Booktalking Techies

Haven’t had enough of playing with tech tools? Try using them to induce teens and middle-schoolers to read plain old books.

At MLA's Kids Are Customers, Too (see previous posts), Vera Shade of Kent County and Amanda Courie of Caroline presented some short book-talk videos made using PhotoStory 3 (free download), Animoto (30-second booktalk is free; longer videos require a $30 annual membership), Audacity and/or Sitepal.

The latter has a large cool factor: The user can design avatars that will then “speak” his or her words in old “Clutch Cargo” animated fashion. The result is made available on your Web page. Drawback is that it’s not inexpensive, so adding avatars to let teens themselves create book talks for posting on the library Web site might not be feasible. (A basic Sitepal account is about $200/year.) There are other, free create-an-avatar sites.

Book-talk videos work well to “jazz up” book talks for a large crowd, Vera Shade said, and can be used in classrooms when library staff aren’t able to spend the time for in-person visits. They also can be linked from the library’s Web site (although bandwidth can be an issue for people on their home computers).

A Flip video camera allows for point and shoot recording; once recorded, it can be connected to a computer by the built-in USB jack and downloaded onto a laptop. Combine several and play the booktalks in a loop from the laptop set up on a cart.

Because the library can do only a dozen or so book talks at a time using Sitepal, they’re careful in choosing titles, selecting them for 6th-8th graders by talking to the school media specialist and trying titles the kids haven’t heard of (no point in preaching to the Potter choir). Holds on these titles have gone up, to the delight of the librarians.

The speakers recommended Nancy Keane's podcast booktalks. The audio is good, but a visual of the book would be far more enticing than the screen-saver swirly you get to watch for 60 seconds. RSS feeds of her talks are available.

Shade and Courie also provided a handout with some comic creation resources sites (toondo.com; Bubbler, which puts word balloons onto Flickr pictures for you; Read-Write-Think’s Comic Creator, stripgenerator.com and more).

I played with the comic creator, as illustrated here, but the options are pretty limited. Stay tuned, however, for more on comic-creation when I get around to blogging the Books for the Beast conference, with the previously mentioned comics artist Jessica Abel.

Included in the materials from the Kids session were directions for making “shelf talkers” on a word processor, and bookmarks using a PowerPoint slide. The Chicago public library branch I go to makes perhaps excess use of shelf talkers, but I thought they worked well with some of the new J series or trilogies, as a guide to parents especially. Copies available on request!

The Books of Champions

In addition to his comments on the controversial gay penguin book “And Tango Makes Three” (see previous post), Cole talked about his route to fame and fortune, an entertaining story of how an elementary school science teacher and untutored illustrator bought a portfolio, pulled together everything he ever drew and walked into a New York publisher to land a contract. The man is obviously talented. And charming.

Cole spoke fervently about the need for children to get outside the “box,” meaning the room with a computer. Children need to be creative, he said, and to “mess up,” quite literally. The outdoors in all its muddy immense glory obviously influenced his decision to major in forestry (at Va. Tech) and to teach science and to write and illustrate books about nature.

For the latter, see “I Took a Walk,” “On the Way to the Beach,” both with foldout pages, and “On Meadowview Street,” which he conceived as a wordless book but which his editor insisted needed text. Editor won (one of few times I will not cheer for victorious Editor). Cole assured the Kids crowd that “Meadowview” will provoke no controversy, “unless you own a pesticide company.”

For Cole fans, a piece of good news: His new chapter book (a “Charlotte’s Web” sort of story) “A Nest for Celeste” is at the printer and due out in March.

And for participatory fans, Cole mentioned that one of the contenders for an upcoming Cheerios title is “Chaucer’s First Winter,” illustrated by Cole, written by Stephen Krensky. And you, the American (and possibly un-American) people get to pick your favorite at spoonfulsofstories.com.

But hurry, kids! Voting ends Oct. 30! (“Chaucer” is trailing in fifth place with 13 percent; “The Purple Kangaroo” by Michael Ian Black is in the lead with 21 percent of the vote.)

Apparently General Mills has been putting kids paperbacks in Cheerios boxes for seven years. Maybe next time I’m in the cereal aisle I won’t head straight for the Grape-nuts.

Nude Penguins and Other Book Challenges

Atop the recent most challenged books list is the sweet, charming, real-life story of two male penguins who pair off in lonely coupledom until a thoughtful zookeeper presents them with an egg to nurse. Among the reasons for the many challenges to this picture book, according to the American Library Association, are: "Anti-Family, Homosexuality, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group," and the mystifying "Anti-Ethnic."

"And Tango Makes Three" illustrator Henry Cole was the keynote speaker at last week's "Kids Are Customers, Too" conference, put on by the children's services division of the Maryland Library Association. He was pleased to point out that "Tango" recently made the Guinness Book of World Records as the most challenged book (I haven't been able to confirm that, so am taking his word for it). The Guardian reported on Oct. 2 that "the challenges appear to have had the opposite effect from what their instigators might have hoped. Renewed focus on And Tango Makes Three this week, thanks to Banned Books Week, the annual US celebration of the freedom to read, has sent it racing to the top of Amazon.co.uk's 'movers and shakers' chart, which monitors books experiencing sudden surges in demand."

Warned by his publisher that taking the assignment to illustrate "Tango" might harm his career, Cole nonetheless went ahead. A frequent speaker in classrooms across the country, he found the publisher was right: Schools canceled visits because of his work on the "gay penguins" book and the Loudoun County schools superintendent removed the book from school shelves, a particular blow to Cole, a Virginia native who taught science in the state for many years.

More from Cole in a later post, perhaps, but now on to the session on challenged books, with Sydney McCoy and Janet Vogel of Frederick County Public Libraries.

Library staff’s response to challenges to library materials is aided by a clear, enforced collection development policy, McCoy said. Frederick County’s is readily accessible from its Web site and includes this cogent summary:

“Our selection is based upon principles rather than personal opinion, reason rather than prejudice, and judgment rather than censorship.”

The policy also incorporates the Library Bill of Rights and the Freedom to Read statement of the American Library Association. The latter is a Declaration of Independence for the written word, ending in this:

“We here stake out a lofty claim for the value of the written word. We do so because we believe that it is possessed of enormous variety and usefulness, worthy of cherishing and keeping free. We realize that the application of these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons. . . . We believe . . . that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

Stirring words to hold in mind when an angry patron is waving the “filth” that her tween just picked off the shelf.

How to respond to the patron? McCoy said she never just hands over a complaint form but instead listens to the patron, asking what she finds offensive and explaining that the library represents the broader community. She then tries to direct the patron to books she may find suitable, and suggests reading a book before giving it to or reading aloud to a child.

For parents of older children, she offers a selection of Web sites that rate books, among them NoveList, Books & Authors, Common Sense Media and the religious Dove Foundation and suggests that troublesome parts of books can provide useful “teachable moments.” She also points them to the cataloguing information at the front of the book as a guide to whether it includes themes a child/teen may not be ready to confront. ALA provides more tips for parents in choosing books.

Frederick County flags some books, on topics such as adoption or potty-training, with an orange or yellow dot. These form the library’s parent-teacher collection. The library system also conducts regular training on how to handle banning or challenges so the frontline staff is familiar with policies, comfortable in responding to patrons, and knows when to refer the matter to the branch manager or other staff.

McCoy pointed out that sometimes, the customer is right. A book may be misclassified for children when it should be for young adults, or an old book may simply contain outdated information.

A footnote on "Tango": Henry Cole said the furor over the book didn't really take off until after the two boy penguins had split up. According to a New York Times story in 2005, "Silo's eye began to wander, and last spring he forsook his partner of six years at the Central Park Zoo and took up with a female from California named Scrappy. Of late, Roy has been seen alone, in a corner, staring at a wall."

Bisexual, adulterous penguins. Definitely time for a sequel.

Great Books for the Beast

"Saying you wanted to be a writer was like saying, 'I want to grow up to be homeless.'"

This is my favorite quote from author Jacqueline Woodson at last spring's Great Books conclave. She'll be the keynote speaker at next week's Books for the Beast as well. As well as being a writer, she's a spoken-word artist, and listening to her "perform" parts of her works adds at least two more dimensions to them.

Woodson also spoke of how her proclivity to embellish the truth naturally led her to write stories. "When you write it down," she said, "it's fiction. It's not a lie anymore. And, it's lucrative."

Well, maybe not for the poor unread blogger who attempts to deal in truthiness.

As for the Beast, the blogger has been attempting to review the readings on LibraryThing. Feel free to read them here. Differing opinions most welcome.