Hmm, perhaps that title needs a little work…

What I love, though, is that last night I was idling on the internet when my Skype  pinged to tell me that my friend Mayu in Tokyo was saying hello – we chatted for half an hour or so about the weather, time differences, just catch-up kind of conversation. I changed the language settings on my computer and typed in Japanese – I am so out of practice! I took a photo of myself with the built-in camera and sent it to her – so many ways to communicate so easily! Text, language input modes, emoticons, file transfers… On Skype I have shared video conversations with my boss. I have used Skype to phone my Mum, and do video with typing on the side…  Applications like Skype make it so easy to connect with other people despite distance – there are so many ways I could use this with my colleagues and students, molding the tool to suit my purposes…

Also this week, I love that I can ask for friends around the world to have their classes answer an online survey, direct them to a wiki about the project, log in and check the changing accumulation of results, and demonstrate the power of real data collection and the meanings behind the statistics by projecting the results onto a screen for my class to discuss. I love that I can tweet this request to various people in my network and ask them to pass on the url. I love that I can connect so easily to like-minded teachers and teacher-librarians around the world, just by typing and clicking…

I wonder what’s under the rest of the iceberg?

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)

Before Picasso went completely abstract…

Me, with class

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:

My apologies for not blogging more regularly. Motherhood took over life for the past week with two of three children sick with a virus, which did not leave much time for conferencing or reflection.

Today I caught up on a couple of presentations, and there are a couple of things I would like to think about further, and also to share:

From Mihaela Banek and Sonja Spiranek, concluding thoughts:

To me that means we have to jump in, embrace the possibilities, experiment, model, demonstrate, assimilate these tools until they are simply part of the fabric of what we do.

And an image used as part of the presentation:

(Released by Daniel F. Pigatto under a CC licence)

Now isn’t that food for thought???

And to finish off on a tangent, have you ever wondered how anyone could map the web?

It’s that time again – Your School Library Online Conference #2, Information Literacy with Web 2.0.

We started on Saturday, and already I’m falling behind. Hopefully I will be able to block out some time each day at work to view the presentations, and then I’ll need less time at home to take part in the discussions.

I have been working hard preparing for this; I have a wiki presentation on day 6, which still needs a few things uploaded, but is basically done. I have to resist the urge to play around with prettifying it, so that I can concentrate my little free time on keeping up with the real conference stuff.

To whit:

Day 1: Information Literacy Assessment: 
A Systems Global Approach
By Dr. Lesley Farmer, CSULB

This was the opening ppt presentation, unfortunately not as fleshed-out as we might have hoped, but it certainly raised the issue of how/whether/why to assess information literacy skills, which is a tricky question. Information literacy is so enmeshed with the processes that it is hard to deduct from an end-product, unless that product includes perhaps some kind of journalling of the steps of the task.

Another key point for me was the cultural/international aspect – can we assume that information literacy is global, and globally agreed upon? I’m guessing not, as different cultures place different values upon information, from total ownership at one end, to communal sharing at the other. International students at the secondary and teritary levels cannot be assumed to have the same understandings or skills as students who have come up through our education system and curriculum. – Although that even applies to the microcosm at local school level – a new student who has moved from one suburb to another will have different ideas and experiences of information literacy skills than those held by their new peers – we cannot make assumptions, we must always start with an explicit definition and demonstration of the skills we wish students to acquire/develop or use , and even more so if those skills are to be an assessable component of their learning.

Lastly, (although I am skipping a great deal of what was presented), I am feeling caught by the issue of overlap; there are more and more ‘literacies’ being targeted by educational researchers or professional development writers, and so many overlap or are interdependent with information literacy, escpecially in the digital dimensions: “critical thinking, technology competency, problem-solving, research skills…” (Farmer, 2009) and technology/visual/media literacies – I cannot define any of these without being aware of the way that they relate to information literacy and sometimes each other. I think that as ever we need to be aware of the ‘Big Picture’ – to have in mind our goals for our students’ education, and to weave these skills and understandings in as and where appropriate. In some cases it is easy and helpful to maintain a tick-a-box checklist, especially for areas such as ICT literacy where we are being asked to demonstrate our integration of a key skillset. In others these important skills are side-notes on the syllabus, difficult to assess or demonstrate in traditional assessment routines.

hmm, that’s a lot of thinking. Perhaps it is time for me to catch up on Day 2.

:>

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::

:>

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!

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