TL Under Construction

This animated video was created by Pete Foley, with sound and music by Chris Perren. The project was co-ordinated by Elliott Bledsoe, from Creative Commons Australia at QUT.

TLs all over the world are most generous. One of the other Teacher Librarians on the OZTL_forum just recently posted a link to this video that explains in a most entertaining way all about Creative Commons and lists some excellent resources that are available through them.

Best of all Creative Commons have a search engine I’d not heard of until I watched this. What a valuable resource for students wishing to create new and exciting works or to enhance projects they’re working on. Be sure to watch the demo video on how this search engine works. And have fun!

Future Lab just emailed their latest newsletter and I’ve been exploring one of their resources called Vision Mapper. This site is an Aladdin’s cave of resources, activities and tools to assist schools (or a school library) to exercise their ‘what if’ skills.

There is so much happening on the educational reform front in Australia that it seems hard to lift our heads from the paperwork at the best of times but when we do get that chance then what? How do we clear our heads to vision forward, what should we focus on? Well this site offers many directions. I’ve been particularly looking from a TLs point of view and thought the Future Day activity could be a powerful one for collaboratively rethinking the school library. It encourages the participants to ‘ build new ideas and identify new practices and resources’ by focussing on current routines then re-imagining routines for an ideal typical day.

Imagine your library staff undertaking this exercise together, thinking though changes and ‘play[ing] out’ decisions to see how they might affect typical days’. The chance to stand back and look at what you’re doing on a really basic level could open up missed opportunities of all kinds – services, resources, environmental aspects.

Vision Mapping offers much to explore and to share with your principal and colleagues, I’ll definitely be bookmarking this site.

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Photo: Visions by Jerry Leandera from flickr

I’ve got my hands on a copy of Teaching and Learning Multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies by Michele Anstey and Geoff Bull. Thankfully it’s a slim volume because I’ve decided to get my head  firmly around multiliteracies before I start on the next two subjects of my M.Ed TL course. There’s just never enough time to absorb everything. Yet working in the little alternative primary school where I am, I recognize there is a gap between the way many of the children gather and use information in their ‘home’ world and how they are working with it in class. I’m betting this is not unusual for most schools, but I want to tackle this by first raising my own awareness.

I’m reassured by the preface of the book that it’s going to first introduce me to the language of the new literacies so I can hang terms on concepts. I’m glad because ‘jargon’ or professional language is not one of my strengths. I may have a very good handle on something but often can’t remember the term for it. Second, I like that it has reflective exercises.  I can write my reflections here for re-reading. Third there are practical examples so you can take theory to practice. And that’s the whole point isn’t it?

Chapter One offers a little history; how literacy in post-war schooling was basically about print — reading, and writing.  Anstey and Bull (2006, p.2) point out that pictures then were mostly decorative. This was certainly the system I was educated in. I don’t remember many illustrations having labelled parts, cross-sections or adding to the context in any real sense. And examining older texts (still weeding these out of the collection) I can imagine as a child being overwhelmed by the dense columns of words, getting to what you hope is an oasis only to find that the illustration has nothing to offer you beyond colour and a break in the page. It certainly seems designed to separate the men from the boys. Either you can read and succeed or you can’t read and you’re a failure. It’s a message, I certainly don’t want to send to my students with their varying levels of ability.  The urgency to weed these old books out has just increased.

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Anstey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing 
     literacies. Kensington Gardens, S.A.: International Reading Association and The Australian
     Literacy Educators' Association.
Photo: Too much text by seventhsamurai on flickr

I’m  between semesters of study and this is a perfect time to widen my repertoire of Web 2.0 gadgets.

Here are a couple I’ve been ‘playing’ with that seem worth further investigation and use.

Amaztype is a typographic book search. Enter in a keyword and Amazon.com will find and display books on that topic in the shape of your entered keyword. Hover your mouse over the books to view details of them. Click on one to be transported to its entry on Amazon.com. The application seems to keep stacking the books up without end so don’t wait for it to finish. I generated the Seuss photo below taking a print screen once the books filled all the gaps in the letters then opened  and cropped it in my Paint program. (click on the photo, it’ll give you a much clearer look).

I then took it to another great web application Block Poster to blow it up for the wall in our library (I did Seuss across four A4 sheets). The resolution is a bit low but When you stand back, it looks alright.

I haven’t used Block Poster on any high resolution pictures yet but am thinking about giving some photos of students working in the library a go. Photos to follow!

Wow! Life sometimes pushes our best intentions over the edge and between work, study and family, I admit to having had to give up a lot of life’s pleasures just to regain some footing and that’s included writing here. But I’m really looking forward to being back on my blog and ready to continue writing about this curious voyage I’ve undertaken to become a TL, a darn good TL.

A short summary of the past few months in my TL life –

After a marathon run of fifteen meetings, the decision-making working party finally worked through the process to a chosen solution which involves a re-working of the management system and splitting the management into educational and business sections. Like many other schools they have chosen to look for a business manager to handle some of the myriad of tasks that need doing as well as many other changes. My job as a facilitator to the group finished a fortnight ago and I have put the group in contact with some professional change facilitators to help them formulate a 5 year strategic plan which is what Step 6– Implementation of the Decision Making process will involve for them.

Implementation is of course the most challenging of the steps in the process – the time for talk is finished and the doing must happen. In an initial meeting with the two change facilitators, they emphasised to me that the solution the group chose involved changing the school’s culture not just implementing innovations, changing the way we do things not just what we do. It really harkened back to the main message in Michael Fullan’s books.

In the more hands-on sphere of this TL we had the building that held the little library at our school demolished to make way for a new set of classrooms and the library moved into a portable. The whole process was very poorly timed – no notification as to when the demolition would happen until two weeks before the demolition. School did not hire movers or allow for any over-time so … let’s just say summer holidays were most welcome!

I managed to throw a few photos up on flickr.

The portable was meant to be a temporary home for the library for the next two to three years. That is until our Prime Minister, Mr Rudd announced the Building the Education Revolution (BER) plan. While our school opted not to apply for major funding for a new library (they went for a multi-purpose building), they did apply and receive the renovation/capital works grant to ‘do up’ one of the existing buildings to house the library permanently. This will mean another move in December, hopefully at a more leisurely pace.

I’ve continued to push for Web 2.0 integration into our school and have had the pleasure of being the first to acquire an IWB thanks to a bargain on E-bay! A small demo model came up for auction and I was able to ’snipe’ it for just over $300 – bargain! It arrived and was installed by a most obliging husband (Thanks, BH!). All this happened just in time for my first collaborative project with the Year 5/6 teacher. The class has embarked on the IASL’s wonderful GiggleIT project.

So,things are really starting to bubble along. Exciting times ahead!

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Photo from: Marc Shandro’s Flickr photostream