Thursday, November 28, 2013

Learning and teaching in the Inquiry Centre at AIS


I have had the privilege this term to be invited as a "guest teacher" to the Inquiry Centre in our Junior School, to collaborate on this term's storytelling unit with Year 1- Sequencing and retelling information, based around 4 fairy tales.
The Inquiry Centre is an initiative of Shane, our Gifted and Talented teacher, Darren the Digital Literacy Coach, and Denise, Junior School Library Co-ordinator. This year has been a trial at Year 1 level. Next year it will be expanded Prep-Year 2. A computer lab adjoining the Junior Library has become the Inquiry Centre, and like the library it is a colourful, welcoming, stimulating place.
It is such an impressive program, innovative in its approach and with collaboration, literature and digital literacy at the core. After student learning, that is!
Key elements
The planning is impressive, to say the least, as evidenced by the sample here. You may not be able to read it clearly but the detail and components are evident.
Collaboration takes place at all levels - students, teachers and classroom assistants, planning and teaching.
How does it work?
Classes are doubled up, two at a time, then divided into groups of about 7 children, using the key staff plus class teachers, classroom assistants and guest teachers (me! and other program leaders eg. pyp and school leaders eg. Assistant Head of Junior School). This is such a good strategy for buy-in for the program across the whole school.
While all the children are with Denise for a literature-based activity, and borrowing time, teachers for that session undertake some "just-in-time"ICT pd lead by Shane or Darren. For this unit, we were helping the children sequence a fairy tale, and retell it. We filmed it and created an imovie. So the pd each week was - how to use the ipad camera; how to frame/take good movies; how to use imovie; how to share to the cloud; how to guide student reflection; the assessment rubric.
I absolutely loved my involvement this term. It led me to wonder if, in a large library team like ours, we could take this model for collaboration and learn and share more from each other in a similar way, perhaps shadowing each other at certain times?
If you would like to know more about the Inquiry Centre, or would like to see the program in action,
email Shane Ross at shane_ross@ais.com.sg.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Promoting ebooks in schools


We started investigating ebooks last year, first acquiring Follettshelf. It was ok, a bit clunky on the laptop with Follett Digital Reader, and I am disappointed that so many of the secondary fiction titles are available only in the USA and Canada. The non-fiction is great though, especially for IB. This year we signed up with Wheelers who offer a great range of fiction.
After a soft launch, I found our ebooks were not being well-used. One of the problems, I think, was the lack of ipad apps. Who wants to read on a laptop? This has now changed, with both eplatforms providing good ipad apps - Bluefire reader for Wheelers and Follett Enlight K-12 app for Follett.
As we all move forward with our ebook provision in school libraries, the challenge is to maximise use for the budget outlay.
A meeting with our Elementary Literacy Co-ordinator was further motivation to review what ebooks we were providing across the school, and to vigorously promote them. Add to this the recent announcement that our school is moving to 1-1 ipads in Elementary next year and our Platform for secondary laptops will change to Apple - Macbooks.
Our two shelves have been differentiated in this way - Wheelers: fiction for the whole family; Follett - specialising in Fiction and Non-Fiction for Secondary. As well as promoting reading on mobile devices, I am still promoting Follettshelf on laptop with Adobe Digital Editions. This is because a few of our students do not have access to a mobile device at home, and I imagine it might be acceptable for students when they are working on their laptops to access our non-fiction, course-related content that way too.
We have re-subscribed to Tumblebooks, and have BookFlix, as good ebooks for Elementary. There is a new provider emerging from Australia - Story Box Library with free trials available until April 2014.
Online help has been created on our library website for use of the ebook shelves on both laptop and ipad.
http://libguides.ais.com.sg/ebooks
As we are approaching the end of year and Christmas break, we are visiting English classes promoting our ebooks to students. I have published a newsletter article promoting our ebooks to families for holiday reading and shared information on the homepage of our VLE as well.

Postscript:
I have just visited two Year 10 classrooms this morning, promoting our ebookshelves and online help.
I want to share two lovely emails I received from students afterwards:
"I would like to thank you for introducing eBook to our class.
I think it’s a really useful tool. It will definitely help me to borrow books form the library with more comforts. 
I actually have iPad mini and I’ve always wanted to use it to read books electronically. 
Could you please show me how to do it before the holiday starts?"
and
"I was wondering if you could purchase some titles from the black library, some that i would love to be added are the Horrus heresy series, The Fall of Damnos and Fateweaver. Thank you for introducing this new service, I can't wait to start using it."

Made my day!

And

Yesterday 5 ebooks were borrowed - a good start!

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Vloggers, Booktubers and reading promotion

My November YA newsletter from Goodreads sent me on another trail of exploration from its Meet a Goodreader column, introducing Ariel Bissett.  Now I have to confess to knowing little about vlogging so I looked up the link to Ariel's channel. She certainly communicates with lots of personality and passion. Ariel has created some fun tags for her discussions- The book sacrifice; The book haul; Branching out; Birthday extravaganza; Book to movie. I have noticed some of these are popular with other vloggers.

In the Goodreads profile Ariel mentions Booktubes  and a search led to the SPL Booktubes channel.
What a cool idea.  Create a Booktubes channel for your school students to share their book vlogs. I'm thinking the school CCA program might be a good way to start. Even if students don't want to  create, they may find these booktubers inspiration for their own reading.

So I will create a page on my Into reading library website and add the link here when that is done.
Here it is http://libguides.ais.com.sg/booktubes

Who are some other good booktubers? The YA bookmark blog had a really good post on YA vloggers, and some good suggestions in the comments too. Lauren reads also has a good list.

Here's a list of others that come recommended, that I like:

http://m.youtube.com/user/twiyachannel

http://m.youtube.com/user/padfootandprongs07

http://m.youtube.com/user/ReadingWithJack

http://m.youtube.com/user/AmberPepper

http://m.youtube.com/user/booksandquill

http://m.youtube.com/user/ReadTomes

Here is a good technique, and not OTT like so many are. Use of visuals is clever and would help students who would prefer to be off-camera:
http://youtu.be/nG-gwCokR54

This one starts each video with a signature animation:
http://m.youtube.com/user/thereadables





Thursday, November 14, 2013

Library report as an infographic

Last year I shared with our school executive an eight-page library report. When I look at it now, I wonder did anyone read it.
A friend of mine recently updated her professional portfolio and included an infographic for the first page - education, interests, etc. I had been thinking about getting started on my annual library report, and thought it would be fun to try and present the information more graphically. So much of it is statistics.
So I decided to try Piktochart. I found this tool intuitive and really easy to use. No need for Google help. Easy templates - or start from a blank template. Easy to edit text options. A selection of images and icons to import, and you can import your own images.
I love the way it displays the information in the report visually, so that important outcomes are quickly understood.The infographic is saved as a jpeg to share in a document or website, and print. It looks best online.
This year I will meet with my Principal and Head of School to briefly go through the report with them, in this new visual format.
Here is the result.




Saturday, October 19, 2013

Professional learning and library teams


Professional learning in the library team.

Last week our Library Teaching Team attended Learning 2.013 conference in Singapore. It led me to reflect on the power of shared professional learning. So often schools send one member of a team to attend a conference with the mandate to report back to their team at school. Does that work? One person is inspired, but can they pass that enthusiasm on to others to effect change?
When our Principal at AIS agreed in 2011 to send all 5 of our teacher librarians to 21st century learning @Hong Kong, I vowed to show him in 6 months' time what we had learnt and achieved as a result of that conference. I did that. That experience was transformational for our team. We were overwhelmed by the ideas that had bombarded us, but it inspired us all to action. It put us on the same page, with a shared vision of what we could do, why we should do it.
There has been some change in our team but again I believe this shared experience at Learning 2.013 is a powerful agent for consolidating our vision and practice.
In our Library Teaching Team meetings we have an agenda item called Spotlight. It is an attempt to move our discussions on from library management to teaching and learning. We showcase tools and ideas that we have tried and want to share. It keeps us all in tune with what is happening in each others libraries and good use of technology, resources and web 2.0 tools. I'm wondering if we can take that one step further. I think there is an opportunity in a team our size to extend the idea of learning from each other. Could we invite each other into our classes to observe or participate? In the library we are so used to an open classroom - can we extend this to each other? It will take trust and openness, but what a dynamic professional learning environment that could be and the conversations that would come out of it. 


What about our non-teaching staff in the library?

This has recently been a discussion point in our library network ISLN. How can we provide professional learning opportunities for our library staff? Jacqi Makselon at Tanglin Trust School has led this initiative in encouraging her non-teaching staff to visit other libraries in our network, including AIS, to establish connections and build a dialogue between school library staff. This is a great initiative that is sure to grow as reciprocity is already under way. In Australia, the wonderful work of the School Library Association of Victoria includes professional development days for library technicians and assistants. Is this something our ISLN network could do?

Learning 2.013

Last week our library teaching team and several other teachers from our school  attended Learning 2.013 at UWCSEA, Singapore. An impressive feature was the student-led sessions. The mornings started with spotlight presentations of the longer sessions, another great idea.
The conference was sub-titled "Making change" and it was a rich opportunity to be stimulated and provoked into reflection of our own practice and contemplation of new ways of doing. There were some immediate takeaways - Haiku Deck, Weavly, some new books to buy. There were also big picture ideas to bring back to our library teams and schools for consideration - attribution and intellectual property; how to ensure our use of technology in our classrooms is transformational; the idea of providing an ebook store for our school communities and their ebook creations; publishing student presentations to TEDxYouth. I have created a Blendspace page of the tools that were used or mentioned in the sessions I attended.
Go to my Learning 2.013 Blendspace here.

So what next?

  • Share some ideas at Humanities Department meeting from the session on "Bringing History alive." 
  • Discussion with our Director of ICT about an ebook store as a place for publishing the creations of members of our school community. I see this as a growing area as we move to IOS and Apple devices next year, with the brilliant iBooks Author program at hand.
  • More conversations with our DP Academic Standards about how we ramp up our approach to Academic honesty and intellectual property - for staff and students. Plans are already in hand but space needs to be found (in year 9 and 10 PGD?) for sessions on intellectual property and Creative Commons. That's a conversation for Heads of Year.
  • Sharing amongst our library team of what inspired them, plans for action. Discussion of ideas for Library Action Plan 2014:  investigation of the maker movement -Makerspaces in libraries. professional learning in the library team for teaching and non-teaching staff.

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Social networking and young adult readers

I recently wrote about Book Drum, a reading promotion and social networking site which I really like for my High School students. Today another one came through my PLN from Bright Ideas, a post about another new social networking site for readers, Bookish.
With a broad target audience, it is possible to limit by subject, including one for young adults and teens.
This site differs from Goodreads and Book Drum in that recommendations are supplied by publishers, not members. Recommendations are based on "more like.." and users can create their own shelves.

I am a regular user of Goodreads. I use it to log my reading and I enjoy seeing what friends are reading. I check reviews - with caution - for titles I am considering buying.

So I have added a new page to my Into Reading guide for my students - Reading and social networking sites. I have just links to three - Book Drum, Bookish and Goodreads. I will promote this with my English classes, and with a hit counter there we will see how it goes.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Reading promotion websites - SlimeKids and Book Drum

Yesterday I received a promotional email from Andy Fine about his reading promotion website SlimeKids.
Here's my brief review of it.


The site's creator is Andy Fine, a School Library Media specialist from Minnesota. He states that SlimeKids is"  a site built for students that provides easy access to excellent literacy-related resources, has a variety of reading-based games with bona fide educational value and contains a large collection of book trailers organized by year and by grade level. "

The target audience is middle elementary to lower secondary, years 3-8. The appearance of the site is simple, unsophisticated and would have  some appeal to elementary students. Teens might find it less appealing, a bit young. There is some advertising at the side which is not too intrusive.

Book trailers are accompanied by a plot summary and brief author biography. Not too much, which is good for the reluctant readership that this site would appeal to. Many of the books selected have high-interest levels that would hook boys who are reluctant readers. Grade range indicators for the trailers seem misleading. For example, Ship breaker, Maze runner have a keen readership up to age 16 here in my library. These are assigned Grades 3-6. There is an archive of books through the years, for each grade level, but this less appealing (copyright concerns using the covers?) and I found to be not age appropriate.

There is a lack of attribution that concerns me. Book trailers I checked out are created by others (found on YouTube) without attribution. eg. Ship breaker. Similarly, literacy games are embedded without attribution. The Authors tab and Book Reviews link to other useful sites, but are the Search engines and Reference pages appropriate or necessary? I decided not to share this with my secondary students on my Into Reading guide.

On the other hand, I do link to Book drum - beyond the page from my reading promotion guide.

The visual appeal of this site is immediately striking.
A social networking site for books and readers, not unlike Goodreads, pitched at a teenage audience. Unknown contributors build a set of resources around a book.
Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
Summary: objective synopsis of the book
Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
Readers can create a personal profile and begin contributing.

The site is hosted by Facebook, so that may present some problems if your school blocks Facebook. My school does but I was still able to access Book drum without impediment, although with some access warnings.

From the home page, links are provided to a number of resources built around common set-texts.Although not authoratative, I shared the resources for The Road with my senior English students who are studying this text. They provide some useful background information and the visual elements enhance the text. Video is also used, and music is integrated with Spotify, although not supported in some juridictions including Singapore.

I like this site and will promote it to my students for reading inspiration. For some,  the further opportunities to share responses and links and for online engagement with other avid readers will provide that dialogue about books that they enjoy.