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 :).