Professional learning and library teams

  by  Super Furry Librarian 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.