The Gaiman Spike

Much excitement already this week, with my review of The Sleeper and the Spindle being retweeted by none other than author Neil Gaiman himself, resulting in an overnight doubling of traffic on the review blog! My phone buzzed all night as the retweets from his fans came through. Heady stuff - check out the graph for site views over the last few days:

I'm really enjoying writing the reviews, they're a good way for me to keep track of the best literature we have in our collection, and am receiving positive feedback from a number of parents who've been reading along. Alongside my own reviews, we've also had a number of students add their recommendations, which is really cool. The interactive book review is still a work in progress, but is looking great - scroll to the bottom of the page to see what it looks like so far.

I met with the Grade 2 team today for a quick introduction to, and play with, Symbaloo (for shared resource curation - a big improvement on using Google sites, I'm predicting!) and Popplet. We'll be using Popplet for mapping narratives the children are reading and hopefully creating some Choose Your Own Adventure stories. I'm really looking forward to getting into the classrooms for that! 

Otherwise, it's my regular library sessions (the children are really enjoying Emily Gravett's books this week), and resourcing resourcing resourcing - lots of books to pull and sort for new units of inquiry, and shifting all the digital resources over to the new system is taking a bit of time.

Tomorrow's job: prepping a sample of the interactive CIS Self-Study Report for a meeting with the Director. I have a good plan of what it will be like in my head, and have begun to pull it all together, but will have to spend some time making sure all the links work, and the evidence is in the right folders. I'm pleased with how it's gone so far - the setup was thorough enough that the sub-committees were able to follow the tasks through pretty well, although, of course, there are a couple of tweaks I'd make to streamline the process for next time. Still, pretty proud of the way that my Co-coordinator and I have managed the process - more than 60 staff members across 12 sub-committees. Phew!

I'll leave you with our 'in progress' interactive book review. I know I ought to wait for the children to finish it off, but I only teach them every second week, which is too long to wait :). 

Blogging with ESL, Interactive book reviews, Symbaloo for resource curation...

It's been a busy week - lots of meetings and planning for projects underway.

The last while has been really enjoyable because there' s been lots of time for library work - I've really enjoyed getting more familiar with our collection, and gaining confidence in being able to find the right book for students, parents and teachers when they come and ask. However, we are just on the brink of the next phase of the CIS Self-Study, so I will need to devote a lot of time in the near future to collating the evidence and analysis collected by our sub-committees, and creating the report.

But, a quick review of the week, because there are some exciting things going on...

The Grade 3 ESL class I've been working with now have their blog up and running. Their ESL teacher is excited to have another way that the children can show their parents the work they've done so far this school year in her classes. Hopefully, it'll also provide a useful tool for reflection later in the year - they can watch the videos of themselves speaking and be proud of the progress they've made! My next goal for this group is to have them begin creating their own posts.

With this same group, we've been using Storybird to create narratives. There's lots that's great about Storybird - the illustrations are absolutely stunning, for one. It's really simple, available for computers and tablets, and it's relatively easy to share your finished product - via social media or by embedding. My only complaint is that there's no option to generate a direct link to your work - which means it's not so compatible with Blogger and other Google products. You can play with the embed code to make it work, but those are precious minutes better spent elsewhere, really. The other thing I'd really like to see included in Storybird is the option to add audio - this group of students has trouble getting their thoughts and ideas written down in English. My work-around for this time is to have them use Audioboom to record their stories, and we'll embed the audio underneath the Storybird work on the blog. I think next time we'll try Voicethread...

I worked with a couple of Grade 5 classes yesterday, which was wonderful. I know this group quite well, from being a Grade 4 classroom teacher last year.. I'm working with one group on creating interactive book reviews, using Thinglink. Here's the link so you can see what we've done so far, although it's clearly a work in progress. I love Thinglink - it's really fun, is a great vehicle for kids to learn to upload photos and video, hyperlink and manipulate basic code, and the end products look great. We'll add the finished product to the library's book review blog.

With the other class, we also published book reviews. They chose to publish theirs in Destiny Quest, our catalogue/library management system, so other students can easily access their reviews as they browse. We're just beginning to use Destiny Quest more effectively in the library this year, and so far, I like it a lot. It's very simple and user-friendly. Some students also chose to add their reviews to the library review blog to share with the wider school community, which made me very happy. Most of the reviews are written by me, about picture books, because 50% of my teaching time is spent with the very small children, sharing picture books. Which is lovely, but I'm very conscious of a vast body of excellent literature for older readers that I'm not getting into yet! It's a goal.. On the upside, reviews about children's books are more authentic when they're written by children, I suppose. Kids know better what they like than I do :).

I also had a really exciting meeting with the Grade 2 team, and am looking forward to trialling our new system for resource curation with them (Symbaloo). I have a load of curation to do with/for them for their next unit of inquiry, Resources and Choices. Also, more tech integration work with narratives, a couple of author visits, AND hopefully some drama.

Oh it feels so good to write all that down - so nice to be back in reflection mode - really keeps me on track and clears my head. Now for the weekend!

Information and Literature Resource Teacher

It's been quite a while since my last post!

This new school year has seen some big changes. I have a couple of new jobs - an admin/co-ordination/leadership role, but not to do with teaching, and the Best Job in the World. I do really enjoy the admin work, but it's not the stuff of interesting writing thus far. Fellow pen-pushers, you'll need to hold your hats for a mind-blowing post on the joys of developing and administrating systems for online collaboration another day. Sorry.

I've just begun a two year contract as my school's Information and Literature Resource Teacher, which I think is really just the knobbliest term someone could come up with for 'Library Teacher'. It's all the joys of Teacher Librarianism, without the cataloguing, ordering, book-mending and other sensible responsible library work. I am in charge of Literary Fun.

We started the year on an exciting note with an authors' visit from Chris Riddell, Paul Stewart and Anthony McGowan (coinciding with our annual visit from the excellent Brocklehursts of the Norfolk Children's Book Centre). I decided to try something new this year, asking our visitors to hold writing workshops with smaller groups, rather than the larger-scale book talks we've had in the past. My intent was that the smaller groupings, and more interactive format would be of greater benefit to the children, the vast majority of whom speak English as their second or third language. Anthony, Paul and Chris did wonderful work and it was a privilege to work with them and see them in action for a few days.

After that, time at the beginning of the school year was much spent in working on helping students learn their way around and how to find the books they need in the library. Using number lines to help the 3rd Graders understand the Dewey Decimal System was really effective, and we assessed the Grade Fours' skills by asking them to locate and pull books to keep in their classrooms for their Unit of Inquiry. Grade 5s spent a few lessons learning how to use the library catalogue, databases and kid-friendly search engines effectively. It's exciting to see them using keywords and filters to search, and it could well have happened that tears came to my eyes when I saw how many DO NOT automatically turn to Google Search when they want to find things out. Next stop, citation.

Working with the younger children (ELC, Grade Primary, Grade 1) has been a steep learning curve, but a rewarding one that deserves a post all of its own. I came into this position with very little Early Childhood experience and it's certainly a whole other world than the upper primary and middle school teaching I'm used to. Still, I'm very pleased with what I've learned so far - definitely challenging, but a very rewarding experience. And I have discovered a deep love for picture books.

My excellent librarian colleague and I have been tasked with making our library a more energetic and dynamic community space, which is an exciting process. Library traffic has definitely increased, with many more classes, teachers, parents and individual students using the space for a broader range of activities. This is an ongoing project, calling for lots of trialling of different ways of working together (and scheduling!), but we are learning together and many community members have commented on the 'friendlier' library atmosphere we've developed.

One thing I'm working on is increasing community awareness of the amazing literature resources we have, and how they connect to the concepts and values inherent in our school's mission and values, as well as those of the IB. Books We've Been Reading is a review blog for community members, that recommends high-quality literature available in our collection. I'm the author of the vast majority of posts, but you'll see that we have a few from guest student bloggers as well.

And I'll leave you with this wonderful illustration by Chris Riddell, that just arrived in the post for me this afternoon. Isn't she magnificent? Ah, the lucky lucky life of a library teacher!

Adventuress, by Chris Riddell.