Mary+Saunders

Mary Saunders (msaunders@gloucester.k12.ma.us) Grade 9-12, Library Media (all subjects)

Because I am a high school librarian, all Gloucester High School students (1200) are my students. I am fortunate in the timing of this class because the summer reading program at our school requires students to choose and read one book from the list of 38 and participating in a discussion in September. Discussion leaders will be about half staff, teachers, and administrators and half community members. Blogging, if I can pull it off, will be a great way to begin the discussion in the summer and continue from the beginning of the school year until the discussions on Sept. 13. This is the fourth year we have run the summer reading this way. It has been well received. This should be a great addition to the program. My goals for the summer reading discussion by blog are three-fold. First, providing additional time for group discussion by blogging about each book should bring fresh voices and additional ideas to the discussions. Second, the public librarians can contribute to the discussion in the summer and perhaps extend their summer reading program this way. Third, involvement of all the English Department teachers and teachers from the other disciplines who are leading summer reading discussions will give these teachers the chance to see some of the pedagogical potential of this tool. For my blog, I have considered my audience: students and discussion leaders plus, I can dream, readers all over the world who happen on the blog and want to contribute. I have also thought about safety. Our high school students are using the read/write Web so the more we can educate them about being careful with personal information, the better. In the case of my summer reading blog, I have set Blogger to only allow publication of comments after I have approved them and to alert me by email when a comment is attempted. For posting, I have sent an email to all of the discussion leaders asking them to contact me if they would like to post and I’ll put them on the blog as authors. There are more than70 discussion leaders. I wonder how many will be comfortable blogging? After less than 24 hours, I have had four respond that they would like to contribute and one has left a comment. Will Richardson, in __Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts,...__ states that the inclusion of pertinent links to more resources is an essential characteristic of blogs. I see that in some of the example blogs we have examined and not in others. To follow his advice, I have begun adding links to the posts on my blog. It is very easy and it is fun searching for appropriate links. Also fun is the addition of images to my posts. I had trouble adding a picture to the header on my blog. Every time I tried, the image made that portion of the blog too large and obscured the content. I wasn’t willing to give up the words in the title so I decided to add images to posts instead. I can’t explore podcasts and videos until next week when I can return to the high-speed access at school. If I can find anything appropriate, I’ll experiment with adding them to the blog. Mostly, I’m excited about getting discussion leaders to post about their books. Then I’ll start recruiting student comments. The link to my blog is on the left of the class blog main page under Mary Saunders. Or, you can go directly from [|http://ghssummerreading2007.blogspot.com]