serious fun

The future of libraries is in the hands of librarians

Bridget Schaumann — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:48:11 +0000

So says R. David Lankes in the opening moments of his presentation School Librarians as Facilitators for Learning embedded below. We represent the fundamentals of the future of libraries. Yes! High Five Folks! His Atlas of New Librarianship is a bible, a book to take so much out of.

He says: The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. And he is talking to you school librarians.

I’m quite a lot in love with his messages, pretty much all of them. Watch this presentation and take on board what he is saying. He is going to give you lots of examples of how you can think about why you do the things you do. Not the what you do. Yes, it takes an hour but yes it is an hour well spent. Great PD. Really great PD.

It comes from here.

Dystopia – old and new

Bridget Schaumann — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:54:13 +0000

Readers advisory in my school this year, and last year too, has been all about finding books which are similar in style, or substance to The Hunger Games. I’m really feeling like I could move on from reading this type of book myself but my students are clearly not ready for that yet. So, as I firmly believe it is my job to keep up with what they want and not foist what I think they should want onto them, I am delighted that the Lawrence Public Library of Kansas in the USA, has done me a terrific favour. For a moment I thought this was the Lawrence in Central Otago, where I spent many happy teenage summers, sigh! This link will take you to a fantastic flowchart of Hunger Gamesish delight, and it helpfully includes some fabulous classic books which you may not have thought of sharing with your HG fans. I’ve only made a screenshot of a tiny part of the flowchart. You will have to go to their website to see the whole impressive thing. Enjoy!

25 books every child should have on their bookshelf

Bridget Schaumann — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 09:44:27 +0000

Fabulous Flavourwire, makers of taste and purveyors of internet good taste have posted this list. The books are an interesting take on must read childrens classics. Would you have chosen them? It got me thinking, I wonder what would be on a similar list if it was made in New Zealand? Surely there’d be a Maurice Gee or a Joy Cowley, a Jack Lasenby or a David Elliot. There would also probably be some of the books on this list too. I know everyone else in the country would insert a Margaret Mahey but my kids never really loved those and I didn’t much love reading her books to them. My kids would have had Wombat Stew and Possum Magic and The Little Yellow Digger when really little and Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket and Matilda on their middle of their childhood lists. I guess everyone would have different titles but it is nice to have a think back and remember and also to think about the books which helped form you. Have they had an affect on your reading tastes in the long term? I wonder.

Teen speak – or you know you work with teenagers when ….

Bridget Schaumann — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 07:17:08 +0000

Let me count the ways – with a little bit of help from a blog post over on TLT: Teen Librarians Toolbox. Have a look at their post

English: SPOG students (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

and then if you are a secondary school librarian you might want to add a few of your own. Here are some from me.

You greet student librarians with Yo G! Or it’s alternative What up G! Instead of Hello there sweetie!
You know major players in various bizzarre sporting codes despite having little to no interest in anything remotely related to sport.
You are as obsessed with 4 Pics 1 word as your students and you are constantly being asked for help, “cos Miss you know everything right?”
Given that the library is gossip central you know the details of far too many teenage relationship breakdowns/startups/on holds, and constantly surprise the students by saying “oh yes I know her Mother!”
You have become incredibly sick of telling the students to “Go ask your Mum if you can borrow her copy of 50 Shades of Grey, because no, we will not be having it in here!”
You have to guard your Mockingjay pin because even though other staff have no idea what it is, you know that if you take your cardigan off with the pin still on it, you may not ever see it again. In general you are prepared to have your fashion sense critiqued every day by the fashionista crew who are always hanging in the library – at least that is how it seems at our school.
You are well aware that even though the adults may have moved on from vampire romance that is isn’t dead in the hearts of some of your most loyal clients.
You know exactly how cool you are if you show year 13 students a clip that they haven’t seen yet, but which is ridiculously funny.
You keep having to tell the students that “versing someone is quoting them poetry, not going against them in a match!” This is a pet bugbear at the moment.
Your students stop you in the street and say “hey Miss remember that time when …..” and you laugh and laugh.

Tailored services – that’s how we roll

Bridget Schaumann — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 01:36:56 +0000

This fabulous cartoon came to me via Teacher Librarian Network on Facebook tonight.

What do you think? Is this the future? Swallow a pill and you’ve read a classic? Have the characters in a book step out and become a projected holograph on the wall in front of you? Robot library staff? Will we reach a time when paper books are just a fond memory?

I personally think not – at least not for a while. A quick pop quiz this week with a bunch of Year 10 classes as they passed through my booktalking clutches and quizzed them on their library usage – ours I know about, but I was interested in whether they used the public library. Most did not, and it certainly depended on the kind of class they were. Higher streams using it more than lower. Students seem to have had a range of experiences when they’ve been mixing it up in the public libraries. It seems staff there aren’t familiar with the kind of things they need, perhaps remembering from their school days what they required, or even more enthusiastically encouraging them to look at new things about which the particular librarian they approach is an expert. I think there is some room for public librarians to get familiar with the kind of things our students study, to find out what topics are taught and to make contact with school librarians to talk curriculum matters. What books work for subjects, what won’t work. That at least is the feedback I got from my guys. The quest for information to complete assignments often yields better results at school because we are working as a conduit between teaching staff and students, providing specific titles which match specific topics. We know the level of the resources the students need, and we can tailor our advice to the right level. (There is an exception to this though, one public library in our area is hugely popular with the students and has an ex school librarian manager, students report that they have loads of things that are useful and that they want to take home, that is awesome!) However I know that often the experiences of students at public libraries when on a quest for information are often less successful than if they took their query to their school library. The school library has purchased specifically for that curriculum area, we know the kind of information which will work for the student.

At school we are tailoring our stock specifically to our target audience, it is youth specific and responding to feedback from teachers and students. No robots can do what we do! In a school we are tailoring our services to our students, to the people we see in front of us every day. Micro tailoring if you will. This just isn’t possible when you are catering to a while town or city with a Public Library. They have more buying power than we do, are able to stock more copies of popular items but are more general in their approach because they have to be but in terms of having a specific focus on youth and the curriculum then the school library is where it is at. We should celebrate our specialness, and think about the students we have who are using the public library for homework and research and think about who is taking them there. That would in most cases be a parent. Do the parents think about the resources in the school library in the same way that they think about the public library? I think that perhaps parents are assuming that information is information and that the public library has a youth section and therefore will be able to cater to the needs of their kids. But that ain’t necessarily so bro!

Parents, your kids should use the school library as well as the public library, most times instead of the public library when it comes to resources for homework. This is our specialty area. Our whole library is a youth section! This again makes me wonder. How many parents ever set foot in a school library? Not many I’m thinking. There is scope for a parents information blitz here I think. Something to mull further on.

This is so me – is it you, too?

Miriam Tuohy — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:49:34 +0000

You may already be a fan of the blog/Facebook page “Librarian Problems”, the brainchild of library director William Ottens. Hilarious. Case in point: I see teens making out in the stacks.

Like it? Well if you’re a school librarian like me, then you might love this one just as much:

What I did in the holidays

Miriam Tuohy — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:00:14 +0000

My summer break for 2012/2013 has come to an end, and it will be back to work as usual from Monday. I’ve had a lovely break away from school, spending time with family and friends, reading, getting things done around the house. For me, the school holidays over the last few years have also included doing a bunch of stuff for SLANZA, and this break is no different.

Soon we will be launching the next iteration of the SLANZA wiki – a new website that will stand alongside the recently redeveloped main site, so that’s been one of my holiday projects. Here’s a sneak preview of how it’s looking so far (click to embiggen):

The other project that’s taking shape is a new Professional Development programme for SLANZA members, urged on by our survey last year that showed 80% of respondents want PD around the use of online tools in school libraries. It’s a big project, and one that the SLANZA PD team are keen to deliver ASAP. As part of the programme design, we’ve been investigating the use of OpenBadges as a method of recognising and displaying the skills that participants will learn as they progress through the course. Here’s a diagram I’ve made (using Triptico’s ‘hexagonal thinking’ tool Think Link) to show my thoughts about how this PD might connect with ‘what school librarians do’.

I’d love to get your feedback on this, so please leave a comment with any thoughts or suggestions that you think could be incorporated. I tend to get a bit tunnel-vision-y at times, so if there are glaringly obvious omissions please help me fill them in!

An evening of awesome with Hank and John Green

Bridget Schaumann — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 21:18:39 +0000

Watch The Vlog Brothers perform a live concert at Carnegie Hall. It is great! the music is lovely and the sentiments in the songs resonate! Lovers of the Green Brothers will be in heaven!

Incoming and outgoing

Bridget Schaumann — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 09:39:14 +0000

Here is a list, from over on the What’s Next: Top Trends blog. If you head over to the post you can see the items in a list. So soon we won’t be needing to vacuum - excellent news. No need for intimacy or retirement. We will be working until we drop! In come memory implants (that’d be handy), pay by fingerprint – seeing as I’ve just become a mobile banking fan this would be awesome, as for pollution absorbing clothes I’m pretty sure my kids had that sorted a few years ago. Anyway jesting aside it is interesting to see what the geek folk think we have heading our way, and indeed what is being relegated to the pasta.

It’s the list-iest time of the year

Miriam Tuohy — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 18:09:25 +0000

And I don’t mean who’s been naughty or nice, though anyone who works in a school library surely has a mental list of those…

But I digress. It’s that time of year when various book-related peeps put together lists of the best books of the year that’s nearly over.

Open in my browser tabs lately are these “Best of 2012″ beauties. Why don’t you start making your own “to-read” list for the summer now! Or make notes of titles to buy for your school library in 2013.