0:02

Hey there everybody, so my guest this week is me.

0:06

And I'm kinda, we're gonna see how this goes.

0:09

I haven't done this before, but I'm gonna share a lesson.

0:13

I was fortunate enough to be at Texas's Library Association Conference two weeks

0:19

ago, and it was amazing.

0:21

As it was last year too, I've been fortunate enough to go twice now.

0:25

And if you get the chance, you absolutely should go. It is really just incredible.

0:29

But while I was there, I was talking about some lessons that I've shared with people

0:34

in different ways. And one of the lessons that came up was building your own search engine.

0:37

And when I talked about it, people's eyes got real big, like, oh my gosh, you can do

0:40

that? And I realized, oh, maybe this is something that people aren't as aware of

0:45

as I thought. This is something that I actually learned about when I was doing my graduate

0:49

classes. And I figured it might be a good one to share out.

0:52

So I also figured it'd be good.

0:54

You know what? I should probably just run myself through the same kind of...

0:58

Lowdown that I get that I do with guests because now I'm the guest so maybe you

1:02

want to know something about how I became a school librarian So here's the shortest

1:07

version So I was a I was an english teacher in middle school and high school

1:13

for 25 -ish years and at a couple of years back

1:22

So I was an English teacher for 25 or plus years in both middle school and high

1:27

school. I spent most of my time in the same middle school and I really enjoyed it.

1:31

But a couple of years back, right around 2015, 2016, the librarian at my school

1:39

started talking about, you know, I'm gonna be out for a little bit.

1:42

Do you want to? So 2015, 2016 or so, the librarian at my school had to be out for a while, for a

1:52

couple of weeks. And he asked me if I'd be interested in kind of sitting in when I had prep periods

1:57

to kind of just keep an eye on the library. And I was like, oh, that sounds pretty good.

2:00

So I liked being in the library.

2:02

I liked being there to sub. It was really interesting to kind of be part of the library program.

2:07

I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. And when he came back, he said, you know,

2:10

I'm thinking about retiring and you seemed to really enjoy being here.

2:14

Have you got your library certification? Maybe you should go and get it.

2:17

I said, interesting. So I went, got in the program, realized how important school libraries are really

2:25

by thinking about and seeing what kind of instruction school librarians get.

2:30

I'd already gotten instruction on how to be a classroom teacher.

2:33

I'd already gotten degrees in how to be a supervisor, principal and administrator.

2:39

And so I'd seen a lot of different sides of education, but seeing school

2:43

librarianship from the inside and being trained in it really made me see how

2:47

incredibly important and valuable the school library program can be for our

2:52

students. So it really sunk in how important it was to have good strong library programs for

2:59

students, for faculty, for the school.

3:02

So I ended up going through the program.

3:05

Didn't. get into my middle school's library right around the time that in fact, literally a

3:11

month after I got my certification, the decision was made to close my middle

3:15

school's library because they were doing a big renovation and they ended up, they

3:19

were supposed to renovate the library, but things went a little sideways and they

3:22

found they needed the space for something else.

3:24

So the library became Science Labs. The middle school lost the library.

3:27

And so I continued to be an English teacher for a couple of years, but the

3:32

supervisor of libraries and technologies in my district,

3:35

was a friend of mine and I got my annual what position would you like in the future

3:41

note that we can you know make a request of do I want to stay at the same level do

3:46

I want to go to a different grade level things like that and it kind of got me

3:49

thinking like why don't I ask about being school librarian because the middle school

3:54

when they closed our middle school library they had to start sharing library space

4:00

with the high school we're an attached middle school high school complex and the

4:03

high school library is really out of the way for the middle school.

4:06

It's a hike to get there. The high school librarian already had a full plate dealing with being a high

4:12

school librarian. So the middle school really wasn't getting too much in the way of library services.

4:17

They weren't, they just weren't available. Like there just wasn't an easy way for the middle school to get them.

4:22

And so I went to the supervisor slash friend of mine and I said, look, you know,

4:28

it's good that they at least gave us some kind of an opportunity to have library

4:32

services, but It's really hard for our school to take advantage of it.

4:36

And I think I could really be useful in helping the middle school teachers and

4:40

students take advantage of the materials services that we do have access to that

4:46

they may not even realize that they've got access to.

4:48

Because at this point, it had been a couple of years, literally there were

4:51

students who had never known that SADS had a library at that point.

4:54

Literally there were students who didn't know that our middle school had a library

4:57

at that point. And the teachers had sort of fallen out of the habit of using the space as well or

5:02

thinking about the space. So the supervisor was on board.

5:05

She said, that's a great idea. She took a little while.

5:08

She did a whole lot of behind the scenes maneuvering and managed to finally make it

5:13

so that I was able to become the middle school's library liaison, basically, for

5:18

the complex. And just recently, I got a new principal.

5:24

Our vice principal became our principal. She's a huge supporter of school library program.

5:30

And I was very fortunate that she and I were kind of on the same page and we

5:35

managed to find some space in the middle school. Again, there's a room that used to be part of the library that was converted into a

5:41

conference room that didn't get used on a regular basis.

5:43

Frequently enough that it was a still a conference room, but something that could

5:48

be used to also house books and be a library space.

5:52

So that has recently come into being.

5:55

And I've been really fortunate to be able to work.

5:57

as the middle school library liaison for the past couple of years and get things

6:02

kind of moving forward there. So that's sort of my journey to becoming a school librarian.

6:08

And along the way, while I was getting those, getting the certification for

6:14

school librarianship, while I was taking the classes, I also was given the

6:18

opportunity to write some curriculum. And the class that I was supposed to write a curriculum for was called Argument and

6:24

Debate. And that class,

6:27

was meant to be an elective that all of the seventh grade students were gonna take

6:30

so that by the end of seventh grade, they'd all have some basic knowledge, some

6:35

basic skills in argument and debate, structures, styles, information that they

6:41

could apply to other classes as well.

6:43

Since I was taking my graduate class or had just finished up my graduate class at

6:47

the time, I had all these ideas about how school librarianship should kind of

6:52

interact with students and what it can bring to the students and the staff.

6:55

So I was able to take those ideas and incorporate them into this argument debate

6:59

class, which basically became almost like a secret back door school library class

7:05

for the seventh graders and involved lots of research, lots of technology skills,

7:10

information skills. So one of the lessons that I ended up writing for that class was how to build

7:16

your own search engine, which I had learned about in my graduate classes.

7:19

And I figured this might be something that the students would be able to take

7:23

advantage of or. if not the students, maybe the staff.

7:26

So I had put together this lesson called building your own search engine.

7:30

So it's a relatively straightforward thing to do.

7:38

And Google actually makes it very easy because they have a custom search engine

7:42

interface. And basically what it is is you go to the website and that'll be linked in the show

7:48

notes, of course, and you sign in with your Google account.

7:52

And once you do, it gives you the opportunity to start building your own search engine, which

7:56

means that you get to choose what resources is the search engine going to

8:02

look at when it does the searches that you ask it to do.

8:06

So let me jump to the end. The end of the process is you end up with a search box that looks like a Google

8:11

search box, and you can get a link to it, and you can send that to people, or you

8:15

can bookmark it so you can get back to it very easily.

8:17

And whatever you type into that search box, the search will be done, but it'll

8:21

only be done on... the list of resources that you have put into the custom search engine.

8:28

So you get to choose, you get to decide what are the reliable resources that would

8:33

be useful. And while we all know there's all sorts of great reliable resources out there, and we

8:40

know that when we can, we want students to get into databases, we know they're gonna

8:43

use online sources other than our databases, we know they're gonna do open

8:47

web searches. So having a custom search engine that I could build,

8:52

that I knew all the sources were going to be reliable sources instead of just

8:57

drawing from everywhere online, that helped me to kind of build up a couple of

9:01

different kinds of search engines that could be applied to different kinds of

9:05

projects and programs. I had actually built a couple before I made this lesson for a couple of different

9:10

classes that one was for a poetry class or for part of our poetry program that we

9:17

were doing in English. I built a poetry search engine that only looked at

9:21

certain poetry websites so that I knew the students were going to be looking at

9:25

particular kinds of poetry. I built one for one of the history classes.

9:30

They were doing current events, so I built a current event search engine that only

9:34

drew on reliable resources. So having these different kinds of search engines for different functions made me

9:41

sort of realize, oh yeah, you know, we can really channel students to good

9:45

information when they're doing open web searches if we're aware of these tools

9:50

that can help us kind of focus them in.

9:53

And when you add in your ability to customize your Google search with

9:57

different kinds of Boolean terms and different kinds of operators, then you

10:02

really start to see some amazing abilities from these customized search engines.

10:06

I mean, just on top of being able to do a Google search that is from reliable

10:12

sources, you can also really narrow it in.

10:14

So you're getting way fewer than the hundreds of millions or billions of

10:19

results that you might get on a search. you're going to get that down to a much more manageable number.

10:23

And when you start adding in different kinds of operators, you can really get it

10:26

down to something that is very useful, something you could almost look at every

10:31

result and really get some good solid background information.

10:35

So this lesson that I built, open web searches and building your own search

10:40

engine, it's built along the same pattern as all of the lessons that I did for this

10:45

argument and debate class. It starts with some...

10:48

reminders of some things that we want to bear that we want to have in our heads as

10:52

we get into the lesson and then there's a couple of videos to kind of set the stage

10:57

for some of the things we're going to be thinking about and once we get into the

11:01

videos we start talking about here's why you need to be thoughtful about what

11:06

you're looking at online when you do searches especially when you do open web

11:09

searches because we've got things like Advertisements we've got things like

11:14

filter bubbles. So we've got to give a little bit of thought to

11:18

when we're doing open web searches, what are we really getting back from those

11:23

searches? Where are the search engines pulling their information from?

11:27

And we use Google as a term as though that's the word that means to search

11:33

online. And Google is just one of many different search tools that's out there.

11:37

If we're going to talk about Googling, we might as well turn it to our advantage and

11:41

go to Google and use Google to build the engines that are going to really work well

11:45

for us. So. I give the students some examples of different kinds of search engines I've

11:50

built, and I encourage them as we get started to think about what is the topic

11:56

that you think you want to be able to do searches for?

11:59

Because if you can narrow in on a specific topic, it's going to make your search

12:03

engine much more accurate when you go searching for information.

12:06

So they start by just brainstorming.

12:09

what are some areas that I might wanna do searches in?

12:11

And some of the searches that students have done have been on sports, some have

12:14

been on dance, some have been on video games.

12:17

They have things that they're interested in.

12:21

And by having them use their interests, that builds their reliance on or builds

12:27

their understanding of why this can be a useful tool because it can help them find

12:34

those inquiry needs that they have in their own lives.

12:38

but it also kind of translates into the idea that, oh yeah, you could also do this

12:41

for a school topic and that way you'd have a really good reliable source for your

12:46

school information too. So we start by thinking about what's the topic that we wanna think about.

12:52

We come up with a couple of different possibilities and for each one of those

12:55

possibilities, I then have the students do some thinking about what sources do you

13:01

know of that might be good sources of information about that topic or,

13:06

If you're having trouble coming up with some, let's go online and see what are

13:10

some of the sources out there. And then we can do a little bit of sifting of the sources and try and figure out, are

13:16

there some that are better, more accurate, more reliable, ones that we want to rely

13:20

on more over others?

13:22

And so we're doing a couple of different skills there.

13:25

We're thinking a little bit about how do we assess where we're getting our

13:29

information from? Where do we get our information from?

13:32

Why do we choose those sources over others?

13:34

So, We've got topics, we brainstorm up, here's some possible sources of information that

13:41

we could maybe get that search going in.

13:46

And then we create basically a list of URLs that they're gonna use to feed into

13:54

the search engine. So now they've got a topic, they've got sources, we're gonna make the search

13:58

engine that's gonna look at those sources for that topic.

14:01

And there's a couple of little...

14:04

bits and bobs here as they go along, but it's basically as simple as create a list

14:09

of URLs and copy and paste them into the custom search engine interface.

14:14

I share with them a couple of different resources they might want to think about

14:17

depending on what kind of search engine they want to build.

14:21

And once they've got some of those different ideas put together, we start

14:28

going into the actual, we've got the list of sources.

14:32

We've got them set up in a particular way to put them into the search engine.

14:35

Now we actually go to the search engine interface.

14:39

So before they're going into the search engine interface, they're spending some

14:44

time just brainstorming and thinking through what do they want and how are they

14:48

going to find it? And so that's also adding to their thought process about search in general, right?

14:55

So we get to the search engine interface.

14:58

It's called Google custom search engine.

15:02

And it's just, if you want to go and check it out, cse .google .com.

15:08

It's that simple. CSE, custom search engine, google .com.

15:12

When you go there, it's got a sign in and then it's a, okay, get started, create a

15:17

new search engine. So they do that.

15:19

They start putting in their links to the different sources they want to use.

15:25

And you can get as specific or as broad as you want when you start putting in the

15:31

sources you want to. So you can go as wide as a domain like you could put in dot -gov as one of your

15:39

search parameters or one of your search sources and That would limit the searches

15:43

to just dot -gov Sources or you can get more specific and drill down and be like

15:49

no. I don't want all the doc of resources.

15:52

I want just the FDA resources, I want just Medline Plus you can

16:00

add as many different kinds of sources you want.

16:02

So even if you put .gov as one of the sources, you could also put .net or .org

16:08

and it'll search in all the websites that have those kinds of extensions or those

16:12

kinds of domains. Or you can get real granular and say, I want you to look in this section of this

16:19

website, or I want you to only look on this particular page of a website.

16:23

If there was like one that had a whole lot of information that you really wanted to

16:27

focus in on and be able to search through.

16:29

So you can get as specific or as broad as you wish when you're entering in your

16:35

different areas to do the search in.

16:38

You come up with a name for your search engine.

16:40

I try to name them as what they are for, like sports search engine, poetry.

16:47

One of mine is Dr. T's reliable current events so that I know like I made it, I know what it's for and I

16:54

know why I made it, right? So obviously I know why I made it, but as a...

16:58

title, it's good for the students and the staff to be able to see like, here's what

17:02

it is. Here's what this thing is that you are getting into.

17:05

So once you've entered in your sources that you want it to search, you name it,

17:10

you click create. And once you've created it, you have the option to get the public URL, which is the

17:17

link that's going to bring you to the search box that has your search built into

17:21

it. You can even do a lot of customizing of colors and fonts and you can really make

17:27

it look certain ways that you want.

17:29

So having talked through the steps and having shown the students how to get into

17:33

how this goes, I then turn them loose.

17:35

I say, great, make your search engines, see what you can come up with, play around

17:40

with the fonts, play around with the colors, make it the way you want it to

17:43

look. You can have it display the results in different ways.

17:46

You can have it include pictures or leave out pictures.

17:50

Like there's lots of different things you can play with.

17:52

in terms of the nitty gritty details of it.

17:55

So once you've got it and you've got the public URL, you basically just keep that

17:59

URL someplace safe. I have a document where I've started laying them out so that I've got here's

18:05

what the name of it is, here's what it does, and here's the link to it.

18:07

So that if somebody needs it in the future, I can pull it right up, send them

18:10

the link for that particular custom search.

18:14

So yeah, that's basically how that goes.

18:18

And it's... The students really enjoyed this chance to look sort of inside how search engines

18:24

work. And they seemed to have a real good time with building their own engines and then

18:29

going back and using them and showing them to their friends.

18:32

Like, check this out. It does this. You can do that.

18:34

You want to know about this topic? Let me show you what I did.

18:37

So it gives them that mastery and it lets them show off their knowledge and

18:41

understanding while also expanding and extending that knowledge and understanding

18:45

of the topic, which is really great.

18:48

And of course, The teachers love that students know how to do this.

18:52

I wish more of my teachers knew about this.

18:54

And I'm trying to sort of, when I tell them that they can do these kinds of

18:57

things, they go, Oh, wow, you can do that? And it's so easy to do.

19:00

It just takes maybe 20 minutes to set up a real good one.

19:03

You can set one up in minutes without, you know, if you're not worried about how it's

19:08

going to actually function, you could knock one of these out in no time.

19:10

But if you take the time to sort of build up your list of resources that you really

19:14

know are good, solid resources, you can spend a little bit of time setting one up.

19:19

But then once you've invested that time on the front end, you know that you've got a

19:23

good reliable source on the back end that you're going to be able to use this for in

19:27

the future. So strongly recommend if you haven't yet exploring that custom search engine

19:32

interface from Google, cse .google .com.

19:36

And of course you can check out the lesson.

19:38

It walks you through step by step.

19:40

And hopefully it's something that you can, you and your students and maybe your staff

19:45

can get some use out of.

19:47

So. There we go.

19:49

We just did Me as the Guest.

19:51

Now, of course, we've got to go into our book break.

19:56

So for the book break, I'm going to go with a book that I am currently reading

20:00

literally at this moment reading, not at this moment, reading just before I sat

20:04

down to record. I was reading this book and it's called The Meister of Deciman City.

20:30

by Brenna Rainey. And it is a really fun and interesting book.

20:35

I was at TXLA, I was walking around, I was thinking to myself, you know, I just did

20:39

this survey of my students and they said that they want more humor.

20:42

So while I'm here, while I'm on the exhibitor floor, I'm gonna walk around and

20:45

see, can I find some humor books that my students might be interested in?

20:48

And literally as I had that thought, I turned a corner and there's a guy standing

20:52

there with a book in his hand. He said, hey, would you like a free book that the author is gonna sign for you?

20:56

I said, of course. So.

20:59

took the book, got in line, I'm looking at it, The Meister of Decimum City, and it's

21:03

clearly a superhero book. And I'm a superhero nerd, so I was like, this sounds fun.

21:08

And I'm looking at the description on the back, and it's so, it just really is

21:12

grabbing me. And the tagline is, no one cares that you cured cancer if you also cloned a horde of

21:19

dinosaurs and let them rampage down the street.

21:23

Which just sounds perfect to me.

21:27

And as I'm reading a little bit about, this sort of semi -super villain genius who does all these things.

21:36

I'm really just getting pulled into the little blurb on the back.

21:39

It's so interesting. I took it home, started reading it, and I have just been...

21:46

It's an interesting book because at first I thought it was going to be for maybe

21:50

like the middle grades, but it's absolutely not.

21:52

It's much more for our upper YA slash adult, definitely in...

21:58

upper YA range. And it's about a 20 something super genius slash sometimes villain, sometimes not,

22:07

who is really trying to figure out who she is and how that sort of fits into the

22:14

world that she is part of.

22:16

And the book does not suffer fools.

22:19

It dives right in to the middle of what's going on and it expects you to pay close

22:25

attention and it expects that

22:27

The characters aren't going to explain things that they already know because they

22:31

already know them. So there's not a lot of exposition.

22:33

It's a lot of you figure it out as it goes along.

22:37

You start filling in blanks. You have to do some work to get this story to really make sense in terms of all the

22:44

pieces that are being thrown at you because there's a lot of characters.

22:47

There's a lot of different elements to it, but it's so good.

22:49

It's so engaging. It's so enjoyable.

22:52

And I love the main character who is just

22:55

completely unsure of herself, despite being a literal super genius, smarter than

23:00

anybody else on the planet, she's so full of insecurities.

23:03

She's so full of these just moments of uncertainty and she doesn't really kind of

23:11

get why she doesn't seem to fit in anywhere.

23:13

And as the story goes along, she starts to try to find her identity a little bit and

23:18

figure out who she is. And she's also got all this family baggage that she's trying to figure out and all

23:23

this emotional, tragedy that she's had to deal with and all sorts of different kinds of trauma

23:31

that she's trying to overcome. all different kinds of trauma that she's trying to overcome.

23:37

And it's really interesting. It also has some interesting ideas about like, who are the heroes and who are the

23:43

villains? Like we tend to tell certain stories about the heroes that would almost equally apply

23:50

to what we'd consider villains.

23:53

And yet we tend to differentiate between these two groups.

23:57

And of course there's reasons why we separate heroes and villains, but it

24:01

really asks us to think a little deeper.

24:03

And one of the... Ideas in the story is that there's more to the story and just because we get a neat

24:10

Storyline that seems in the headlines to tell us everything we need to know there's

24:15

usually more going on and when the news story is over the people involved still

24:21

continue forward and their stories are not finished just because the news story is

24:25

finished and Sometimes there are lingering effects of things that go on that we don't

24:29

maybe realize or think about and we want to put those aside and say the story's

24:33

done Let's move forward But for the people who are engaged with these stories, who are part of these

24:37

stories, maybe the story is not done and maybe they're not ready to move on.

24:41

And I feel like that hits on so many things that are going on in our society

24:46

right now, in our world right now.

24:48

So I'm really enjoying this story.

24:51

I hope that you'll check it out because it's just, it's fun and it's interesting

24:56

and it's got lots of pieces, lots of moving parts.

24:59

It's different than other sorts of stories that I've read that are similar to this.

25:03

It's got more... got more depth to it, I would say, than a lot of the superhero -y kind of stories

25:10

I've read, especially ones that tend to have some humor to them.

25:13

So something to think about.

25:16

This might be a good one if you've got your upper YA readers who might be looking

25:20

for something a little bit deeper or maybe looking for something a little different

25:23

that they're not into superheroes usually, but this might be an entryway for some of

25:27

those readers who are looking for something a little bit heavier to read

25:31

that might help them see that there's lots of great stuff that can be funny and

25:36

interesting that's not necessarily something that we might first think of and

25:41

we might be able to look past the surface of our books to see that there's maybe

25:46

more going on underneath. So that's all we got this week.

25:50

I would love if you know other folks that have some great lessons.

25:55

Maybe you're not ready to come and share on the show, but maybe you know somebody

25:59

who's got a great lesson they

26:01

have done or you know that they've got this awesome activity that they've worked

26:05

on, why not either encourage them to reach out or send me some kind of contact

26:12

information for them. I will reach out. I'll say, Hey, you were recommended.

26:16

We'd love to have you. I love hearing what other people have to say.

26:19

I love getting to share what other people have put together and finding out about

26:25

it. I mean, I have loved doing this podcast so far because I get to learn so much and I

26:29

get to have these great conversations. So if you're not ready to share your lesson, maybe you know somebody who is or

26:36

who might be, reach out, let me know.

26:39

Or if you've got something, reach out, let me know.

26:42

I was talking to Len Bryant at Texas's Library Association conference, and he was

26:49

saying, you know, for some of us, the everyday might seem real simple and basic,

26:55

but for somebody else, it might be revolutionary.

26:57

Your everyday might be somebody else's revolutionary.

26:59

So think about it. Maybe there's something you're like, Oh, that's not really that cool.

27:03

It's not really that neat, but there's people out there and I'm probably going to

27:06

be one of them. They're going to go, Holy smokes.

27:09

That's awesome. That's brilliant. It might seem simple, but it's not.

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It's something that not everybody's going to have thought of before.

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So think about it. Maybe reach out.

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Let me know. I would love to talk to more folks.

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I'd love to see some of the awesome stuff that folks are doing out there.

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So anyway, that's my pitch.

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That's my book. That's my lesson. I hope you're having a great one.

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and I'm going to be bringing you a couple of new guests in the near future and I'm

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looking forward to hearing from a lot of you. Thanks everybody.