Davis JUSD Library Program Saved!

The Davis JUSD was faced with an almost overwhelming budget deficit of 4 million dollars. The Davis community has always played an active role in the school system and so they tackled this problem head on. The Davis Schools Foundation, which had been formed several years ago, spear-headed a campaign to raise $365 (A Dollar A Day Campaign)for each child. While they didn't quite reach that goal, they did raise almost $2 million in 2 months. The librarians in the district joined the campaign by promising to walk 182.5 miles each (half of 365) and getting pledges. We turned in our money to the Foundation last night. We managed to walk over 1200 miles and amassed close to $63,000.00. (An additional thousand came in after we "cut" the check.) The music program solicited donations and held concerts to raise over $200,000.

The Governor's budget revision helped to close the gap and now instead of 112 teachers (including librarians, music teachers, science prep teachers, and classroom teachers) there are only 11 people still on the cut list due to declining enrollment. Our hearts go out to those eleven, but we know that they are incredibly talented teachers who will continue their careers with other districts that are still growing and in need of teachers. The decisions will not be final until they are voted on at the Board meeting on May 21st, but we are confident that the administations recommendations will be approved.
While communities around us sometimes make fun of Davis for its liberal thinkers, slow-growth policies, and environmental emphasis, it is a wonderful place to live and work. Very few other communities could come together so quickly and with such enthusiasm, spirit and generosity to save their school programs. The Davis Schools Foundation is the most amazing group and I cannot thank them enough for their vision, creativity, and untold hours, days, weeks and months of work.

David Warlick workshop

Today I was lucky enough to attend a workshop by David Warlick on redefining literacy. Instead of the 3 R's, he contends that the basics are the 4 E's: exposing truth, employing information, expressing ideas compellingly, and ethical use of information.
In the workshop he started by showing us some tools that enable us to continue to be life-long learners. No longer do we need to seek out information. We can construct a personal learning network that has information come to our personal networks.
The first tool was del.icio.us. What was really cool is that he demonstrated a search on del.icio.us on learning 2.0. Guess what popped up in his search results? School Library Learning 2.0 and Classroom Learning 2.0! Yeah!
He showed a way to search in del.icio.us to find sites that others have tagged. For instance if you wanted science articles you could type in the url
Netvibes is an aggregator that is geographically laid out, making it ideal for school use.
He also talked about social networking using nings and diigo. In diigo, you can sign up members (your class) and then they can see your sticky notes.
VoiceThread is a free service to record your voice comments to pictures. One idea was to post a group of pictures and then have students put the pictures in an order that could tell a story and then narrate it.
PicLens is a estension that works with Flickr to show all the pictures that share a tag in a museum display. Flickr Storm gives you the ability to copy images from
Flickr at home and then students can access them in Flickr Storm (which may not be blocked). He talked about Creative Commons and how that differs from copyright.
For wikis he suggests wikispaces, pbwiki, wetpaint.
Blogpulse is a way to search the blogosphere. When doing a search in blogosphere you can click on trends and it graphs when your search term was most mentioned. It will graph several terms - ie when was Clinton, Obama and Edwards blogged about last month. Ustream.tv is a site where you can broadcast your own TV show.

Notes on the presentation are on http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfvv7h4m_1047stm9t8q were taken by Sarah Diruscio of Grant school district.

So much of what he talked about today, especially using information ethically and efficiently, falls under the umbrella of information literacy that is taught by teacher librarians. How sad that 21st information literacy skills are being recognized at the same time that teacher librarians are being laid off due to the current budget crisis.