Tag Archives: participatory culture

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Book Choice Champions Begins

Surveying students using iPad and Google forms

Once again, I’ve set out on a journey with a group of students to make decisions on what books are purchased for the library in a project called Book Choice Champions.  This year, I set aside $1500 in book fair profits for a budget that is completely decided on by students.  Once again, our school is doing enrichment clusters on Wednesdays, so from 9-10AM I have a group of 11 students in grades 2nd-5th that come to the library to work on this project until late November.  The students self-selected which enrichment cluster they would be in based on their interest in the cluster topic.  The surprising part of this is that the group of students I’m working with is all boys.

On day 1, the boys immediately noticed that no girls were in the group and they saw this as a problem.  How would they buy books that were supposed to be for the whole school without having girl representation in the group?  They decided to survey students from the whole school and felt that it was important to know how many boys and how many girls answered the survey.  They also wanted to know what grades students were in so that all grades were represented in the decisions.  Two students in the group were in a similar group last year and they talked about the problems that we had with surveying, especially using blank paper and simply asking people what they liked to read.  For this reason, they decided to develop a Google survey that could be done on laptops, desktops, smartboards, and iPads.  They felt it was important to ask about various categories of books such as animals/sports/fairies/etc, kinds of books such as chapter/picture/informational/etc, and to give students a chance to request specific books or series.

The next problem was when would students take the survey.  We knew we didn’t want to interrupt instruction, so we thought of the least disruptive process we could.  They came up with several idea that they are now trying:

  • Ask their teachers when they could come get an iPad from the media center to survey their own classes
  • Ask 3rd-5th grades to take surveys on the iPads and desktop computers in the media center during morning arrival time before going to homerooms.
  • Ask K-2nd grades to take the surveys on iPads in the art room during morning arrival time before going to class.
  • See which grade levels seem to be missing from the survey results and ask specific teachers if there is a time to come into their room to do surveys
  • If needed, email the survey to teachers to use on their smartboards
Today, we asked PreK teachers permission to pull students to survey.  Members of the book choice champions read the survey to them and filled in the results on the iPad.  Also today, several students have come to the media center throughout the day to borrow an iPad to take to their classroom and to recess to do more surveys.  At the beginning of today, we only had 14 results and by the writing of this post 85 students out of 500 have been surveyed.  That’s pretty impressive for a group of 11 students.
Our next steps will be to look at this data and make decisions about where we will focus our time.  I’m so excited by the energy and passion that this group has.  All 11 boys truly want to be a part of the process and they’re stepping up to offer ideas and make decisions.

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Leader Librarians: A Reflection

Today I received feedback from a survey that was given to the students who participated in leader librarians.  The students were asked:

What did you enjoy most? Almost all students in the group listed “buying books” as what they enjoyed.  They also listed things like using Animoto for the school to see what was done, ordering and unpacking books, and bringing more books into our library.

What did you learn from Leader Librarians? Students said they learned how hard it is to spend the amount of money that you have to buy books.  They learned how to use money wisely and that it’s a big process to order books for a library.  They learned how to be a “good librarian”.

If you could change something or do something differently, what would it be? They wished that they could have bought more books and checked more of the books out to read before other students got to read them.  They also wished that more people could have come to the enrichment fair to see what they accomplished across our 9 weeks together.  Most of all, they said they really wouldn’t change anything.

It was such a treat to hear what these 12 students had to say about being a part of the budgeting decisions in the library.  We ran out of time to sit together and reflect on what we had accomplished, so I was thankful that our enrichment cluster coordinator found time to collect data from all students in the school about their clusters.  Hearing these students’ voices confirmed for me the importance of giving students the opportunity to be a part of decision-making in the library.

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Leader Librarians: Students as Part of the Budgeting Process Part 2

Last year, I embarked on a journey to give students a voice in the budgeting decisions in the library.  Last year’s students were a targeted group of below grade level readers in grades 3-5.  That project was funded by a grant.  This year, I wanted to expand the idea to include more than just a targeted group.  I once again obtained a grant of $1000, but I took $1000 of our book fair profits to match that grant.

This year our school began school-wide enrichment clusters.  Every Wednesday from 9-10AM, every student in the school goes to a cross grade level class that is based on interest.  Leader Librarians was the cluster that I offered.  12 students were selected based on their interest to be in my group.  An interesting thing is that 3 of the 12 students were students who participated in my student voice, student choice project last year.  It was great to see their interest in buying books for the library continue.

In our group, the 12 students made all of the decisions.  I told them that we had $2000 to spend.  I shared with them many of the ways that I make decisions about how money is spent from setting goals to assigning percentages to each goal.  After looking at the ways that I normally spend money, the students began brainstorming how to spend their own money.  They decided to informally survey the school from Prek-5.  Students assigned themselves to grade levels and set out with clipboards to collect information about what students liked to read about.  We put all of the data on the table and started looking for themes.  In the end, students identified about ten different categories of books to focus on that ranged from scary stories to comics to superheroes to sports.  Students paired up and chose categories to focus on and we divided the budget equally among the partner groups.  The students decided they wanted to meet with vendors like last year’s group, so once again Jim Boon from Capstone Press brought book samples for students to preview.  We also invited Frieda Julian of Children’s Plus Inc.  Students began making wish lists from the books they saw and the books found in catalogs.  Finally, students began narrowing down their lists to what they actually wanted to order.

Once lists were finalized, I placed the orders.  While we waited, the students worked on making posters, a commercial script for our morning broadcast, talking points for sharing the project with others, and an animoto video of the whole project.

When the books arrived, we made an assembly line.  Students had the following jobs: unpacking the boxes, checking the packing slip, inspecting the books, stamping the books, photographing groups of books.  Finally, students sat down and enjoyed reading the books.

We still have some steps to go, including presenting our project at our school enrichment fair on December 7th.  I’m very proud of these students.  There was so much that they wanted to do that we just didn’t have time for, but they accomplished a huge need in our collection: buying books that are guaranteed to be loved by students school-wide.

Check out their Animoto video here.