Penguins go Xmas shopping

Very very cute video from Penguin Books, which I have blatantly pilfered from Julia’s blog Cover to Cover.  This is all kinds of cute.  Nicely done Penguin!

Online Safety – some shocking stats

Are you a parent of young children?  Do you parent teenagers?  Do you work in a school library?  Teach children using online tools?

The video below, which came to me from Judy O’Connell’s Scoop-it makes some scary watching.  Especially when you think about how often kids are online, and how nobody feels confident to teach online safety.

(SNS stands for Social Networking Serivce)

Blogging 101

Lots of people want to blog (see this post) (or this one) and there are lots and lots of helpful places you can go online to get instructions, including at the various blog providers, but I thought this blog worth taking a look at if you are keen to head down the Blogger route.  Nice clear instructions and fantastic images and screen shots to help you along the way, great embedded document with helpful stuff in there too.  It is called Bling For Your Blog and the blogger is Allanah King of Moturoa Classroom at Appleby School.  She has some great links to her other blogs and presentations on there too.  In fact Allanah King is a bit of an ICT legend.  Check out this article from New Zealand Educational Review, posted on her other blog.  Awesome.

One thing to note:  This is done with the Old Blogger stylings.  The new Blogger stylings are much stylier, and easier to work with.  Now you won’t get the option to choose the older style, if you haven’t blogged on your blogger account for a while you might find the video below helpful.

Your vote counts

I’m not so naive as to think that we’ll all be voting based on education policy alone, but I think it’s safe to say that anyone working in a school library (as I’m assuming many of our readers do) has a vested interest in finding out what the various parties plans are for education. So assembled here, in one handy location, are links to the education policies and statements for the political parties with candidates standing in this election. Have at it!

• ACT
• ALCP
• Alliance
• Conservative
• Democrats
• Greens
• Labour
• Libertarianz
• National
• New Zealand First
• Mana
• Maori party
• United Future

And while we’re at it, last month LIANZA wrote to all the major political parties with some questions, and they’ve collated the answers into one document which you can find on LIANZA’s website.

Inspiration for those who want to blog

In the world there are some people, people who just give common sense, accessible, inspirational and at the same time do-able advice.  Gwyneth Jones is one of those people.  The Daring Librarian is someone who can get me totally fired up and make me go hah! Yes!  I can do that!

Blogging is one of those things that you really just have to make yourself do.  You can’t take an extended break because if you get out of the habit you will get all angsty about doing it.  Slow and steady wins the blogging race in my humble opinion.

Lots of school librarians go to PD which is about blogging, for goodness sake I have delivered some of that PD, lots of people start, few carry on.  It always seems like such a great way to connect with your users, to get your students keen to contribute, to make your staff engage with the library in an online way, to upskill yourself, to get yourself a little patch of the online world you can call your own.  But it is hard to find the time, get inspired, write that book review, decide that what you have to say is important, to realise that if you thought something was cool and worth talking about there is surely someone else out there who also thinks that.  The trick is to just write it down on your blog or share the link.  We are very happy in our school library community in NZ sharing things we find on our listserv, but blogging takes a bit more bravery and gumption.  And it is true that people judge you, I am guilty of it myself, just ignore the critics and get on with it.

So, to the rescue comes Gwyneth Jones with her recent post called Just Blog It! Blogging Tips & Ideas.  Sensible advice, ways to do things, and in a non-preachy, non toney, in a good old just get on with it post.

 

Virtual tour of Australian school libraries

OH WOW!

Judith Way – one of my library heroines (read more about her here) has achieved this grand feat. A fantastic inside view of lots of Australian School libraries.  Just WOW!

I found out about this from here (another great blog I follow called Brave New World – it’s all kinds of awesome too)

Considering the future of reading: lessons, links and thought experiments

Posted to the SLANZA Facebook page by Catherine Lee, this article about the different ways we read today is full of great links to previous articles and lots of great content.  When you get to the end you will find a bundle of excellent links which will keep you occupied for ages.  I really enjoyed the video (which I can’t get to embed) too, on an evening where everyone in my house is reading in different ways on different devices!

Image is from here - where this article is also mentioned.

 

Tiny House Libraries – The Little Free Library Initiative

The Little Free Library organisation is all about sharing books within your community. These tiny house libraries originate from Madison, Wisconsin, USA and are now dotted around the USA (see map).

They come in a variety of styles and costs to suit all budgets, but really, anyone may set up a small box, making it weatherproof if it is outside, fill it with a few books to share, then tell friends and neighbours . . . like the ‘Pay It Forward’ concept. People may take a book and exchange it for another.

What an excellent scheme to encourage reading.

Source: Judy O’Connell, Hey Jude

You too could smell like your library!

In The Library Perfume

CB I hate Perfume have produced these rather gorgeous bottles containing the scent of the library.  Hmmm well if your library is full of teenage boys as mine is I’m not sure that it would have any kind of appeal – the smell of damp, sweaty, woollen socks wouldn’t rate highly with me.

They think a library smells like -

In the Library is a warm blend of English Novel*, Russian & Moroccan Leather Bindings, Worn Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish

*The main note in this scent was copied from one of my favorite novels originally published in 1927.  I happened to find a signed first edition in pristine condition many years ago in London.  I was more than a little excited because there were only ever a hundred of these in the first place.  It had a marvelous warm woody slightly sweet smell and I set about immediately to bottle it.

 

 

Top 100 Tools of 2011

Judith Way has posted this on her blog The Way Forward.  If you are looking to upskill in Web 2.0 skills then you could do a lot worse than work your way through this list.  It is from Jane Hart from C4LPT whose Twitter feed has provided me with fantastic PD this year.

This list of tools has given me some new things to try, and it has also been interesting to see that some of the things I completely love (iGoogle for example) slip down in the rankings.