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 GaDOE Library Media Update - September 2017


Table of Contents​

  • CTAE Regional Meetings set to Further Engage Education and Industry
  • GaDOE Learning Standards Published in CASE Format
  • Let’s Work Together to Get Georgia’s Children Ready for Kindergarten!
  • Gullatt Elementary School Hosts School Library Tour
  • Georgia Media Specialist Receives 2017 Hero of Collaboration Award
  • GOSA Announces New Community-Based Literacy Grants
  • TumbleBookCloud Available to 6-12 Schools
  • Back to School with NoveList Plus
  • Ask a Regional Education Lab
  • Georgia Southern University’s College of Education Hosting Edumakers Unconference
  • New Georgia Encyclopedia Publishes Article on Georgiacetus Vogtlenesis
  • Worth Sharing
  • Going Social
  • GaDOE Media Mailing List

CTAE Regional Meetings set to Further Engage Education and Industry

The Georgia Department of Education’s Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education (CTAE) Division will host six regional economic development meetings this fall. The meetings are intended to provide industry and community stakeholders a chance to participate in creation of best practices and strategic plans for CTAE curriculum in their local school systems.

“We value the relationships that have been developed with our business and industry stakeholders,” State CTAE Director Dr. Barbara Wall said. “The role of CTAE in supporting local and regional economic development has never been more important, and we know that educating Georgia’s future workforce cannot be done in silos. It takes many people working together with our educators to create a strong and sustained career pipeline for all Georgia employers.”

The basic framework of each meeting will be facilitated with assistance from the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government; however, all six meetings will have a distinct local flair focusing on student achievement, current industry needs and future growth unique to that region of the state.

Dates & Locations

  • September 6, 2017 – Newton County
  • September 13, 2017 – Fayette County
  • September 19, 2017 - Glynn County
  • October 12, 2017 – Dougherty County
  • October 26, 2017 – Bartow County
  • October 30, 2017 – Richmond County

GaDOE Learning Standards Published in CASE Format

The Georgia Department of Education is using  a new technical specification by IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global) called the Competency and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) to enable  machine-readable, linked data versions of state and national learning standards, local learning objectives and targets, and any workplace, military, or higher education competencies representing skills, knowledge, or abilities.

With CASE, open educational resources can be more easily tagged and discovered. Districts and individual educators can build crosswalks to their local learning targets, organize assessment results, and discover content through these crosswalks. This resolves one of the biggest remaining barriers to blended learning.

​Let’s Work Together to Get Georgia’s Children Ready for Kindergarten!

Your child’s first years in school can set the tone for the rest of their academic career, so it is important to make sure they are prepared socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically to enter kindergarten. In Georgia, the GKIDS Readiness Check has been developed as an approach to thoughtfully measure the entry-level readiness skills of kindergarteners.

Families can use this site to:

Learn more about the GKIDS Readiness Check and how it will impact your child
Access information and videos about the 20 skills on which your child will be assessed
Find activity ideas to help support your child’s learning and development at home

Gullatt Elementary School Hosts School Library Tour

The Georgia Library Media Association (GLMA) invited a small group of education leaders to visit a newly built school. C.H. Gullatt Elementary School has a beautiful new media center that is innovative in its technology and its design. GLMA sponsored the first School Library Tour at Gullatt Elementary School in Union City, GA on August 22, 2017.

The tour highlighted some of the innovative features of the school library program, the physical space and components of an effective, instructional practices. This space incorporates flexible and mobile furnishings, collaborative group spaces, chairs and tables with integrated power for charging mobile devices, power dropping from the ceiling and a blending of electronic and print resources. It houses virtual collections featuring e-books and high-quality online databases, as well as curated multimedia and digital resources. It represents a state of the art school library media center. This physical space serves as the foundation of a highly effective school library media program. This coupled with a competent, capable school library media specialist empowers learning through innovation.

The tour featured students working in five different stations.

Georgia Media Specialist Receives 2017 Hero of Collaboration Award

Jan Wilson, has just received the School Library Journal 2017 Hero of Collaboration Award. Jan has a powerful library media program going at Brookwood High School in Gwinnett County Public Schools.

“I really don’t feel like I’ve done anything on my own,” says Brookwood High School (BHS) media specialist Jan Wilson. In her eight years at this suburban Atlanta campus where over 80 percent of graduates attend college, Wilson has served BHS’s 3,500 students, teachers, staff, and surrounding community with initiatives from a learning commons to witty professional development to a school bus turned bookmobile that received 5,248 visitors this summer.
In 2011, BHS was the first among Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) to convert its library into a learning commons. With $8,000 from the Gwinnett Schools Foundation, district funds, and the BHS principal’s budget, Wilson and parent volunteers brought in new, movable furniture. The media center now holds 35 computers, along with scanners and two “mediascapes”—tables with monitors where students work on group projects.

Ms. Wilson was a former Ed.S. student of the School Library Media Program at the University of West Georgia. Her professor Dr. Phyllis R. Snipes was thrilled to share that, “Jan has taken an ordinary library media program and employed many effective best practices to develop a learning commons approach to media services that has changed the face of education in her school...and community!”

GOSA Announces New Community-Based Literacy Grants

On August 10, 2017, the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement (GOSA) announced the launch of the Early Language and Literacy Mini-Grant Program, a new grant opportunity designed to invest in community partnerships to support efforts to improve the early language and literacy development of Georgia’s young children. As Governor Deal has stated, “Early language development and literacy are vital skills for putting our young children on the path to success.” The mini-grants provide an opportunity to build community coalitions focused on this work.

TumbleBookCloud Available to 6-12 Schools​

TumbleBookCloud, a resource for grades 6-12, offers a collection of graphic novels; classic novels (there is an excellent AP section); nonfiction history, biography, and science titles; audiobooks; and enhanced ebooks that include many titles already popular in middle and high schools. Titles include reading level information, including Lexile, grade, and A/R. Search limiters include Lexile and/or A/R level and genre.

NOTE: TumbleBookCloud is a separate resource from Tumble Book Library, which is subscribed by Georgia public libraries through GALILEO.

Back to School with NoveList Plus

  • Get up to speed on the latest features of NoveList Plus with the refresher guide.
  • The NoveList for schools YouTube playlist can help you brush up on finding exactly what you need inside NoveList.
  • On the home page, click Especially For > Working with Youth for articles on serving bilingual students, matching readers with books, and lots more!

Ask a Regional Education Lab

Have you ever wanted to ask a question about evidence-based practices? Is your school struggling with literacy instruction? Ask A REL is a collaborative reference desk service provided by the ten regional educational laboratories (REL). By design, the service functions in much  the same way as a technical reference library. It provides references, referrals, and brief responses, in the form of citations, on research-based education questions. Each question submitted is routed directly to a REL to determine the scope and timeline for the response.

Previous Ask A REL questions include:

What is the evidence base to support reading interventions in the secondary grades?
What research has been conducted on UDL and literacy? 
What research has been conducted on how credits earned during freshmen year are correlated to graduation rate? 

Georgia Southern University’s College of Education Hosting Edumakers Unconference

On Saturday, September 9, 2017 from 9 a.m. to noon, Georgia Southern University’s College of Education will host its first EduMakers Unconference for area teachers, media specialists and other educational professionals to share expertise in creating and teaching in makerspaces and STEM/STEAM labs.

New Georgia Encyclopedia Publishes Article on Georgiacetus Vogtlenesis

This month, the New Georgia Encyclopedia (NGE) expanded its Paleontology section by publishing an article by Thomas Thurman of Georgia Earth and Sky on Georgiacetus vogtlensis. This proto-whale skeleton, previously unknown to science, was discovered in 1983 during the construction of Plant Vogtle in Burke County. The fossil is nearly 40 million years old. A reconstruction of the fossil is on display at the Georgia Southern Museum in Statesboro. 

Worth Sharing

Going Social

GaDOE Media Mailing List

Do you want to share the GaDOE Media Updates? If so, encourage your colleagues to join the email mailing list by following the directions on this page.

Thank you,

Tony Vlachakis
Educational Technologist 
Library/Media Liaison
tvlachak@doe.k12.ga.us