The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

Teaching Librarian pleted, graded, and then thrown out or put away by the student, never to see the light of day again. This particular partnership began with Dan Shafransky, our curriculum leader for comput- er studies. He was musing that he wished he could find something authentic and meaningful for his grade 9 students to work on. They were about to begin a unit on desktop publishing. This conversation occurred at approximately the time the White Pine selection committee (of which I am a member) was to meet to choose the nominees for 2004. I suggested to Dan that perhaps his students would like to create promotional materials for the White Pine reading program. These could take the form of brochures, bookmarks, posters and whatever other ideas the students might have. I introduced the assignment by providing students with the titles of the nominated books, an explanation of how the White Pine reading program works, and some examples of last year's promotional materials. I directed students to visit Chapters, Barnes and Noble and Amazon Web sites to look at pictures of the books and to read blurbs about each book and author. Students used these mostly to get ideas for creating their own products. I explained to students that their posters would be displayed 16 Ontario School Library Association Over the years, a large part of my suc-cess as a teacher-librarian has beenthe wonderful partnerships I have formed with subject teachers. Together we have created performance tasks that give stu- dents the opportunity to develop skills that encompass all stages of the research and inquiry process. These tasks also help them work on assignments that answer a "com- pelling why." In other words, students create a product that has meaning in the real world. That product is not just something that is com- A Meaningful Experience Karen Smulevitch Desktop Publi shing