A Must Visit Site!!
Grandview Elementary School, Monsey, New York is the home of Grandview Library Blog. The library blog can be found by clicking the library link on the side menu of the school’s home page. It can also be found by googling Grandview Library. The Grandview Library Blog is eye catching and had tons for me to click on. It really wasn’t a blog but a web site with the title of Blog. I explored it for hours! I think Mrs. Chauncey and her students have an excellent grasp of using web 2.0 tools in their school library. It is an outstanding site.On Mrs. Chauncey’s librarian web page, was a U Tube insert with various cookie Monster clips. I loved Cookie Monster visits the library! a must watch! She also had a long list of professional links which I will take time to explore later.If you click on the school newspaper you can find podcasts about a panda study or book talks by Grade Three students, there are even video clips. The home page of the web site is written for parents and extolled the virtues of reading aloud to your child. It provided links to the local library and how to get a library card. It gave detailed lesson plans for the library curriculum and lots of excellent links. One of the links I particularly like was to Scholastic research which examined the importance of libraries and librarians to student performance. Once you started to click on the links the pages became more child centered. The blog button was just one among many (I’m not sure how many parents would have found it or clicked on it if their child wasn’t directly involved and told them to go and look at their blog). Mrs. Chauncey had posted the rules for blogging. Students were not allowed to post photos or use their names only initials and class number. Although this was a safety precaution, and I have been concerned with student safety and the internet I wondered if it prevented students making comments if they weren’t sure who they were talking to. The student’s blogs were journal type entries. They had not been written as a class assignment but by individual students who had wanted to write a blog. Mrs. Chauncey had asked open-ended questions in her comments to their postings to encourage students to blog more. I see these blogs and being real places for the students to publish their ideas and to read the ideas of their peers. It wasn’t just a space for the librarian to review books or the students to publish their book review assignment.This school library also had a School Wiki for Grade Three research projects. I can’t even imagine how Mrs. Chancey keeps up with it all!ONE BIG PROBLEM I couldn’t find the link to the school web page anywhere. It took a lot of looking for the school on Google to find the right school. This letter is from someone who attended a Media Specialist Conference and saw Mrs. Chauncey present. It sums up the web site (taken from a letter posted on http://www.grandviewlibrary.org/ ).”Attended the School Library Media Specialists of S.E. New York conference this Friday March 31st and was electrified by one of the presentations, namely that of a colleague, Sarah Chauncey of GrandviewLibrary.org, an elementary school in Monsey,N.Y.If you visit her webpage www.grandviewlibrary.org you will see the future ladies and gentlemen. As an Alumna of the Palmer School I exhort you:The Palmer School MUST work with Sarah to develop a semester long course (minimum) in sharing her vision of the digital school library posthaste. Her model can be extended into every level of K-12, AND beyond.As a career changer, I took my M.S.LIS at LIU by dint of a Title II grant for leadership in 1994. I may not be a leader, but I recognize leadership when I see it.”
I loved this site!
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