A Day in the Life of a School Librarian

http://flic.kr/p/67Ypfp

I had the utmost pleasure today to join with a group of 50-strong librarians at the LIANZA Otago/Southland Library Assistants Day held at the Invercargill Public Library and share with them about what it means to be a school librarian.

Where to start!! No two days are ever the same and what you start out planning to do at the beginning of the day may look totally different by the end of the day, so the challenge was how to go about showing the variety and breadth of work that we do in a school library setting.

This presentation is what I eventually came up with.

Day in the Life of a School Librarian from Senga White

It turned into a bit of a time and motion study of one day of work for me in the James Hargest Library.  I then finished with some thoughts and ideas about how public and school libraries can begin to think about working together.

If you have any great examples of working with a library that is in another sector, I’d love to hear about it!  Please share them here so others can benefit from your fantastic ideas.

Steps to Becoming and Educator-Curator

When I recently presented a workshop on Digital Tools for Content Curation I spent very little time discussing how to go about actually becoming a curator. Being a hands-on, roll your sleeves up and get stuck in kinda session we went straight for the toys.

Curating Content with Digital Tools from Senga White

However, I would highly recommend this excellent presentation on Educators as Curators from Corinne Weisgerber and Shannan Butler, St Edwards University in the US.  It is worth taking a look at in terms of clarifying the purpose for curation and things to think about before you get into curation boots and all.

Re-envisioning Modern Pedagogy: Educators as Curators from Corinne Weisgerber

These professors of communication clearly describe the “journey of a resource: from birth to bookmark”, the process from finding and selecting material through to sharing and tracking it.  Most importantly from my perspective they share about how to editorialise the content.

It’s all very well saving a whole range of resources but you need to be able to identify why you saved it in the first place, reflect on it’s importance to your own practice or how you might implement it into your library programme.  Document your thoughts on it at the time you discover it to make it meaningful to you and the others you might share it with.

Reading, Research and Recreation: the three R’s of a school library

Last night I had the undivided attention of a small but appreciative group of parents who had come along to the monthly PTA meeting to listen to me talk about how our school libraries support their children’s learning and ways they, as parents could be doing that at home.

Reading, Research and Recreation: the three R’s of the School Library

Parent Teacher Association 2012 from SengaW

In this presentation I introduced parents to the school-wide information literacy programme that I have developed to date and described how it fits across year levels and curriculum areas.

To support parents in their endeavours to help their children with homework and enthuse them to read (or keep reading) I also created a Parent Resource Livebinder with some good links in it for author websites, book reviews, book trailers, research help and online safety.

I had several parents stay behind after the presentation to discuss various things that had occurred to them during my talk as well as to talk about their favourite books and how some of the strategies I mentioned had already worked for them or how they intended to try this or that one out.

There was definite interest in sessions for parents to up-skill in their use of the internet and searching strategies so I am adding that to my goals for the 2013 school year.

We have also invited parents to become members of our library for the first time, so it will be interesting to see how many take up that offer and how that aspect of community involvement develops.

What if you could put Slideshare and YouTube together?

This is exactly what is on offer from a new Web 2.o tool I came across yesterday through one of the people I follow on Twitter.  They had shared a link to The Next Web blog about Present.Me.

Present.Me allows you to take your slide presentation or document and add then add your presentation to it.  There’s a short and concise 1 minute tour that explains it simply and clearly.

I can see a wide variety of uses:

• Explaining how to use a new tool
• Recording tutorials for students
• Practicing presentations for Conference.  This would allow you to critically evaluate your style of delivery
• Sharing your presentation after the Conference
• Students presenting a combination of power-points and persuasive or explanatory speeches

I can also see potential in using Pesent.Me for ways of delivering professional development within our schools, regions or even nationally and internationally.

There is a free trial package but if schools decided it was a useful teaching tool, it could be worthwhile exploring purchasing one of their packages.  It’s relatively cost effective so individuals may choose to have their own package.

LILAC 2012 Tertiary Prep Presentation

Presenting at the LILAC Conference in Glasgow last month was a definite highlight in my career.  The whole conference was amazing and I intend to blog about the things I heard and saw as well as the people I met and spoke to and connected with in the next couple of postings.

 In the meantime, for those of you interested in my Tertiary Prep work, I have now uploaded my presentation to Slideshare. 

It really is just the bare basics and I’m more than happy to expand on anything you might want more information about.  Just make contact.

Tertiary Prep Unit

While I seem to have been very quiet on my blog of late, I have actually been working very hard on it, as well as creating a new one.

I have been adding pages to my blog, including both a Resources page and a Lesson Plan page. These both link to aspects of the James Hargest Libraries Information Literacy Programme, which began from a seed of an idea in 2005.  These pages will not be static and I will continue to add resources I’m developing, trialling and using.

For those of you who attended my session at SLANZA Conference in Auckland on Creating Information Literacy Opportunities in Your School, it’s been a bigger job than I thought developing resources in a format able to be shared easily, but it’s now achieved and so any of the units and resources I mentioned there should be found somewhere within the pages on this blog.

I have also this past weekend created a Tertiary Prep wordpress blog to replace the existing Webs website as it gives me more flexibility for use.  In the SLANZA Collected article  published in November last year,  where I wrote on my Tertiary Prep journey, the old website is mentioned but this is the replacement for it.  This revamp has come about partly due to planning for my next presentation which is at the LILAC Conference  (Librarian Information Literacy Annual Conference) in Glasgow in April.  One of the conference themes for 2012 is transitions: from school through to higher education which is the area I’ll be presenting in.  James Hargest is generously supporting my attendance at conference which falls during a planned private holiday in the UK.

Supporting Literacy in Libraries

Yesterday I had the opportunity to present to some of our literacy teachers working in Southland schools, a range of ideas for how libraries can support the work they are doing with our students.

I always enjoy being able to talk to others about what I love to do, rediscovering a shared passion and connection for reading and learning, and today was no exception.  These teachers genuinely care about their students and the outcomes they can help shape for them. And they’re great at sharing the good things that work for them with others.

As time was limited, I chose to narrow the presentation down to three main areas: Reading for Enjoyment, Extending Reading and Supporting Research.  If you’d like to view my presentation with links to resources I use at Hargest you can now do that on Slideshare.

Flockmates and inspiration

After being asked (via another blog post today) to think about the most inspirational speaker I have ever heard, I immediately thought of  Dr Erica McWilliam, who was a keynote speaker at last year’s IASL (International Association for School Libraries) Conference. She is Co-leader of the Creative Workforce Program at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, a university education lecturer as well as a futurist and she was the person to introduce me to the concept of “flock-mates” – real light-bulb moment stuff.

Flock-mates is a term that describes those colleagues in your inner circle, professionally (though not exclusively) who really “get” you, where you’re at and what “floats your boat”. They are the ones whose emails, links, recommendations you look at first as you know they are likely to contain the “good oil”. I have been aware of these amazing people in my life – Especially DW and CS who have, together and separately over the years been my sounding board, my cheer team, my safety net and at times my mirror, when I really needed to take a good look at myself and my practice. Before Erica McWilliam’s address I had no label, no title to give them, but now I have and I make the most of every opportunity to share this with others.  My opening address at last month’s SLANZA Conference made reference to this and I hope it resonated with those who were there, as we all have these amazing people in our lives – our flock-mates.  I was also fortunate enough to begin gathering more potential flock-mates at this fantastic conference.

Dr McWilliam’s keynote address in part, was on the similarities between the historical coffee-houses of England and libraries of today. A truly unique way of looking at what we do and our impact on our customers. Here is the link to her presentation. http://vimeo.com/15414882. I commend this to you as one of the best hours of PD you can get if what you’re looking for is something to open up your mind to a new way of thinking about libraries.  The bonus is she is a very engaging, amusing, almost self-deprecating speaker who paints the most wonderfully rich word pictures.  I have come to realise in recent years that I think, learn and retain information best when it’s delivered in word pictures so I was a convert waiting to happen.

So people, you’ve already built your coop – now why don’t you consider making room for your flock-mates to roost. Real flock-mates are happy to cosy-up with you, in amongst the feathers and the feed. All you need to do is invite them!