I have had a busier than usual time in the last month or so presenting to different groups about the importance of information literacy skills for all of us, including students.
A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to talk to a great group of educators whose focus is on helping students consider their career choices and how to achieve those goals.
Here’s the presentation I gave on not just my Tertiary Prep Programme, but also looking at employability skills with an IL lens. I had such a good time!
I recently had the absolute pleasure and privilege of being invited to share with librarians in the SLANZA Waikato/BOP area around the weighty and timely topic of library advocacy.
After being affected by fog in Christchurch and three plane rides later, I finally arrived in Hamilton at 9 o’clock at night (original arrival time was scheduled at 3.30pm! There’s a potential separate blog post on my stressful, circuitous journey, but I digress) and drove across to Tauranga to meet with the SLANZA Waikato/BOP crew the following morning.
While the weather that Saturday morning may have kept more faint-hearted souls in their beds, that is certainly not the case for intrepid librarians! They are like the Pony Express riders of the historic Amerian West, “heroes for the much needed and dangerous service they provided for the nation” and cheerfully turned out in good numbers. (They were admirably rewarded with a stunning morning tea spread to keep their energy levels at high! Thanks, team!)
The workshop covered 10 key areas:
Taking a look at the big picture
Identifying our vision
Acknowledging what we already do
Planning
Collaborative strategies
Working with our whole community
Telling our story
Promotion and marketing
How to gather evidence and what to do with it
Tools of the trade
Since coming across it several years ago, I have often reflected on Lauren Cohen’s Librarian 2.0 Manifesto, which is startlingly, now more than 10 years old, and it had inspired me to want to write my own, but it never got to the top of my “to do” pile.
It also made me revisit my goal of writing my own manifesto but chose a different path and instead I incorporated the UNESCO manifesto and the NZ guidelines with my own library world view and this is what I came up with:
If you’d like more details about the advocacy workshop you can access it here:
Thanks to the Waikato/BOP Committee for inviting me to come and share with them. They’re an awesome team, ably led by Glenys and Linda. And thank you guys for the most precious of gifts you can give a librarian, a newly published book!
Finally, I’ll leave you with what has become a bit of a catchphrase for me in recent months as I continue to explore the intersection between libraries and learning.
Weve is one of the publications I mentioned in my recent post about professional reading, so I’m thrilled to have been invited to contribute to the latest edition!
This challenged, stretched, excited and frightened me, all at the same time! I’m so proud of stepping outside of my comfort zone and creating something new. I’ve always been a words girl, so parsing my words right back and selecting just the right ones with the right images to express my thoughts was definitely moving beyond comfort. I enjoyed the brainstorming that went along with this immensely! Thank you, Sally and Megan for inviting me to do this, and then actually using my little movie!
I have found Mr. Library Dude, Joe Hardenbrook to be an inspiration and at times a digital kindred spirit over the past few years, reading about ideas such as therapy dogs and postcards from the library. In this offering he shares a fantastic idea to put a different spin when communicating to people (in this case 15 year old students – one of the toughest crowds!) how good it is to be a librarian and what qualities you need to become a great one.
I love this approach and will keep this in mind the next time I get an opportunity to talk to people about what I do. It has the potential to turn that opportunity into something positive for the the deliverer as well as the recipient. Thanks for sharing Joe!
Yesterday was a big day for me! About a month ago I had been invited to speak to student teachers studying at Otago University in Dunedin about the process of scaffolding research and guided inquiry as part of their Literacy Across the Curriculum paper. I was a little nostalgic and it felt even more surreal walking into a lecture theatre I had sat in during my year at teachers college back in the early 1980’s, only this time I was the one standing at the front talking to students, some of whom had already completed degrees and were now training to go into classrooms as teachers.
The time allocated just wasn’t long enough! There was so much to tell them, share with them and discuss with them. I easily had enough content to spread across two sessions, but we were constrained to one and so I made the best of it. My hope is that our short 50 minutes has only just opened up potential discussions as they all contemplate graduation and beginning in their own classes next year. To that end I have invited them to join me in the new Scaffolding Research and Guided Inquiry Group on the Virtual Learning Network. I hope we can continue to discuss what guided research and inquiry can look like in classrooms, as these skills are relevant to all subject disciplines in all schools across every year level.
It was my absolute pleasure to be one of the participants at the SLANZA Winds of Change 2013 Conference held in Wellington last week, not least of all due to the beyond-conference excitement of landing in Wellington last Sunday (one of the last flights to get in for the day!) and encountering the first swarm of earthquakes this past weekend, though fortunately I arrived home mid afternoon yesterday so missed the severe one just after 5pm.
As promised to the wonderful group who attended my workshop on Wednesday morning, here is my presentation Making a Lasting Connection with your School Community, complete with all the links in it for you to go back to and use as and when you want. I would be particularly interested in hearing from you about:
what you found most useful
whether there’s anything you would add to the strategies introduced in this presentation
what strategy you would consider trying first at your school or with your team
if you weren’t at the workshop, does the presentation make any sense?
Also as promised, I have included information about the Library Marketing Toolkit website by Ned Potter.
I welcome any constructive feedback, as that’s the best way to know whether the message is useful to those of you kind enough to take the time and make the choice to come. There were so many wonderful speakers at this year’s conference and I intend to expand on my own conference highlights and take homes in another post in the not too distant future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And if you are looking for even more inspiration then you should invest in a copy of 
sengawhite.nz 