Waiting for the newer version

Firstly, apologies patient readers! I can’t believe it is a year since I last wrote. My excuses are many : finishing (at last!) my masters, becoming a Lead Practitioner, and enjoying my first grandchild. Enough of excuses, and on with the post.

I was delivering a seminar as a Lead Practitioner, talking about the new technologies, in particular the Kindle, the Sony ebook reader and the IPad, all of which I have. The Kindle is my own, the others belong to the school. Some discussion followed, as it usually does, about which devices are best for which purpose. Then one of the participants said that he would not bother buying any of them, he would wait for the newer versions to come along. Whilst this sounded sensible on the face of it, in actuality it showed me that he would potentially always find an excuse for putting exciting new developments off, whilst waiting for ‘the next best thing’. The thing is, with technology, there will always be a newer version. You cannot sit around whilst your pupils race ahead, or you will become an irrelevance in their world. Their phones can already access the Internet full time; it makes a nonsense of school filtering policies – but that’s another post! I have had the iPad in school now for nearly six months, and the ereaders for slightly longer. Both are regularly accessed by pupils, and there is always a queue to use the iPad. If we don’t show them, for instance, how to use these tools for enriching their lives – for studying and research, then they will only think they are ‘toys’. This blog post, for instance, has been written on the iPad. So don’t wait for ‘the next best thing’ but jump right in, embrace the new tech, buy ebooks, and become a leader for the pupils in your community – and the teachers too!

Playing games in the library

Warhammer 40,000 Club. Link to an animoto video about the club

A while ago, I was wondering how to boost lunchtime attendance.  It wasn’t bad, the library has always been a place for the quiet and reflective students to come, and for those who needed a space to recover from the hurly burly of school life.  But it wasn’t exactly busy, and I was beginning to worry about justifying the quietness to the Senior Management, who invariably seemed to walk through just when there was nobody around.  Then a shy Year 7 boy asked me a question which completely turned things around for me.  It was an innocous question; “Miss, I like playing Warhammer.  Do you think there is anyone else in the school who would play with me?”  So we made a plan to investigate this together.  He and I made a poster, which we put up around strategic places around the school, asking anyone who was interested to give in their names to the Library.  We had six pupils by the end of the week.  I told the boys that six was enough to start a club, and I typed up some letters to go home.  We arranged a day after school between us – Wednesdays – and the boys took the letters home. Word of mouth spread, and more and more came.  By the initial session, we had 10 boys starting Warhammer.  A worker at the local youth club came along – she had been wanting to set up a Warhammer Club, but had nobody to join in.  The club was born!  Within two weeks we had 20 members, and have had to close membership.  The boys starting coming into the library every lunch and break, to paint, to battle, to exchange ideas and models.  Suddenly, my problem was unexpectedly solved!  The library is busy, but purposeful.  The quiet kids still come in, and the boys are all engaged and happy.  Sometimes, listening to a pupil enquiry can take you in an unexpected, but welcome direction! 

I have embedded an Animoto video of our boys in the library, playing, painting and enjoying being in the library, which is half the battle won!

A day in the life

Today I took part in a very interesting project.  I don’t know who started the project, as I picked it up on Twitter, via tweets and retweets. The project was simply to write down everything that happened of note during your day, and blog about it at the end of the day.  Those on Twitter also tweeted, using the #libday4 hashtag.  It has been absolutely fascinating!  I have kept a watch on the # throughout the day, as librarians from all around the world logged in and started documenting their days.  All sorts of librarians, from all sorts of libraries, which was the point of the exercise.  All of our blog posts – and our tweets, presumably – are collected on a wiki, and this is to be shown to students considering which branch of librarianship to go into.  Of course, I would strongly advocate going into school librarianship, as the range of things you do in one day is enormous!  When I looked just now, there were 110 librarians on the list; by the time you look, there will probably be more!

Day in my life:  Library Resource Manager, Kent, UK

My day started when I spoke in teachers briefing thanking them for releasing their pupils for the Skype sessions with Tommy Donbavand last week (see previous post).  I also reminded them to send me articles and pictures for the school newsletter, which I will be putting together this week.

I then went back to my desk, where my assistant was working, and attempted to open this blog so that I could write about the day as it happened.  However, County had yet again blocked access – they do this from time to time, and then it mysteriously appears again, so documented my day on Twitter.

I spent a good part of the morning arranging with 4 teachers to meet after school tomorrow for the inaugural meeting of the Reading Week committee (which happens in July).  We have had reading week before, it has never been planned for so well in advance or co-ordinated.  We want to make a huge splash this year – got meeting all sorted.

I also spent part of the morning on my other role as Support Staff Training Manager, organising a Training Day for our Teaching Assistants, to which we have invited other schools to come as well.  3 strands to the day, I am talking on WEB 2 stuff (surprise, surprise!).  45 TA’s now attending, half from other schools – had to sort out rooms and catering arrangements.

Next came break, and I was attempting to set up our homemade interactive table.  However, the projector had been off all weekend and was rather reluctant to wake up.  And the batteries on the infrared pen had run out.  So I decided to give it another go after break, so that it was set up for lunchtime.  During break, students borrowed books, the members of the newly formed Warhammer 40,000 group chatted excitedly with each other, anticipating their first meeting on Wednesday in the library after school.

After break I sent details of my Voicethread collaboration to other school librarians who are joining with our school, telling them about a new person who has joined the group.  In between all of this my assistant and I were issuing books, dealing with printer jams, selling stationery, and answering queries.  At lunchtime, I got the interactive table working,  and showed off a 3D programme with swimming fish and the occasional shark thrown in.

After lunch I contacted finance to find out how much money I had left in my budget, so that I could spend it on books – and got a lovely surprise, a bit more than I thought.  Put that job aside for tomorrow, and intending buying an electronic photo frame to show off new books as they are cheap at Argos at the moment.  Right before I go home, my printer, and all of the others in the school fail (run by a central printing system).  I am the one who reports this to ICT – as usual, the teachers ignore the problem and send pupils to the library to try there, even though if printing fails on one printer, it fails on them all.  Aargh!

As I was leaving at 3 today for a hospital appointment, I spent the rest of the afternoon cataloging individual articles from the Philip Allan magazines for my sixth form pupils.  I brought some home, intending to make up the lost time by finishing at home, but cannot access the catalogue here.  So I wrote this blog post, and will finish the day by making an animoto about the day in the life of a library instead.

Skyping with Tommy

This week saw a first happening in this country – although I am happy to be corrected on this!  What you can see in the fairly unexciting picture there is a group of Year 8 pupils in our school having an author visit from Tommy Donbavand via the medium of Skype!  Tommy, the popular author of the Scream Street Series, gave our pupils a masterclass on writing books during three 40 minute sessions.  The three sessions took place on three consecutive afternoons between 20 –22nd January 2010.  The pupils learnt about how to plot stories, choose characters and develop them, choose a title, end a book well, and develop a plot.  They are now going away to write their stories which we are sending Tommy by email.  The sessions went very well with the smallest of glitches – sometimes the screen froze for a few seconds, – but in general the pupils settled down and seemed to forget that Tommy wasn’t actually in the room with them.  Tommy was able to show them pages from his forthcoming books, and even share a worksheet with them to copy down and fill in via his screen.  The advantages to us were cost, of course – Tommy lives in Lancashire and travelling expenses and overnight stay in Kent would be expensive; and also convenience – only 40 minutes out of a day.  It was our choice to go for three consecutive days, to fit in with Tommy’s timetable, and for me to showcase this collaboration at an upcoming presentation.  Tommy also enjoyed this form of author visit, finding that he could work on his book all morning, and speak to our pupils in the afternoon, with little disturbance to his day.  This is  Tommy’s blog post on how much he enjoyed the experience!  Not all authors will be willing to Skype in to you – in fact, Tommy is the only UK author that I could find who has done such a thing, but I expect that following his enthusiastic example, you will soon be able to persuade some others.  There are American authors who will Skype with classes, if you want a list of them, go here, and you can also register in an Eduskypers Phonebook, which will match you up with someone else looking to skype with you.  Be bold – remember that Skype is free to download and use.  I would use a decent webcam – mine had a good built in microphone, so that was ok, but that was the only cost.  You don’t even have to project it on a screen, if that is a problem for you, it can just be done on your computer. Hope this post has given you some ideas and inspiration – try it, you’ll like it!

Do you believe in digital illiteracy?

A new form of literacy is being discussed these days – digital literacy.  People are also debating whether there is a difference between ordinary literacy and digital literacy.  Of course, if you are only talking about reading words on a screen, then there is no difference between the literacies – you are focussing on reading.  However, I feel that digital literacy – or illiteracy – goes deeper than this.  As much as we are empowering a lot of pupils – especially boys – by increasing our use of technology in the classroom, and in some schools such as ours, laptops for all; we are also disempowering a lot of pupils who do not find computers easy to work on, and would prefer to do their work on paper.  They do not grasp programmes easily and quickly, take their time in getting used to keypads, and find PowerPoint – let alone anything more complicated – hard to manage.  By insisting that all work is produced on computer  have we have made them digitally illiterate?  They may be perfectly literate and articulate children, but our insistence on using computers to produce their work nullifies this for them.  Their written and hand coloured work suddenly looks shabby compared to the printed work of their classmate, all culled from sources like Wikipedia; and what value do we place on their hand drawn map and handwritten notes compared to their classmate’s work?  I am not a Luddite, and I love technology. I am only concerned that the Government’s insistence on more technology in schools (see the Rose report),does not mean that children lose out and find themselves digitally illiterate in an increasingly online world.

Further reading: (if this interests you, otherwise, please just comment)

Written off? How literacy affects opportunity (National Literacy Trust)

Beyond the digital divide: Rethinking digital inclusion for the 21st century  (Futurelab)

Professional behaviour and blurring the boundaries

This post concerns the way that we interact professionally.  This professional behaviour should not only be evident in our workplace, but also in every place where we interact with other professionals.

I know you will probably think, “What’s she on about?  I always act professionally!”.  But do you act professionally online?    Do you, for instance, post messages that are misspelled, not capitalised, not punctuated, and full of text-speak and jargon on online forums?  I feel that this is not the manner in which to communicate with fellow professionals; but it does seem to be the way in which increasing numbers of people communicate on the internet.  Just look at any online forum to see many examples of this.  However, we are professionals, and we want to be treated as professionals, not only by our own schools, but by our peers.  There is a place for fun – I communicate quite differently on my Facebook pages, for instance – but in forums where I am communicating on professional matters, then my language needs to reflect my professionalism. You may disagree with me – you may feel that formal language puts barriers between us – but I feel the opposite, that I cannot take seriously, or reply to posts with any helpful ideas, of people who don’t  communicate with me in professional language.

There does seem to be a blurring of the boundaries between professional and personal lives, and this can cause great confusion.  For instance, if you applied for a new job, and your prospective employers ‘googled’ you and found your Facebook pages, would you consider that a violation of your privacy if that information was used in an interview?  I know that I write quite differently on my Facebook pages, amongst friends – but I also lock them down quite tightly, so they can’t be seen by anyone else. I feel that blurring of the boundaries causes people to not consider the language they use, and what is appropriate in which forum.  So – be careful with your professional language online, and ensure that you remember where you are before you post!

Just my personal opinion, I know – your comments, as always, are welcome.

Does technology really harm our pupils?

I came across this article on the BBC Newspages, and it made me think.  Tech Addiction harms pupils.  Now, those of you who know me in person, know that I am fairly tech addicted myself.  Whilst writing this, I have Tweetdeck open for my twitter updates, and also MSN, in case a friend of mine comes online whilst I am writing this piece.  But does this harm me, and my ability to write?  It will slow me down, undoubtedly, and I wouldn’t argue with that at all.  But will it harm my finished piece of work?  There is also the fact that I can ask all of my online friends a question about something that puzzles me whilst I am writing to be weighed against the difference in time it may take me to write the assignment. I am now in my dissertation year, and I am going to study the impact of technology on teaching. Whilst, as a school librarian I do get upset by the fact that pupils are reading fewer books, and I also know the perfectly good reasons why they should read more (empathy, etc); I cannot say that the pupils are not reading, because they are.  They read blogs, Facebook entries, and webpages, for a start.  Does this harm them?  Well, it does depend on the child, but we could also say that maybe they are living a completely different type of life than we did as children.  They have access to technology way beyond my wildest dreams as a child.  I need to be careful not to judge them by the standards of my own childhood – where there were no other sources of reading other than the printed word – and to judge them by their own standards.  They may not empathise with other people different to them through the medium of fiction; but they may be doing this through Facebook.  Are they being harmed?  No, I don’t think so.  Are they different?  Yes, completely.  And is that a bad thing?  I leave it to you to judge that.

Growing the baby ‘Guerrilla library’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, here we are – you are witnessing the birth of a new baby library!  I am so proud!  Those of you who have been reading my posts, and following my blog, will know about the story of the Guerrilla Librarian.  Today I got to visit the school again, now that the furniture has arrived, to advise on future developments.  Now, those of you with big and ‘proper’ libraries may not think this is much, but to us (the teacher and I), this is miraculous!  This is a tiny space at the back of an English classroom transformed by two sofas, spinners and some nice plants.  What you can’t see – because they were in another classroom – were the two lockable folding bookshelves stuffed full of Accelerated Reader books, already being used by the pupils.  Most of the books on the shelves are old, and I am going into the school again to weed the stock (but very gently), and to help catalogue the books on LibraryThing so that everything is up and running for September.  Our next project is to buy some exciting non-fiction and some graphic novels, and we’re away!  The teacher is asking staff to donate their holiday reading, and some staff have already donated books from their children’s books at home, now they can see the library growing.  Isn’t it wonderful!  I will keep you posted on the growth of my baby, but thought you all deserved to see what can be done by sheer determination (and a generous grant of start-up money from the school of course).  It is fantastic that the Accelerated Reader programme has been used to grow a library back, and we hope that demand for reading is so high over this year that she will need more books and more shelves next year, encroaching even more into her classroom!

Slideshare – the value of online presentations

I learnt a really valuable lesson about the value of having your presentations uploaded to an online presentation site, such as Slideshare, recently. I have had occasion to upload three presentations recently, one of my own and two that I have been given permission to host from a recent CILIPKent training day that I organised.  The one that I uploaded was called A Guerrilla Librarian, and it was the slideshow from the presentation that I gave recently at the Renaissance Learning conference in Birmingham, which arose from the blog post of the same name which you will find earlier in this blog.  The other two were about developing libraries – one a university, and some public, – to incorporate social spaces.   What this exercise has taught me is the numbers of people that you can reach with the simple (and free) exercise of hosting the presentation online.  26 people came to our training day; however, I advertised the slideshows on my Twitter feed, by email to the other members of the CILIPKent committee who could not make the training day, and to the members of a librarians online group to which I belong.  One week after posting the links to these slideshows, this is the result: The Kent Libraries modernisation programme slideshow has had 280 views, and the Imperial College refurbishment programme has had 194 views!  Now considering that there were only 26 people in the room at the time, this shows the value of online networking. Many more people have been helped by the excellent ideas in these two slideshows, than if I had not bothered to upload them and left it to the more traditional handouts to delegates.  I think I have learned a valuable lesson about online presence – and I hope that CILIP learns from this too.

Professional Reviews makes a person professional!

 

You may think that this goes without saying.  You may think that I have just put that heading to be smart, using alliteration and tongue twisting.  But funnily enough, no.  I put that heading because it should be the most obvious statement there is.  Recently, I have been shocked to find how many of my fellow school librarians are not only not allowed to participate in professional training to enhance their skills, they are also not given professional reviews alongside teaching staff.  How can they be expected to be seen and treated as professionals in a school which does not see it worth their while to properly review and evaluate them?  Some of the librarians have ‘a little talk’ with their line manager once or twice a year, without anything being committed to paper; some librarians have complained that they only get interviewed once every four years when the school is renewing the Investors in People certificate; and some are never reviewed in any way at all.  I despair, I really do!  How are we to be able to prove that we need certain skills and training, and so have an entitlement to money from the CPD budget if we do not have a Professional Review which binds the school to provide that training for us?  In a dispute about working practices, I at least could look at my professional review to prove that the school had not trained me even though I had asked for training and it was one of my objectives.  How do I know what I need to improve if nobody bothers to observe my work?  And how do I prove to the teaching staff that I am a professional alongside them when they have objectives that they are held to account for, and I only have a ‘little talk’ now and then, nothing too rigorous? NO, sorry, but no!  We cannot expect to be treated like professionals by the teaching staff unless we are reviewed as professionals alongside them.  If you are not subject to a professional review at the moment, I would seriously suggest that you go to your Line Manager and ask to be included in the next round of reviews.  I guarantee they will be surprised – but I have given you some arguments to arm yourself with.  Let’s not collaborate with the de-professionalising of school librarians; lets strengthen our professional position instead!