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.

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!

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

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.