Category: Budgets

Do you want to have a conversation with your principal about iPads?

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Then here is the one article you should share with them.  The Essential iPad Guide for Principals is a concise, practical guide to simple steps principals or any other member of your School Leadership Team, who are interested in getting the best out of their iPads can use.  There seems to be the notion that iPads are great “toys” – which they are!! – but the educational purposes are less obvious.  If we want those who make the budget decisions to see just how great a tool for themselves and other educators then we need to show them.

This article is written by Justin Baeder, and appears on the eduleadership.org website. He is a public elementary school principal in Seattle and a doctoral student at the University of Washington.

In this article he limits himself to just a few apps that he finds most useful.  They are all great, but I particularly like Evernote  which Justin describes as his filecabinet and i-annotate, a specialised app that allows you to annotate your PDF’s.

I had a conversation with my principal just last week about iPads and how I was suffering from “iPad envy”.  I told him I would be requesting one in my 2013 Library budget.  His response was that he hoped I could justify how I was going to use it educationally with students.  No worries about that, I replied!  I’ll provide plenty of examples of how it can be used for education!

Guess what he received in his email inbox from me this morning!  I challenge you to share this with your principal this week and then be prepared to back it up with a conversation with them about it.

Libraries belong at the hub of schools

Published on by sengaw2 Comments

Many of you may have already read the article published in the latest edition of the New Zealand PPTA News with this headline – Libraries Belong at the Hub of Schools.  As librarians, we all know this already. However, I’m getting ready to celebrate this idea with those colleagues outside of my library sphere.  I hope we all see this article as an opportunity to talk with our teaching colleagues, our principals, our senior leadership teams, our Board of Trustees about their views of school libraries in general and the one you share specifically.

The budget issue many schools are currently facing  is a symptom of our fight to be recognised, but what is the cause? Is there only one cause?  Undoubtedly not, but I believe the over-riding granddaddy of them all is the level of value placed on the work that can be done through an effective school library to support not only the teaching and learning in the school linked to the curriculum but foster and inspire a life-long love of reading.

So how do we get those in our schools who make the decisions to recognise and value the worth of their library?

Donna Watt in her presentation at 2011 SLANZA conference has already alluded to the need for strategic planning and advocacy within your schools.  Having a clear approach to where you want to be will help you plan the steps you need to take.  Every one of you will be starting from your own unique place.  Once you have gone through your own “needs assessment” you will have a clearer understanding of what that next first step will be.

Let’s use this forum as a way of collecting together to share what our own vision is for what makes a good school library.

Imagine you had 5 minutes of Anne Tolley’s undivided attention to talk to her about that makes libraries crucial in schools.  What is the one message you would want to leave her with?