Part of my vacation time is usually spent doing personal learning and preparing for the new year for both my students and for how I can impact teaching and learning for teachers. Last year was my first in a new environment - both in terms of level (middle school rather than primary) and country/school (Beijing, … Continue reading How to WINN in the new school year
Quite a few schools in our network have cut-back on funding for professional development and have either started limiting the time off or financial support for PD. This is extremely disappointing, as PD can be the lifeblood of educators, and dare I say, particularly for teacher-librarians with their often solitary status within a school. There … Continue reading How to get free PD
And it's not the usual stuff about being poor misunderstood under-utilized bits of the school / community. No, the frustration goes much much further. It's about how information, knowledge, books, data, well just about anything is NOT being tagged and catalogued and made generally searchable, available. What prompted this? Well my inbox. I subscribe to … Continue reading Frustrations of a librarian
I've just spent the last 4 days at the #LKSW2017 where 80 librarians around the SE Asian region got together to learn and share (mainly teacher) librarian practise. I also hosted a Chinese lady from a school in China and gave a daily ride to another Canadian librarian working at a school in China. We had … Continue reading A tale of two systems
Planning for a library expansion and renovation involves considerable time, thought and work on the "hardware" of the physical building. Including last week's work of packing up the books and getting them put into storage. I'd blogged a little about how just prior to that we'd done a lot of weeding, and sorting out patron … Continue reading Firmware (& Software)
As I wander around my library during recess and lunchtime, before and after school, I realise more and more than reading is not the solitary quiet activity that it's usually purported to be. I've taken to trying to capture this by photographing the communal reading that is going on - which takes me to an … Continue reading (Boys) Reading as a social activity
For the longest time since I stumbled on the Hapgood blog I've been intrigued by the ideas of Mike Caulfield on OER and it's taken a little time and a lot of reading around the concepts of digital scholarship, and in particular the lack of the multicultural viewpoint / input / adaptation of educational resources in … Continue reading OER textbooks and the potential for multicultural environment
I need to write an interpretive discussion paper. I'm trying to organise my thoughts. My first and foremost thought is that writing this paper is in direct contravention to the topic of the paper, which is "Digital scholarship in education, in the context of interdisciplinary knowledge and research" - because my digital scholarship is leading … Continue reading Rambling thought organisation
After our leadership meeting this week I asked our principal what she thought of my various options for my case-study and which would be most beneficial and meaningful for the school. By happy coincidence the senior leadership is looking at a number of things that tie in nicely with my ideas of what would … Continue reading Fortunate coincidence
Our library has just received a big shipment of books and I need to make some space so that the new books don't get lost. On Friday I therefore did a little exercise with my Grade 6 students that I called "this book must die". Since many of them had either read "The Hunger Games" … Continue reading This book should die …
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 