Beer and Books

It is all about advocacy! We had Friday drinks in the library by moving a portable bar with snacks in the conversation area of the secondary space.

It is a nice space, with just enough room to be cozy without being cramped and everyone enjoyed being there, but, the best part was some of the comments from staff ....
"I have never been in this part of the library before, this is great", "I didn't realise you stocked so many cool magazines - I'll have to come back on Monday to check them out".

So even though there was a bit of a mess to clean up, and some of our male staff tried to shelve the beers under the dewey system according to country (funny! - thankfully we found them whilst cleaning up), it was a great PR exercise and got staff into the library and noticing the resources without them knowing what was happening.

Beer and books - what a fun afternoon!

Collaboration in Context

Last week I had the pleasure to work with a class and a teacher, teaching about the research process and scaffolding their progress through the assignment.

I have created a number of Glogs to support the unit (you can see them here DCLibrary)

I have not had the opportunity to do this at such depth before, with such consistency or with such context. The students are Year 9 and are keen to learn.

What I am finding is that the students are keen to learn how to question, define, keyword, find, evaluate, notetake, select .... they are engaged because they can see how it relates to improving their abilities to achieve higher marks in the current unit. I am really enjoying the experience and is reinforcing to me what I have always known - that teaching and learning these skills must be in context to be truly effective learning.

Even better in all of this was that the teacher recognised the students had a very low level of skills before the unit, they then requested that I be a part of this unit so we could focus on information literacy. We have not put a time line on when I need to finish, so the scaffolding will continue until they are well and truly on their own feet. I am fortunate to be working with a flexible schedule that allows me to go into the class every day. Another interesting aside is that I am only working with half the year 9 classes on this unit, it will be interesting to see how their finished product compares with the other 2 classes to see if I really did make a difference.

Something else that has come out of this unit is I have been using some web 2.0 tools as tools for collaboration and storage of tools - wikis, netvibes, glogster, etherpad and wallwisher so far. Because we have been co teaching, I have not only been teaching the students how to use these tools in context, the teacher has been taking notice too, and it has resulted in other staff coming to ask me about the tools I am using and how to use them. This has now led to a workshop on our CPD day along with other tools of learning.

The students have really responded well to the use of these web 2.0 tools - Glogs are a favourite, and etherpad and wallwisher got the 'cool' approval. So, a busy but great week all round!

Epiphanies all round today...

Today I had to scramble quickly to retrieve my goods and chattels from my Geocities site before it was sucked into the cyberspace equivalent of a blackhole.

In doing this I had an epiphany - well a few actually.

First epiphany - I am an early adopter of technology. I had my first website in 1999 - 10 years ago, and I had to know html to create a special look for it. Not sure why it took me so long to realise I was an early adopter - I mean we had our first Apple Mac in 1987 (22 years ago - and we did NOT buy shares ;-0) but there you go - I am a slow realiser of what I am doing.

Second Epiphany - I had the pleasure to read some of my old assignments from my M.App.Sc. Course written in 1999 - 2001 that I moved from my Geocities site. Some of the titles include "Managing Websites as resources" and "Appropriate Recreational Use of the Internet in the School Setting". The epiphany is that the problems still exist and people are still struggling with the management of online resources and acceptable use of the internet in school and they are still the same problems. Why after 10 years haven't they been solved?

The third epiphany - I reread my assignment entitled "The Dynamic and Unique Role of the Teacher Librarian" and realised why I am so tired at the end of the work day! The essay is a bit political in that the task was to differentiate between the TL, the School Librarian and the classroom/subject teacher roles, but if you want to have read - it is here The Dynamic and Unique Role of the Teacher Librarian It is pretty comprehensive and long. I am about to lobby for another TL to support the school and students, and I think this may be useful to isolate the different roles I undertake without having to rethink to much to place into a proposal for submission.

Fourth Epiphany? Uni assignments can be useful after all!

(if you want to read the other articles they can be found off this page - it is a bit of mess right now as I literally just dumped it all there in the shortest time)

Collaboration in the corridor

Last week I received an email regarding a unit of work coming up and questions as to how I could help with regard to helping the students formulate great research questions and finding the information they need. I could have just emailed back and told her, or asked questions for her to answer, I could have just phoned and asked about it, but this would all have taken much longer than speaking to the teacher and working out a plan face to face.

Neither the teacher or I had any time to meet formally before the half term break, but it was urgent to nut out what she required and to come up with a plan for immediately after the break. I grabbed my desk diary and a pen, and met with her as she was walking to Learning Advisory class (roll call) on the way we discussed what prompted her email, what she required and how I could help. In the 10 minutes or so we took to arrive and to stand in the corridor (there was another teacher able to take the class), I had taken notes, written a draft plan of the requirements and briefly outlined what we could achieve and how long it would take. I would get back to her with a more concrete draft on where we would go and we would work on it over the break via email.

If I had not taken the initiative to walk with the teacher concerned at that very moment, I may have lost the chance to work with her as we would have just got too busy. I am now working on the plan for this class and we will continue to communicate over the one week holiday to be ready for the first week back. Moral : - Walking and planning in the corridors can be a very productive use of time!

For this unit I wanted to develop something that was an interactive and interesting scaffold to help them through the research processes. I explored a number of options and gave Glogster a go trying it out to make something interesting for the students to work through and with. Part of the assessment is to make a 6 page webpage and am wondering if they can use Glogster for this - I certainly found it interesting, easy and fun to use.

This is my initial couple of Information literacy Glogster interactive posters - still being tweeked Awesome RQs and Finding Info I have only used a small part of the Glogster capabilities, but I think it will do the trick for this unit.

Active and engaging learning

This weekend I have had the privilege to attend an IB continuum workshop for school librarians. So far the presenters have been working hard to keep us engaged and the learning has been good, but the best part has been meeting and chatting with people outside the sessions as we discuss problems, solutions and share our knowledge and experiences with each other. Many are from from far away places, and tell the stories of how to develop a “culturally diverse” collection in a country where diversity is not embraced, the problems of working in a for profit school where libraries are seen as bottomless pits of a money sucking vortex’, and the constant dilemma of having not enough space to accommodate the student population in the library.

As much as twitter, facebook, blogging, skype, email, listserves, help to keep us all connected in this maddening busy world, there is nothing like bringing a bunch of school librarians together for an intensive workshop to accelerate the sharing and learning through animated discussion on their solutions to the same problems you have, and share their own dilemmas for a different perspective on a resolution.

Face to face professional development is costly and time consuming but it produces an amazing result in widening your personal network, learning through others and giving you an appreciation for what you have and that you do have something to offer - not just to your school, but to others development as well. It may just be a small comment, or it may be a larger contribution. Professional development is an opportunity for sharing, and we all have something to offer. So, next time you have the opportunity to be with others discussing library stuff - don’t be a leech and just take everyone else’s ideas - make sure you contribute with your own experiences and solutions - it just may make a difference in the life of someone else.



(Image from State Library of NSW http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemLarge.aspx?itemID=304539 - you do need to visit this resource for Historic Photographs / Media / Manuscripts of NSW and Australia - just fabulous! - http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/search/SimpleSearch.aspx)

"I am just a librarian"

(image from http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/upload/2007/12/diary%20librarian.jpg)

On Friday I had the chance to attend a training workshop (not a very good one - but that is for another post) and part of the workshop was to create something to present using a web 2.0 presentation tool. It was a mixed bag of about 10 participants made up of teachers, teacher librarians and school librarians.

One of the participants was having some problems working out the application and gave the excuse or reason for her inadequacy "I'm just a librarian". I was appalled and told her so (It would not have been PC to smack her across the head for such a comment).

It made me reflect on why School libraries and Librarians get such a bum deal most of the time - it may just be their own fault for having such an attitude of patheticness (such a word?)...

If you are 'just a librarian' you will never approach the principal to tell them what you need, they will certainly not come to you for input and ideas. If you are 'just a librarian' you will get trampled over by teachers and will never be able to say 'no', if you are 'just a librarian' you will never get the rest breaks you are entitled to, nor the budget you require, nor the respect from the children, nor the ability to leave a wake of construction in your path, and as a consequence your library and job may just disappear.

Please, never insult any other school or teacher librarian by using the occupation as reason why you are inadequate in doing something. You "are a librarian" and therefore you are only limited by your own imagination and ability to move forward.

Most librarians are not dim or pathetic, in fact, the ones I know are extremely clever people. So, blame your own self for your own inadequacies and not the career you have chosen.

There, I will get off my soap box now and prepare for another hopefully better workshop later in the week.

Controversy in the collection

This week I had a parent of a year 7 boy bring in "King Dork" by Frank Portman and object to it being in the school library - particularly the descriptive sex scene on pages 119 - 121.

The fiction collection at our K-9 school is divided into 3 sections - Junior fiction for the emerging readers where we have the early chapter books. There is then the Fiction section, which is a general section which I keep 'G' rated. Then we have the senior fiction, which includes the controversial titles like Melvin Burgess' "Junk' and Portman's 'King Dork' plus other titles which are on the edge. Only the secondary students can borrow from the senior fiction collection - this includes year 7, or 11 year olds.

At the beginning of the year I talk to the year 7 students about the senior fiction and how they will come across swear words, and possible topics that will make them uncomfortable, or may not be the type of reading matter their parents want them to read at this time. They are to make to read the blurb and if they do decide to read the book, they have permission to not finish it if it makes them uncomfortable.

The parent was concerned that these types of books are in the school library, and she wanted year 7 & 8's to be banned from reading the senior fiction collection. I explained that I was not going to ban the year 7's and 8's from this collection, but she could request that her son does not borrow from that section. I explained that if he was in a pure secondary school, the books would probably not be separated into General and Mature ratings, and would probably find it harder to sift out books that are controversial from those that are not.

This has got me thinking about bringing in another level of the collection - to mark those in the senior fiction with an 'M' to indicate really mature content - which would include 'King Dork', Burgess' "Junk" & "Doing it", anything by Glynn Parry, most of Sonia Hartnett's work, anything where there is "intense sex, swearing, violence, drugs or rock and roll". This would then at least give the students more of a warning about the content, and probably make them wider read!

What do others do with their riskier fiction titles?

Just as an addition to this - I had a teacher bring me a National Geographic which has topless Lisu women bathing in China and stated that it was not appropriate for the collection. I also have students hiding the "Sex 101" and similar titles because 'they are inappropriate to be in a school library'.

I do have a collection development policy, and a challenged materials policy, so I think I am ready for the big challenge when it comes, and it will.

Here is a link to a superbly written letter by Jamie LaRue to a parent about the objection they had about single sex marriages in Uncle Bobby's wedding
Thanks to Ben Farr in Singapore for alerting me to this via OZTL_NET.