Blowing My Own Trumpet

I had my Five Minutes of Glory today, presenting my vision for my library to the Junior and ELC staff. I know all too well that teachers are a hard audience, but also that they respond well to bribery, so I decided to use a technique I have heard of from various wondrous TLs, that of the Love Your Library showbag.

With the help of Big W and Chickenfeed (ie $2 shop) I assembled a document wallet for each staff member, a book of stickers, and highlighter and some stickynotes, then added

  • Quick and Dirty Guide to the Premier’s Reading Challenge, + bookmark and poster
  • Local bookstore 15% discount bookmark
  • Andy Griffiths ‘Just Macbeth!’ tour flyer for yrs 5 & 6 teachers
  • Referencing Refresher
  • Bibliography examples and templates
  • Information Literacy stages using ICT (from ASLA, 2004)

The last two items were targeted by year group, so each teacher only got the level relevant to their group, while their staff refresher doc had the full whammy. My aim was to give the staff an overview of the range of services provided by the library – most of which they know, but a reminder with prezzies doesn’t hurt – and to bring information literacy issues to the forefront a little more. We’ve been having a bit of a push in the Middle School to give staff and students this information and resources, so now I’m targeting the Junior School.

The other topic was that of the school library webpage. I do not like it – I find it text-heavy, disorganised, counter-intuitive (hey, this sounds a lot like me and my office…!) and I’m sure that staff and students find it very hard to know where to look to find anything useful. I want to redesign it, within the framework of the intranet software, to provide library and information services to everyone in an accessible way. I explained to staff my thoughts on this, and external issues such as forthcoming software changes to the catalogue search, and redesign of intranet appearance by contracted web developers later this year, and general lack of free time to do things instantly. I also asked staff would they like a more personalised library service – my library serves students from 4 to 14 yrs of age, an enormous range of skills, interests, literacy levels, subject areas. My thinking is to provide a page for each year group – or pair of years – based on a generic template, containing:

  • annotated links to age-appropriate search engines
  • research skills and tips (for students and parents working from home)
  • hotlists of pre-selected websites
  • links to in-house resources
  • links to support leisure reading – Book Week, PRC, author blogs…

I asked staff what they felt, and there were some easy questions and some curlier ones – but generally it felt like staff are ready to participate in changes that would improve their access to services and resources.

Having offered all this, now I have to make good on it. ::gulp::

:>

Nearest Book meme

Master Jack smiled his reassuring-customers grin, the one that showed his four remaining teeth.

Tom Appleby, convict boy by Jackie French 2004.

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence – either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

from Stephen’s Lighthouse

The Big Flip

Our library was redesigned a few years ago, and I don’t think the TL had much say in how everything turned out. Some things are really annoying but unchangeable, like the TL office being a long way from the door and hidden behind a pillar, or most of the bookshelves being built-in, or the fact that there is only power and network cabling in two areas, for about a dozen computers total.

I have been watching the way that classes use or try to use the library since I started here in late April, and I have decided to flip the fiction and non-fiction collections over, to avoid some of the problems we had had when classes tried to share the library.

Until now, the non-fiction was up near the door, and the fiction was at the ‘quieter’ end with soft chairs etc. the difficulty was that half of the computers are at the far end of the room, past the quiet reading area, so students coming in to do research would be a distraction for those trying to read for English lessons.

My mini-makeover will create a distinct fiction and reading area near the front of the room, with book display space right where students walk in, and will put the tables and chairs in the centre of a research area, surrounded by the non-fiction collection and having the two groups of desktop computers at either end. As we have laptops available, and will be having netbooks too next year, it will be possible for a whole class to sit together, comfortably, using computers and books to research.

That’s the plan. We’ll see how it works :>

 

I really must blog more often

I have many many different things to say about being a Teacher Librarian, but squeezing the time into my day to compose the prose can be a mite difficult, to say the least! For want of some other organisational technique, why don’t I talk about two very different projects I have undertaken this year – the link between them being different sessions I attended at the joint CBCA-Tas and ASLA-Tas conference here in Hobart earlier this year.

Let’s start with a fabulous activity I tried with two Year 8 English classes.

Book Trailers

We had Dr Susan La Marca as a keynote speaker, and also as a speaker on the second day, talking about integrating technology to enhance learning and teaching. The activity which really caught my imagination was a way of making movie-trailer-style reviews of books – Book Trailers. Dr La Marca said that she had had this idea when she a new book being promoted on a publisher’s website, and so she had tried it with her students with great success.

I took this idea to some of the teachers who bring their classes to the library for Silent Reading during English lessons, and offered to set up and run the technology side of it. One of the Yr 8 teachers was interested, so we ran it with his two classes. I set up a wiki on the school library website, with different pages outlining the task, the tools, and the assessment criteria. The aims for this activity were to:

  • Provide a mulitmedia alternative to a written or oral book report
  • Encourage students to plan, draft and edit a project
  • Introduce students to issues of copyright on images and sound files available on the internet
  • Introduce students to alternative search engines such as flickrCC
  • Reinforce the referencing message
  • Emphasise the role of the library in providing information literacy skills as well as leisure reading materials

I created a sample book trailer to demonstrate what we were after, and led the students through the assessment checklist rating my example. When we were sure that the students had understood the task, we let the students get on with it.

Over the next two to three weeks, the students were really focussed and motivated – they worked hard on their projects, frequently previewing and editing their work; they asked lots of questions, and sought help to identify copyrighted and copyright-free images. Toward the end it was clear that some students needed more help with time-management; they hadn’t quite completed their book trailers, or hadn’t added sound, but that is one of those minor tweaks that will be used to improve the activity next time.

When the students had to hand in and share their work, it was great to see the effort that had gone into matching images to events/plots/characters, to see the connections that students had made between the ‘feel’ of a story and what kind of music/soundtrack could evoke that feel. I missed the sharing session of the second class, and afterwards a couple of the boys came to see me to say that they had really enjoyed the task, and that it was interesting to see what other boys had made for different books.

I have two of the students’ final book trailers, and will be collecting some more to share on the school intranet (once the boys have inserted a copyright notice on the last screen). I am thrilled with the students’ enthusiasm and engagement, and am very keen to run it again next year, with a few minor adjustments to achieve an even higher rate of completion.

 

 

 

Dithering

My apologies to the edublogiverse for taking so long to move from intorductory to post to actual content.

I have been thinking hard about what to blog next, so much so that I have been (metaphorically) oscillating in one place, bouncing around between ideas and thoughts and priorities like one of those virtual ball bearings in a MS Pinball game!! (Have to keep the ICT theme going)

For lack of ideas on how to tackle the deep philosophical issues, why don’t I start with a recent success?

This year I started work in a boys’ school, which is a new environment for me. I am learning about boys’ education, and what kind of fiction tastes boys have a different ages, and I’ve been reading things like Cherub (R. Muchamore) and Contest (M. Reilly) and so on. Promoting reading and a culture of reading is of course one of my goals as a Teacher Librarian, and I am always looking for new ways to do this.

My latest brainwave is to have the boys in Yrs 5 and 6 create Reader Profiles for themselves, using as many useful web2.0 gadgets as I can, and have them saved on the students’ personal intranet pages – this is going to be built up into favourite author lists, favourite books, and hopefully even the occasional book review ::gasp!::

This week’s task is to create a personalised Genre Wordle.

  • We do a fast reminder of what genre is, and then the class collaborate to create a genre list of about 20 headings. Every student saves their own copy of the list. (You could do this as a whole class activity if you can’t access enough computers at once)
  • On the big screen – or on a smartboard – I show the students how to find Wordle, and demonstrate coping and pasting the genre heading list into the text box, and tell them to click on ‘Go’.
  • I then show students how to play with the layout, font and colours, so that they know how to change the image.
  • Then we go back to our genre list, and I show the students what happens if I select my favourite genre and paste it into the genre list another 5 or 6 times, and make a new Wordle.
  • Students then have to try it for themselves, chooosing their favourite genre and putting it into their list multiple times, then choosing their second favourite and putting it in several times, etc. I emphasise that students need to save their Favourite Genres list before going any further.
  • Students now make a new Wordle out of their Favourite Genres list, ending up with a Wordle that puts their favourite genres in beautiful big letters!
  • I show students how to publish their Wordle, emphasising that they should not use their real names because these will be on the internet. We copy the URLs and paste them onto the end of the Favourite Genres Word documents.
  • Next lesson I will show the students how to take a screenshot of their Wordle and paste that into Paint or Word to use in their Reader Profiles.

So far this task is working well, and I hope to build on it by having students share their genre Wordles, and start thinking about why they enjoy particular genres – we may then take the favourite genres and make wordles describing their special characteristics…. the sky is the limit!!

1 2 3 4