinkers, by Bette Fetter (Grape Lot Press, 2012). According to Fetter, approximately 70 to 90 percent of the information received by the brain arrives via visual channels. The current test-focused education system fails the majority of students because it neglects visual clues, she says. In this book she discusses different learning styles, visual study techniques, effective writing strategies, and the visual needs of students with autism, ADD, and dyslexia.

The Coombes Approach: Learning Through an Experiential and Outdoor Curriculum, by Susan Rowe and Susan Humphries (Continuum, 2012). The Coombes School in the United Kingdom has spent 40 years developing its approach to early-childhood education, an approach for which it is internationally known. This book by the founder and the former head teacher of the school focuses on the school's outdoor classroom and its cultivation as a sustainable environment for children to learn and play within.

From Inspiration to Red Carpet: Host Your Own Student Film Festival, by William L. Bass, Christian Goodrich, and Kim Lindskog (ISTE, 2013). This book was designed by technology integration specialists to bring technology into the classroom. They created a film festival for the Parkway School District, in Chesterfield, Mo., and have pulled together a volume that shares how they did it. (Who knows? The next Tim Burton, Edgar Wright, Michael Bay, or Kathryn Bigelow could be lurking in your classroom.)

Inspiring Writing through Drama: Creative Approaches to Teaching Ages 7-16, by Patrice Baldwin and Rob John (Bloomsbury, 2012). In a world that is becoming shorter and terser as social media and technology-based conversations become standard forms of communication, the authors of this book argue for a creative approach to the development of literacy: using drama to inspire students to become both writers and actors.

Jake's Fishing Facts: All You Need to Know About Freshwater Fishing, by Jake Bussolini (AuthorHouse, 2013). This is a self-published book, but it's written by a retired aerospace engineer who has been freshwater fishing for more than 70 years. It reads like your granddad telling you about the ins and outs of fishing, which you might find useful if you're contemplating throwing in a fishing lesson as part of a field trip.

Serious Comix: Engaging Students with Digital Storyboards, by Eydie Wilson (ISTE, 2013). Wilson uses her own experiences working through the Serious Comix project with her special-needs students and outlines the measures she put in place to ensure differentiated student learning. (For those interested in having their students create their own comics in a digital online environment, this Marvel website is worth checking out.)

Why Think? Philosophical Play from 3-11, by Sara Stanley (Continuum, 2012). Philosophy for Children—also known as P4C, according to Stanley—is a "method of introducing philosophical thinking into the child's curriculum." Everyone is a philosopher at heart, she says, and the methods she proposes are a way of unlocking children's innate curiosity by giving them the tools for "genuine enquiry."

Posted by Catherine A. Cardno at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Cross-posted from the K-12 Parents and the Public blog, by Michele Molnar.

Even in an era when more parents than ever have easy access to information at home via technology, they find libraries to be important, according to a study by The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released May 1.

Pew researchers conducted interviews with 584 parents of children under 18 late last year, and found that:

• 94 percent say libraries are important for their children;


• 84 percent indicate a major reason is that libraries help inculcate their children's love of reading and books; and,


• 81 percent say libraries provide their children with information and resources not available at home.

"Lower-income parents are more likely to say they've used the library's internet or computers than families with higher incomes," said Zickuhr, of her and her associates' findings in the study entitled, "Parents, Children, Libraries and Reading." Of the parents whose children went to the library in the past 12 months, 37 percent went to use the internet. Of those, 43 percent were ages 12-17.

In addition to borrowing books, which is the main reason children went to the library, more than half (55 percent) went to do schoolwork. Among children ages 12 to 17, that is the reason 77 percent went to the library.

Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Margaret Bernstein writes that the rave reviews libraries receive suggest "that some parents respect the library even more than they do their child's school. And that puts libraries in a position of real influence, one they can wield to prod parents to get more involved in their child's academic success."

Zickhur said that among those surveyed, "a big priority of parents [is that] libraries should definitely coordinate more with schools. In focus groups, parents said they wish the libraries would coordinate more with schools-- to make sure enough copies of books on required reading lists are available, or for homework, and so tutors could help with what students are studying,"

For its part, the American Library Association, through its Association for Library Service to Children, offers an online repository of successful cooperative partnerships between school and public libraries.

Pew's full study is available here.

Posted by Catherine A. Cardno at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So many truly awful events have occurred in the last few months, Hurricane Sandy's damage seems like it occurred years ago, rather than a mere 6 months. However, the organization First Book has been busy collecting new books for distribution to homes, community centers, and schools in need in the aftermath of the storm. Due to the generosity of Random House, the organization now has more than 1 million brand-new books to distribute to home, community, and school libraries.

A program or school "in need" (70 percent or more of the students must come from low-income families to qualify, according to First Book) can register to receive these new books if they are located in states affected by the storm.

The books are available to 12 states and the District of Columbia, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) identified as being affected by the storm: Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, West Virginia, and (of course) Washington, D.C.

First Book has long-running programs for schools and groups that serve low-income populations, so even if your school is not located within the FEMA-designated area, you may qualify for books through a different program.

Posted by Catherine A. Cardno at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

What *is* the difference between the Library of Congress and the National Archives?

That's the question posed by Stephen Wesson from the Library of Congress and Stephanie Greenhut from the National Archives in a blog post that was cross posted to the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog and the National Archives' Education Updates blog last week. It's a good question, particularly if you're stuck for time and scrambling to find online visual resources to illustrate your lesson plans.

While both the Library and the Archives make historical documents available to the public, the Library's mission is to serve the U.S. Congress, too, and to "acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain... a comprehensive record of American history." The Library of Congress is actually part of the legislative branch of the government.

The National Archives, on the other hand, is responsible for safeguarding and preserving the records of the federal government, "ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage." The Archives is located within the executive branch.

The collections and holdings of the Library and Archives are a direct result of those missions. The Archives was created in 1934 and is sent every "permanently valuable" record—handwritten documents, maps, film reels, email, etc.—that a federal agency no longer needs to refer to: between 1 and 3 percent of all records created. According to Wesson and Greenhut, that has still added up to more than 10 billion records.

The Library was established much earlier, in 1800, and is the world's largest collection of knowledge and creativity, according to the pair. It holds items in 460 different languages and receives over 10,000 items a day—including two of every item registered for copyright in the United States, which arrive by a variety of means.

Both the Library and Archives have a wealth of free primary resources, images, and classroom material that teachers can use as they create lesson plans in a variety of topics, as I wrote about previously in a link-heavy piece for Education Week Teacher. So if you want a lesson plan on the history of baseball that meets the Common Core State Standards, the Library has you covered.

And if you want to provide your students with a deeper understanding of the roots of the female suffrage movement in the aftermath of the passage of the 15th Amendment, the Archives has your back.

This post was updated to reflect the fact that the Archives only receives between 1 and 3 percent of all federal documents created.

Posted by Catherine A. Cardno at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

The author of a new book on reform efforts in a large urban district offers a school turnaround model that, he argues, can be scaled and applied almost anywhere. In Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools (Oxford University Press, 2013), David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, chronicles dramatic school improvement in Union City, N.J. Kirp believes that not only is Union City's success unprecedented and unexpected, but the district also offers lessons for urban school leaders nationwide.

The tenets of Union City's school success include blurring the lines between cognitive and noncognitive learning; a school culture built around "pride and respect in 'our house' "; and a dedication to high pre-kindergarten enrollment to prepare students for school early. School climate features prominently in Kirp's portrait of Union City, as he argues that teacher, student, and leader buy-in to a positive school culture can hold the keys to rapid school improvement.

Last week, Sara Mead, an associate partner with Bellwether Education Partners who blogs for Education Week wrote that the book "raises some serious issues that education reformers embracing a pro-charter, pro-accountability agenda" should seriously consider.

Mead refrains from endorsing or discrediting Kirp's argument, while citing a number of ways in which Union City might be considered exceptional and not a typical urban district (its size, its relative wealth). Nevertheless, she considers the book an important read for education policymakers, scholars, and leaders. Mead hosted a recent panel discussion on the book at the Center for American Progress, a recording of which is available online.

Kirp has published a number of opinion pieces in connection with the launch of his new book, including "The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools" (The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2013). In response to that essay, another Education Week blogger, Walt Gardner of the eponymous Reality Check, meets Kirp's optimism with skepticism, pointing out that scalability and sustainability are major challenges that Kirp and others may overlook when offering "concrete illustrations" of successful school turnarounds as the basis for national models. Gardner questions the notion of scalability and the search for a national model, cautioning, "Just because a handful of schools manages to overcome such obstacles does not mean they possess a silver bullet."

The threat of teacher burnout also looms large in the narrative of "high-flying schools," says Gardner. Rapid school turnarounds may produce quick results, but a blistering pace of change can be hard to maintain. Gardner argues that this particular sustainability issue has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, and that Kirp's New York Times op-ed may skip over it too easily.

While reactions to Improbable Scholars vary, it has generated a great deal of discussion about the relationship between school climate and school improvement, a debate bound to continue as school climate issues play a prominent role in the education conversation nationwide.

Posted by Amy Wickner at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend