I have been a little preoccupied this week, because today we were hosting another book launch-ish event, and anything that wasn’t arranged before I went to Perth had to be organised in a searing hurry – audio, permission notes, MCs, book orders, etc etc… Add to all that some fairly busy teaching days, staff meetings, Web 2.0 courses and normal home commitments, and you get a TL with not a lot of spare brain room for idle bloggery.
However, I am pleased to say that our event today went off without any particular hitches – thanks to the enormous help of various staff members and the students in their classes, we had chairs, audio, and MCs, adoring fans had their books signed, more adoring fans had their photos taken with the authors, and I earned some serious brownie points for being the organiser. The students had a great time, the authors were really wonderful speakers, various books and posters were given away as trivia quiz prizes, the school got one of those really really big posters with a nice thank you signed on it – and we only disrupted two lessons and recess. I’d say that’s pretty spectacular, wouldn’t you?

I am back from Perth, Wa, where I attended the ASLA XXI National Conference.

What a fantastic event! So many stimulating ideas, engaging presenters and wonderfully inspiring colleagues!!

While I will be talking more about particular presentations and ideas as I sort out the masses of information in my notes, Twitter feed and overloaded brain cells, I’d like to start by pointing out the single most effective aspect of attending a conference like this:

The people you meet!

I’m playing with Flickr this afternoon, and have had some fun exploring, clicking on links and playing with tools

Do you like my Spell with Flickr creation?

And look what I found while clicking around the World map! Exactly the kind of thing I’d been dreaming up earlier this week: Palette, by Jakerome

(CC licenced for sharing)

I’ve been reading Will Richardson’s blog Weblogg-ed today, and find myself clicking link after link, following through fascinating ideas and pertinent quotes…

It would be easy to spend the entire day doing this, letting my head fill with fireworks as each new idea lets off another multi-coloured explosion of exciting possibilities.

However, I have other tasks to do – housework, lesson plans, 23 Things tutorials to design, socks to knit… I’ll have to let what I’ve read so far satisfy me until I have time to tackle some more.

There are never enough minutes in the day to accommodate all of the ‘oughts’ and ‘want tos’ along with the ‘musts’.

Original image: ‘fireworks at Israel 60th Celebration‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11911266@N02/2499113028
by: Ziv Turner

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License

Before Picasso went completely abstract…

Me, with class

Actually, I’m a bit of a nerd, always have been, always will be. I love books, reading, enjoy school and studying, card games that don’t involve gambling, backgammon, I’m untidy, frequently disorganised, often late, I like Lego, jigsaw puzzles and hard Sudoku. I have been known to garden, sew, embroider, cross-stitch, and think that there is no such thing as too many cookbooks or too much wool. These days I like messing around on the internet, chatting to online knitting friends in our knitter’s online community or via our knitblogs (could I be any cooler??) and trying out new gadgets and gimmicks.
Some of these things point to what kind of learner I am.

• Eclectic. I am interested in almost everything, particularly anything crafty, mathematical, scientific, colourful, communication-related or just really, really fun. Politics, economics and sport do not thrill me.
• Interactive - I generally learn by watching and doing, rather than by reading or inventing.
• Communicative - I like to talk through my ideas and thought processes; if I am writing something I draft and rewrite things several times as I work through my own developing understanding of the concept. (This is probably why I talk so much)
• Visual - I like using different colours for different lists on the whiteboard, and I love concept maps! If something is completely unfamilar to me I like to see it in action before trying it myself, although I am happy to experiment once I have the basic idea.
• Moderately adventurous. I like trying new recipes, going to new places, meeting new people. however I don’t like starting absolutely blind – I want to read the whole recipe and see a picture, or work out how far away the new place is before we head out. 

Busy, busy, busy! I have so many things going on each week that I never seem to sit down and blog the good ones – nor the bad or ugly, either! Which is a shame, because **** segue alert!! **** I am running a 23 Things course for interested staff at my school, which runs on blogging, and I should be practising what I preach, yes?

So, a fun moment to finish my week – I had pointed out one of my recent purchases, Zombie Haiku, to an English teacher colleague. Giggling over it before her lesson started, I suggested she read the first few pages out to her class, and ask them to figure out what was going on. Some of them were mystified, while a few had heard us talking earlier and knew what was going on. Discussion of why I found it funny brought us around to the beautiful traditions of haiku, and how ridiculous it was for an intellectually-dead zombie to write any. One student wanted to know whether I’d finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies yet (no, and I won’t either; just not my shtick), which led to a suggestion of zombifying classic fairy tales – the first suggestion? Cinderella! I hope that the boys do have a chance to try out their skills at transforming some well-known story in this way – although some will be choosing something other than zombies, as there were a few revolted expressions around when we got to the ‘brains, brains, brains’ haiku!

I leave you with the Official Commercial, found on the Official Zombie Haiku site:

This has been a really busy month.

School holidays (3 weeks), including various childish illnesses and a short trip away.

Preparation for conference and for Term 2.

Conference starts.

Term 2 starts.

Son brings home nasty virus, shares it with sisters and father.

Weeks 2 and 3 of term are spent dashing in and out of school, depending on which child was sick and which parent had more urgent meetings. We postpone our youngest daughter’s third birthday due to her being too sick to enjoy anything.

Wednesday I had had enough, and decided to allow myself some time off. It was time to take care of my Mental Elf. I picked up a favourite book and read, and read, and left our children’s dinner to my husband and read, and went to yoga and came back and ate and had some wine and read my book some more.

Hubby catches the virus.

ABC television channels suddenly disappear from the digital set-top box.

It looks like I’ll have plenty of time to review the conference papers this weekend. That is, I’ll have time after caring for sick hubby, and performing parental duties, and housework, and school work, and cake-making.

(Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

So many applications for this in the classroom – and excellent for a giggle!

School is driven by timetables – what lessons do I have today? What’s on this week? When are the staff meetings/ sports days/ reports/ interviews this term? Write up a program, tick off skills and outcomes, demonstrate that something is happening in the classroom.

The same sense of minutes rushing past is felt in the library -

Just keeping on top of everyday tasks is enough to keep me more than fairly well occupied! But reading a paper today from Sharon Markless reminded me of some of the ideas that were presented in the masters’ course I completed a few short years ago – it is not enough to just ‘do your job’ – if you want to do anything significant, if you want to position the library as THE information centre, if you want to market yourself as a leader in using digital information tools and sources, as an innovator, as an experienced leader who can develop and run professional development activities for staff that are both practical and pertinent to the work in the classroom – well then, you have to THINK about it FIRST.

Ms Markless’ paper is called Developing Information Literacy in School: Being Strategic. It draws heavily on the work of researchers into educational change processes such as Michael Fullan (whose books I really did enjoy reading!), and as such much of it was for me a reminder of things I had already heard of. This is not to say that it was irrelevant – I find it much easier to apply a new idea or technique on the second or third read-through – and now that I have been in my current position for a year the message is very timely – I am ready to roll my sleeves up and reshape my library to reflect contemporary best practice for school libraries.

There are two points from this presentation which I am going to follow up:

1. Carry out a school library evaluation to describe the kinds of teaching and learning that are happening in and through the library (and me)
2. Think strategically – sort through my ideas about school libraries and our school curriculum and school culture and services and resources and work out what my vision for the future is, plan out where I want to be in five years’ time and how I’m going to get there. This is a big deal; I need to do a lot of personal reflection, then start talking to other staff in the library team, then go further out to talk to staff and students about what they think of/ want in/need from the library.

Somehow I think that two things is more than enough….