I’ve been a fan of the articles in Connections (from Curriculum Corporation) for a while now. They are generally pertinent, relevant and practical, and certainly provide plenty of inspiration.

Connections No. 69, Term 2 2009 has just crossed my desk, and the first article is Widgets and widgetry for librarians: copy, paste and relax. Sounds good to me! In fact, this article is very timely – we have a library webpage within our school intranet, and I have been thinking about how to revamp it to make it a more appealing and user-friendly access point for staff and students.

Some of the ideas this article has given me:

• put the library timetable on the webpage – giving information on busy/not busy times, and also reinforcing the importance and role of the library without spelling it out
• put student-created ppts on the webpage – the days of research project posters (hand coloured with pencil shavings) are over, so why not share some of students’ great products online?
• add a del.icio.us feed/display
• add a flickr badge – set it to ‘books’ or some such and watch it roll on

I’m also keeping in mind the KISS principle; my library serves years 3 to 8 and their teachers (and hopefully parents too), and I need to provide a site with a logical structure, clear navigation, self-explanatory graphics and not too much text.

I have some planning to do.

I’ve been doing plenty of thinking recently, but not a lot of writing.
Driving to and from work, putting away books, doing housework – these all help the thinking processes, beacuse they are times when I am free to reflect. It is making the time to write that is hard… this post is a case in point – it has been in the drafts folder for two weeks! (there are others in there too, explaining how it comes to be two months since my last published post!)

Recent thoughts have centred on boys’ reading, information literacy, ICT competencies, integrating the library with the classroom curriculum, fluidity, flexibility…

All of these will come into play during the upcoming Your School Library Online Conference – I am presenting a paper on how I seek to introduce and implement web2.0 techonologies in my school library program.

I sat down this week and used Webspiration to help me organise my thoughts; I really like using mind-mapping tools to create order out of the swirling mess of ideas and information that races around inside my skull when I’m trying to pull a project together. As a high school and uni student I used to plan out assignments with lots of different coloured pens, as a classroom teacher I used to write each activity or section on the board in a different colour, giving both me and my students an easy way to describe progress “has everyone finished the blue? Who’s up to the purple already?”. I love having a colourfuI, visually informative way of organising ideas, thoughts and information.

It’s quite a while since I joyfully discovered Inspiration and Kidspiration software, and was completely charmed by the way even struggling students could produce a clear diagram of the life cycle of a duck (for instance), unhindered by the difficulties they had with handwriting. Now we have Webspiration, which is in beta release and currently free, and I am dazzled all over again! So far I have not tried the collaborative facility, where you can invite other people to work on your document, but I have tried the web-publishing, which worked quite well. I foresee some collaborative mind-mapping fun in my future, and definitely in my teaching!