Newbery Update 4/22

Stage Two: March 20th-April 19th:

  • Content Development: Complete the Google Spreadsheet for Caldecott Books. Tweak Tableau Interface, create visualizations; Start blogging on the Website.
  • Design: Finalize website design and add pages to the site (Caldecott, etc.)
  • Outreach & Publicity: Continue to RT content on diverse books/child literacy. 

Reviewing our Project Work Plan, we have hit most of our milestones. During the last two weeks, we focused on creating content for our social media accounts and blog. We also finalized our website design, and have added most of the pages. Regarding our data, we created Newbery visualizations and are sharing them for our next round of feedback.

We were delayed with the Caldecott data, specifically with the breakdown of protagonists, due to the shutdown. We had to get creative, finding read-alongs on YouTube and reaching out to scholars who published Caldecott articles and asking them to share some of their data. The read-alongs were very helpful when dealing with the older Caldecotts, and the scholars were happy to share parts of their work. We will finish the Caldecott Spreadsheet by the end of this week, and then will start playing with the data in Tableau. We are also ready to share some visualizations on our social media, with links to the website.

As we enter the final stage of the project, we are re-thinking our deliverables. In our initial project plan, we wanted to create printable visuals and infographics that librarians and educators could place in their libraries and classrooms. Since classes will be taught virtually for the rest of the school year, we will focus on visualizations that can be shared with our audience digitally. We will also write a blog discussing how covid-19 impacted our research and outreach plans for this project.

The weeks leading up to the presentation will be busy for us. Over the next week we will finish collecting the Caldecott data and start creating vizzes, as well as post more original content on our blog and social media pages.