Book bites for the holidays

Week 7: Creating a community of readers. The workshop I mentioned last week also included staff. Here at TGS we try to develop a community of staff readers by inviting everyone to have morning tea in the library in the last week of term and choose some holiday reading. we pull out all the adult fiction and non fiction (one of the joys of working in a high school library is we can buy adult fiction) and place it on the tables. Staff cruise the tables and displays and shelves, drinking coffee, eating our home baking and sharing thoughts about the books they have read. Some thing we started four years ago has now become a tradition.

I am off for two weeks for a happy holiday.

So we would rather read....

Week 6: There were several workshops on Book Clubs - I went to one led by a librarian, Hsieh Shu-His from Taiwan. She organised her whole school to run class book clubs and a staff book club. That got me thinking about running a class book club next year with my English class. Actually Hsieh's achievement was huge as her high school was one that focussed on vocational training only - so the idea of book clubs was very ambitious.

We do have a book club here at TGS. We have four year 9 students who have been wonderful and recently a German exchange student has joined us as well. We linked up with the Book Lady and have read three titles through her service. The students really like to all read the same book at the same time. The Book Lady provides copies of the book and some great discussion questions. She also e-mails the students with discussion questions. The students found the e-mails a but limiting because they couldn't see what each other were saying to the Book Lady so we set up a wiki space. The Book Lady is a member but I am sure if you asked her she would note as I have that the space has gone very quiet recently.

I have to confess that with being away at conference and being ill the last two weeks I have neglected my wonderful book club. They have become very good at leading their meetings on their own. This is something the book Lady encourages. I asked them add to the discussions on the wiki but last Wednesday after school they preferred to sit in the fiction area and read their books. Looks like for some students the novelty of web 2.0 is already waning and they would rather sit together and read good books.

I will ask them if I can add a photo of them... watch this space.

The monkeys are on our side

Week 5 - Evidenced based practice is the way to go and a lot of the best changes we have made in our school library have come from data gathered in our annual library survey of students and staff.
While at conference I attended a number of workshops based on research papers. Some of the data had been gathered by using electronic surveys.

Our school has bought a license for Survey Monkey - though there are parts of this website that you can use for free. I am looking forward to using NO paper and having the monkeys analyze my survey. This week I have been given the password and have a library folder. Survey Monkey here I come...

If a tree falls....

in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound? If some one posts an article to a blog and no one comments on it ......

No not my blog.

Week 4: Read and make a comment on an article in 'School Libraries Worldwide' ezine. One of the sessions I attended at conference was "Sparking a worldwide conversation on School Libraries 2.0" by Marlene Asselin and Ray Doiron of Canada. Marlene and Ray are co editors of School Libraries Worldwide special topic issue on New Learners, New Literacies and New Libraries. Already this magazine has been the subject of a post on the New Zealand Librarians listserv. The post encouraged people to read the articles.

I read Ross Todd's article

Article 2: Youth and their Virtual Networked Worlds: Research Findings and Implications for School Libraries

which was challenging to me in several ways. I won't discuss all of that here because I did post a comment. I guess my issue is this - it is the first comment. Does that mean no one is reading the articles - I'd like to think not. Does it mean no one is willing to post a comment - probably. Are discussions harder on an online environment like a blog? Are some online environments more conducive to discussions? The article did raise some things for me to work through in my school - thanks Ross.

I saw this line on a teeshirt when I was in Phoenix, Arizona recently "If a man speaks in a desert, and no women are around to hear him, is he still wrong?" Perhaps we could come up with something pithy for what happens if a blogger posts a blog and no one comments.....