Thursday, November 29, 2012

Annual library report

I just finished my 2012 Annual Library Report!
My first, actually. I blogged about my intentions to do this last year, in my opening past for this blog.
I have passed the report on to my "line manager", the Assistant Head Secondary - Diploma Programme and all library staff, and he will share it with my Principal and Heads of Subschool. It was 8 pages long and included the following:
Resources
Print (including statistics of new resources); sharing resources of the local library service; digital (ebook, mp3 audiobooks, ipad apps); management of digital resources (Follettshelf); other digital resources (online curriculum guides - Libguides, including statistics of access); multimedia resources (Clickview and Discovery Education)  including statistics of use; databases; periodicals (including ejournals); stocktaking overview.
Learning and teaching
Reading promotion - library visits, circulation statistics, Book Week, author visits, book fairs; AIS Libraries and professional learning - the contribution of library staff to pd initiatives such as Teacher Inquiry Groups, the 2012 Library Team Inquiry into ipads (report);  the library's contribution to school goals (regional PD provider;ICT integration).
The physical environment. Achievements and challenges.
Staffing.Achievements and challenges.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Students as curators

Image courtesy Anglicans ablaze.

Today I had my first Year 12 class sign in to our new collaborative curation space in Mightybell. We called it Year 12 Belonging and the intention is for students to select the best resources they can find for this area of study and share them here. It will also be a place for students to share their writing for this task. I showed students how to add and use the bookmarklet (Mightybell works best in Firefox or Chrome).

We established the following protocols for work in the site:
1. Authenticating and exercising judgement when selecting resources to post. this is an essential part of curation. I explained we didn't want everything they can find, but the BEST they can find. We want this to be the BEST website on Belonging. Here is Joyce Valenza's wiki about curation.
2. After posting a resource, students should go in to comment and justify why they selected it.
3. Attribution - I have modelled this in my examples on the site for a website and an image, hyperlinking the name of the creator/site back to the source and explained that this is not to be confused with referencing in the formal sense, it's about using the work of others ethically.

I also talked to the class about this being an opportunity for students to create a positive academic digital footprint for themselves (the site is closed, but we may open it up later), as opposed to their social footprint (Facebook etc), and the value of this.

I'm really excited about the opportunity this gave me for an authentic relevant context for some valuable learning and teaching. And that this arose as a result of my colleague's inspiration by Joyce Valenza's presentation at Hands on Literacy 2012 conference last Satuday. And that she is infecting others with her enthusiasm. Just me isn't enough!!

Hands on Literacy 2012 conference, November 17, Singapore

Almost 300 delegates; 46 workshop presenters; two amazing keynotes and a great team effort. It was fantastic to network with colleagues from all over Asia and to be joined by librarians from The School Library Association of Victoria and elsewhere in Australia.
Workshops  catered for early years through to Diploma/senior years; catered for mainstream English to ESL and Special Needs; and of course Libraries.

 
Joyce Valenza as keynote cast a broad net of issues facing librarians and educators in a networked world - transliteracy and the need to be literate across different media; digital citizenship; the world of web 2.0 tools for active and engaged learners; digital curation and student-curators as well as educator-curators. What a generous and inspiring role model she is. Here is a link to her presentation.

Two things have happened this week in response to Joyce's presentation.
  • 1. I have finally curated my favourite links in my Personal Learning Network, using a tool mentioned by Joyce - Bundlr. Here it is - My PLN.  I chose Bundlr because it has the layout I want to use to access my contacts, and also because it is social. So Denise in the Junior Library here is going to start one too, and as we share common professional interests, we can easily share what we find and like.
  • 2. On Monday morning a colleague enthusiastically asked me to help her senior English class with a collaborative curation tool they could use to curate resources for their English task. Not all curation tools are collaborative, and again I used one recommended by Joyce - Mightybell. (our site is closed). She has enthused her colleagues in the English faculty, and now others want to join in.
I was really excited about this because I had tried earlier in the year to set up an online reading/responding space for my senior students using Ning. It didn't take off, despite my presentations and encouragement of faculty. One thing I learnt from this was that it's not about my timing, it's about my colleagues' timing.

 One of our Committee's goals was to provide a strong library strand for our ISLN network members. So,  two library-based keynotes that have broad teacher appeal, and a strong response to call-for-papers that addressed the uses of ICT, ways to engage boys (and girls) with reading, information literacy, library design, curation.
Here's a link to the programme.

Judy O'Connell's "Digital curation" presentation provided an excellent close to the conference, sweeping her audience to the future of web 3.0, the semantic web and grounded them with a conclusion that was a call-for-action - to embrace opportunities for new ways of engaging with learning technologies, the re-invention of learning.
Image courtesy Dimitrios journeys.
 Here is a link to Judy's presentation.