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I love to bring my background as a published author, freelance journalist, and technical communicator into everything I do at the library, whether it is judging a short story contest, providing students with feedback on their creative writing, talking with students about the books they read for entertainment, working with them to analyze narrative structures, or collaborating with teachers on an unit plan that uses technology to boost teaching and learning.
My goal is to spark conversations about what the students themselves are learning, get students thinking about how they can construct an effective narrative around what they are learning, and help them select the right technical platform and/or medium to communicate what they have learned and prompt others to take specific actions in response.
The Listen to us! Graphic Novel program is aligned with California Common Core Standards for Grade 6.
Intended for use by a collaborative teaching team that includes a Teacher Librarian and a 6th grade Social Studies/English teacher, this Unit Plan encourages students to explore a social justice issue of their choice, and use it as the basis for creating a short graphic novel (fiction or narrative nonfiction). Students use a variety of technologies during the process, including Generative AI, book publishing and creation software, and AI-powered translation services. Given the known issues with Generative AI producing plausible but inaccurate information in response to queries, students are encouraged to the STIC Model to assess the relevance, reliability, and accuracy of all information used in their projects.
Learners will receive a copy of every group's graphic novel. Students with family members who speak languages other than English at home will be issued a set in that second language as well. The library will include complete set of graphic novels in a special electronic collection in their OPAC for patrons to check out in the future.
The project culminates in a community-wide Socratic seminar-style gathering, at which students will present their graphic novels and answer questions about their chosen civic engagement topic, the narrative in their graphic novel, and the foibles of AI translation.
Created in collaboration with Abby Gratzer-Owens
The Think Like a College Student Film/Podcast project is aligned with both the California Common Core Standards for Grades 11-12 and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.
Intended for use by a collaborative teaching team that includes an Academic Librarian, a Teacher Librarian, and a high school teacher of any subject, this Unit Plan equips current high school seniors with the information literacy skills they will need as a college student. Our unit plan invites students to research a political, historical, moral, scientific, literary, or contemporary social issue of interest to them; research and analyze positions on that issue; form an opinion; and communicate that position to their community in a film or podcast format. Students are also asked to participate in a peer review process, and write journalist-style reviews of each other's finished works. Assignments are intentionally designed to build on each other over the course of the project so that the final project feels like a natural extension of all of the work that has come before.
The project closes with a community wide film / podcast festival. Attendees will be issued a collection of the student reviews to use as a program guide for the festival. Finally, the finished projects will be published online for viewing by community members unable to attend the festival in person.
Created in collaboration with Angel Rafael “Ralph” Vázquez-Concepción
Image by Alexandra Haynak from Pixabay
Can we use generative AI technology to explore history in a new way?
Intended for use by a collaborative teaching team that includes a Teacher Librarian, a Grade 7 History / Social Studies teacher, and (optionally) a computer science teacher, this Unit Plan goes beyond traditional biography reports or Living Wax Museum projects to invite students to use Generative AI technology to design, program, and deploy AI chatbots to take on the personas of actual historical figures. To successfully engineer their chatbots, students must delve deep into the past to understand how information flows, local conflicts, global issues, and their historical figure's role in life would have impacted their access to information.
What would their historical figure have known?
Perhaps more importantly, what could they have not known?
Determining this requires far more than simply programming the chatbot not to comment on events that happened after their own death. It requires students to think deeply about the way in which information flowed along trade routes, the impact of literacy rates on a person's knowledge, and how their role in life (midwife, apothecary, guild master, apprentice, soldier, royal, servant, farmer, child) may have given (or prevented them) from having access to specialized knowledge. In short, programming a chatbot to respond accurately to unpredictable questions from their audience requires students to think far more deeply about history and its implications for the people who lived through it.
This unit plan deepens the learning by adding a culminating experience and a Big Think reflection to the five-stage design thinking process. Adding these two components provides additional scope for this project's specific combination of historical thinking, information literacy, and generative AI prompt engineering skills.
Created in collaboration with Rachael Krumpe
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