Apologies for bad poetry! This little tool is giving me ideas…

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Now that I’m in recovery mode, and have had a chance to refine my event planner checklist, I’ve been thinking about the benefit of these author visits – how would I justify them to the powers that be if my budget came under fierce scrutiny?

I have hosted three author visits this year, two of them purely serendipitous. The visit last term by Jeannette Rowe gave our prep boys a chance to hear about how books are made, to see someone drawing pictures in the familiar style of known books, to understand some of the motivation behind writing books, and to enjoy well-known stories in a new way.
The book tour visit by Andy Griffiths gave students new insight into how funny books can be, how such outrageous ideas are developed, and how text and pictures interact. The drama performance of a short excerpt from the latest book also demonstrated how readers can interact with a text to bring it to life in a new form.
And this week’s event brought together sport and reading – a great AFL player up there on stage talking about how his old school friend asked him to help write a book, and now there are seven in the series with number eight planned for next year. Although many audience questions concentrated on Gary’s sporting career, there were quite a few about the series, how long it takes to write the books, things like that.

What are the students getting out of these events? For me it means a lot of organising – crossing ‘i’s and dotting ‘t’s – such as coordinating changes to timetables, supervision, ordering more copies of the books…

But for my students – the ongoing interest in the books, the discussions about the event and what they enjoyed, the connections they make between books on the shelf and the creative efforts of the person who put the story onto the page – those are very powerful things.

That’s the point.

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!

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….

I’ve just come home from a Parent Information Night, where I played both the TL and the parent roles. My son has begun year 4 at my school, so I needed to hear about the way things are structured, what the expectations are and so on.

As the Teacher Librarian, I spoke to the assembled group of parents to explain the role of the library as both centre for reading and as promoter of information literacy skills. I explained our opening hours, the resources available for the boys, our philosophy of matching the book to the boy, our efforts to encourage the boys to expand their reading into new areas, my availability to talk to parents, and that the first answer on Google is not always the best.

I felt very pleased when my colleague told me that I spoke well, for which I can partly thank the ‘get over it’ attitude I developed towards potentially embarrassing situations after being an exchange student – having mortified myself in Japanese in front of 1500 students during a school speech competition, there really isn’t much more to be afraid of. However, most of my confidence came from a belief in the value of my role – I make a difference in my students’ lives by helping them discover the solace and escape and joy of reading, and by helping them to know how to find out what they need as they need it, so that they can be confident in their own ability to tackle unknown situations, because they know that all it takes is a little thought and sifting and the answers will become clear.

I love my job.

the Transforming School Libraries e-conference is chugging right along, and I am enjoying skimming through the presentations to choose those most relevant to my situation, and then read/listen/view more carefully and follow the discussions. It has been fascinating to see the use -for instance- of Voicethread, because not only can you add typed or audio comments, but the comments play in order, and you can also ‘write’ on the image when commenting.

I am bringing the deputy head in on Thursday to give her an overview of what I am exploring, and to bounce ideas around regarding what we see the library providing to the school.

I’ll have to keep this brief, as there have been too many late nights and early mornings, and I do not wish to frighten small children tomorrow ;P

For my holiday reading I brought home The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Although I haven’t touched the second, this week I have been reading The Book Thief, and really enjoying it. Tyring to explain it to my curious son, I said that this book is set in Nazi Germany, is narrated by Death, and is about a fairly ordinary little girl who is fostered out to a poor family and who steals books from time to time, and that despite all these points, it is not depressing.

Reading this book has reminded me of how satisfying it is to be absorbed by a tale, to live inside the words. So much of my reading now is snatches of info on computer screens, or flicking through the newspaper, or a chapter of a novel at (the children’s) bedtime. This reminds me that there was an article I read last year about how the internet is changing our reading habits. When I googled it (as you do) I discovered a Wikipeida article that turned out to be even more interesting than my recollection of the original article. Apparently the article sparked a furious debate across the blogosphere and intellectual fora, wherein journalists, writers, critics, educators and neuroscientists posited theories and some evidence (mostly anecdotal, due to the newness of the alleged phenomenon) on whether or not spending more time online in a hypertextual reading environment rewires our reading circuits so that sitting down to concentrate on a single piece of prose becomes harder and harder to do. I’m not quite ready to put forth my own opinion yet; I think that perhaps we haven’t quite identified all of the factors, because changes in the way that we timetable our lives, for instance, have an impact on how much uninterrupted time we have to devote to sustained reading, which is a social and cultural influence rather than exclusively technological.

hmm. I’ll have to think about this one. Once I’ve read my emails.

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