Opening the ACS Archives

I have been posting images, files, and videos to the Archives section of our library pages. Included are ACS sports videos, library projects, early school board minutes, 19th century Regents exams, and some Mr. D. videos. Topping the selection is our continuing crowdsourcing project to tag Afton Historic Minutes from the Tri-Town News.

Final Four

Along with student/staff brackets, my Final Four library bulletin board includes a WSJ article on the birth of brackets in sports, a poem about basketball, a statistical prediction from a NYTimes political analyst, and a review of books by basketball coaches from the WSJ.

An audio record

Last Autumn, I spoke at an Afton Historical Society meeting about using technology to record one's personal history. At that time, I suggested that I might make podcasts of Charles Decker's weekly historical articles in the Trt-Town News.

I'm proud to say that with the exception of Minute No. 924, I managed to record thirty-five of them in the course of the school year; numbers 900-935.

They are available at the Internet Archive.

The library landscape

From hosting the morning gym class with the announcements projected on the wall, to creating a mini-auditorium that seats 60 students,, the library landscape flexes daily to encourage individual inquiry, making and creating, event presentations, and an environment of "we can find out and make it here."

Tape

I used masking tape to identify the the new location of my fiction collection. I got the idea of orienting students with floor-signage from a Japenese library featured in an Architectural Record article.

Cross curriculum evidence

I always look forward to the NY Times Magazine annual Year of Ideas issue. This year they placed little icons next to each entry to designate the domain of the idea: arts, culture, technology, etc.

Not surprisingly, almost all of them feature a couple of icons; cross discipline ideas, either by inception or application.

When we get our students into small groups for problem-solving, and we frame the discussion to invite the interplay of what they're learning in "other classes," we prepare them for the world of collaboration: which is our future.

Some of my favorite Ideas from 2009:

The Rainfall Theory of Development
Massively Collaborative Mathematics
The Google Algorithm as Extinction Model
Literary Alzheimer's