Paraphrasing, Summarising and Quoting

Paraphrasing, summarising and quoting are the three ways of presenting someone's ideas and phrases that Middle School students are often struggle with. To help students grasp the difference, Humanities teacher Mr. Sullivan and I, library media specialist conduct a purpose-built class activity.

Before we start a lesson on paraphrasing, summarising and quoting, six grade students are divided by groups. They brainstorm and  share their understanding in front of the class. Other students listen carefully, take notes and ask questions when the presentation is over.

Building an even clarer differentiation between the tools through a dialogue is the next step of student discovery. Students are paired to develop each concept through a conversation. We guide  student discussions by asking open questions.

Below are the results of the class discussions.

Quoting:

What? Quoting is an exact reproduction of spoken or written words. It's usually a short message that

supports and not replaces students' own ideas.
Why? Writers use quoting when the exact wording is the best way to convey a message.
How? The message should not be altered. Quotation marks are used in the beginning and at the end of the message.

Paraphrasing:

What? Paraphrasing is a way to express the original ideas in ones own way by using different words.
Why? It is done to support students' original ideas and/or provide evidence.

How? Paraphrasing doesn't make the original text shorter.
A correct way to paraphrase is

• to read the original text carefully and understand it. 
• Then, identify key words and main ideas and relationships between them as well as the author's attitude toward information you are paraphrasing. 
• When paraphrasing, change the grammar and sentence structure but keywords, main ideas and relationships between them keep the same. 
• Express the attitude the author has to treat the original text, that is confidence, doubt, criticism, or other.

Summarising
What? Summarising is a way to convey main ideas of the original text.
Why? Summarising is used to support main ideas of student writing or provide evidence to prove student thoughts.
How?

• To summarise, read the text, take notes and outline the main ideas. 
• Leave out details and examples.
• Close the text and rewrite notes in your own words.

Project-Based Learning: collaboration with Librarian

Just on time I received a link to Edutopia on Project-Based Learning approach to teaching!
Students are engaged in exploration of real world problems and investigation of the subject much deeper than they are when reading textbooks and listening to lectures. 

A couple of weeks ago High School students presented their final projects at their Ancient History class. Both their Social Studies teacher and the librarian were satisfied with the result of the work. For the first time we worked as a teacher/librarian team on this project: we planned the steps of the research and agreed on the final product by putting a rubric.

The theme was to choose one of the groups of people who are present in different parts of the world and still have a life style like people during the Stone Age. The goal of the project was to evaluate the way of this group living and define the stage of their development supporting it with examples and explanations. Students started their work with filling in the chart with characteristics of the tribe and the development stages of the Stone Age. We worked on the chart together prior the research session. We also were very clear with our expectations from the class in the library: students had to submit their outlines to the unit in Moodle.

Students had a block to work in the library and to have both of us assisting them in finding proper resources. Without realizing that they were learning new skills, students browsed the library catalog and located books on shelves; they followed my instructions on how to build a background information by using World Book Online and find scholarly articles in EBSCO. I showed the students the print and digital resources we had in our collections. 

What time to learn citing sources can be more appropriate than that when the students work with resources for their projects?!   "Where to find a good picture?" , "Map?", "Music?", "How to insert them in your presentation?",  "How to give credits to the sources?",  "Where to put those credits?" - students puzzled.
They helped each other and had our support all the time. 

Besides learning the content the students exploited technology. They worked with Google documents and learned how to share their presentation online via Google Presentations. Seeing that all of them chose Power Point Presentation as a way to present their final projects Sara Jane and I agreed that our next project will include some new formats that kids can explore and use in future: prezi, glogster, slideshare, photostory, and several more.

School Library Media Programs - What are they?

Can you list at least three of the purposes of school library programs?

An old image of the hushing librarian is fading away. Librarians don't circumscribe themselves with printed formats and brick walls any longer. They plow the cyberspace and dig with the web tools. Training students to use the Internet effectively and participate in social network communication safely is their priority. Avatars represent them online; wikis and Second Life are the islands designated for their professional gatherings. Librarians collaborate with teachers, educate kids to research, they recommend materials for projects and classes, attract teachers to available and appropriate web tools and provide training for their use... We change our hats according to your needs and requests!

This school year we started introducing ourselves and our programs to the Board. Now we would like to finish the year with presenting the results of our work and describing important activities to our loyal audience.

Do you think it's unnecessary? Everyone sees us daily in various places interacting with teachers, students, parents, and the administration; hears us talking about information, values of reading, and ways to retrieve information; observes us looking for books and rearranging book shelves; recognizes when we support the curriculum. We advise, advertise, and invite to experiment with technology; entertain, take pictures and videos, smile, and just howdy. Programs and activities run during the year reflect the diverse roles of the School Library Media Specialists.

Read about other activities in our annual report and take a quiz (this multiple choice is the way to summarize what school library media programs are about).

Looking forward to seeing you in August, to collaborating on new units, integrating Looking forward to seeing you in August, to collaborating on new units, integrating technology into education, and educating our students to become 21st century learners.