PLN: Building your personal learning network presentation

WeSSSTA has invited me to present at their annual inservice at Penrith in August.  I'll be doing a revised/tweaked/personalised version of my presentation about Personal Learning Networks.  Maybe I'll see some of your Social Science colleagues there? - tell them to say hello!  I've attended these over the past few years (at school I report to the SS head teacher, and attend SS faculty meetings), and it will be fun to present.  Good to revisit the presentation, which I put together for the staff here in term two, and see how I can improve/develop it, based on how it went and what I've learned in the intervening time.  Always room for improvement!

Cheers

Ruth

The 500th entry

Hard to believe, but a couple of years after starting this blog, this is the 500th entry.  I've canvassed useful stuff online, the happy life of teacher librarians, books to love and lots more.  What began as a way to catch things for myself has evolved into a resource for others too.  Which is lovely.

I went back to hunt up my first entry.  Hmmm.  I've stayed on track with my original idea, one way and another.  With some entertaining detours.


Friday, February 1, 2008


Whaffor?


I keep tripping over useful stuff on the net that's worth a) having in one spot so *I* can find it again and b) having in one spot so others can find it if they wish to.


Being a teacher librarian is a great job. It's changed so much in twenty-coughcough years, but it's still a great job. Just not enough time to sit and drink Diet Coke and read the newspaper, like people seem to think you do, but hey, every job has its cliches.


(Dang, I'm working the bun and glasses thing today - only it's too hot to not have your hair out of the way, and the glasses are a genetic gift from Grandpa. Can't win 'em all...).


So welcome to my virtual office. Pull up a pew. Post a comment. Share useful things you've found that I can add here for other teacher librarians. But bring your own Diet Coke...! And if you were in my real office, you could dig into the jellybean jar. Jellybean diplomacy is damn fine stuff.


What would I like as a present?

Comments from readers (sometimes one does wonder if one is writing into a vacuum - and then you get a lovely comment, and sigh with pleasure at knowing the tree falling in the forest really is heard!).  Yup, you.

So if you want to say what's useful, which entry has been your favourite, or just hello - leave a comment, and that will make this 500th entry rightfully special.

Thank you for reading this blog!  Now for the next 500...

Cheers

Ruth

PS.  It occurs to me that if I'd written the number of words in this blog for a novel instead...I'd probably have at least a decent first draft.  But this has just been a different sort of story.  Differently fun.  Also fun.  No regrets!  And I can still work on novels too, if I wish.

PPS. Just for the archives, the stats as of today: 69,226 visitors according to one counter (the number on a counter depends of course when you added it to your site &tc).  20 Bloglines readers, 23 Followers in Blogger, 118 bookmarks of the home page on Delicious, Technorati authority 128.   A couple of other snapshots of visitors:

and the same map with smaller dots:

Hmmm.  Anytime I find myself muttering Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum I can remind myself it's been done...!!

GIFSL* 51: take photos (with an added bonus: Skerricks: all singing, all dancing live version!)

(Actually, I lie.  No singing, no dancing.)  But it's lovely to have received some invitations to speak at teacher librarian meetings and conferences about re-imagining/enhancing/sprucing your school library.  So if you're going to the Sydney TL conference in Leichhardt in March, the Northern Sydney TL conference in Terrey Hills in March or MANTLE (website will show the 2010 program soon) in Newcastle in May, it will be lovely to meet you.

One of those looked like it might have to be done using the Connected Classrooms videoconferencing and Bridgit, so I would have been at my own school but beamed on a telly with my presentation on a whiteboard at the meeting venue.  Circumstances altered and I'll be able to attend in person, but I'm thinking I'd like to add being able to do that to my skillset.  Always good to learn something new!

I spoke at two conferences last year,  ASLA (NSW) and Western Sydney TL - they were fairly close together in time, so I didn't tweak my presentation enormously between the two (although I did tweak it - there's always something to make better/more effective). It was great to get the positive feedback and know my contribution had been useful.  This week, looking over the presentation (I don't have notes, the PowerPoint is my prompt as I find that more interesting, less 'rote' and besides, like lots of teachers, you switch me on, I talk... and I enjoy public speaking), I can see plenty of room for more tweaking/changing, even though it's only a few months down the track.  New things we've tried.  Improvements to the library.  More goodness to share!

I cannot encourage you enough to take photos of your library.  At least once a term, or more often if you change something (as we do with our foyer/entrance area).  Not only to record what you've done, but also to remind you of the evolution of your library, to see what's better than it was before.  I just wish I'd photographed my current school library when I walked into it first ten years ago, so I could have those photos to compare with how it looks now. 

One of the ways in which this blog has been really useful to me is the way in which providing illustrations for it has made me fish out my camera more often than I might otherwise have done, to catch 'before' shots as well as 'after'.  The camera's lens, and the reality of a photograph, can help see more clearly what one likes and what one would like to change/improve/develop. I've only got to look at the renovation of the library entrance (several entries from May 2009 on the blog illustrate this - use the archives over on the right) for just one example.

Other ways to use photographs (hurrah for the digital camera) include our framed row of student readers and (which used some of those photos again, as well as others taken at lunchtimes etc) our Christmas tree.

Cheers

Ruth


*GIFSL: good ideas for school libraries

The next theme for our foyer...

started with this fabric from Ikea.

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Slightly surreal, and I thought it looked full of stories.  So I'm working on that idea for bookmarks, and we have done some banners and so forth.

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More soon (just didn't want you to think there was NO entry today, heaven forbid!! - what with the ASLA (NSW) professional development day last Saturday, and the article in the current issue of SCAN, and the Met West teacher librarian professional development day coming up, all with ideas from here being presented by yours truly...)

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Cheers,

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Ruth.

Skerricks in the world: the maths teachers love us!

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It's always kinda fun to see the referrals to this blog - how people are finding it.  The major answer is often googling.  A recent mention from a maths blog, however, was a lovely coup (maths teachers not always being the most frequent users of libraries).  Mathsclass.net has an entry about 'DERing with Year 9' (great verb - to der!) which mentions my seven things to try week 1 list from this blog entry.  Thank you linesmen, thank you ballboys!  Not only does the Mathclass.net blog entry have other useful web links, it's one I'll be able to share with our teachers - not just the maths ones.  One of the useful things about referrals is the chance to find out about great new online resources.
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Cheers

Ruth
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PS. I've just written a piece for SLAV on the seven things list - it will be out in their journal early next month.  It seems to be a useful list that's finding a bunch of friends, which is great.
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GIFSL: rearrange the furniture (encore edition) and Skerricks Live (well, sorta)

Hey, does that photo look vaguely familar?  You might have seen it here (GIFSL 11) - it's currently having an encore in issue 71 of the excellent Curriculum Corporation journal, Connections. 

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And if you don't go and follow that link and read issue 71, you are a great gaby (I've been rereading Georgette Heyer in the holidays and being reminded of some excellent historical colloquialisms) because there is some fine and brilliant reading there.

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Welcome back!  I hope you had a great holiday too.  Every holiday's a good holiday!

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Cheers

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Ruth

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PS if you're interested in a Live Version of GIFSL and other treats from here, I'm speaking about such things and more at an ASLA NSW one-day conference Planning for 2010, in very fine company (June Wall, Ian McLean, Terry Bruce and Sharon McGuinness).  Click on the link to find out more - the location is in Sydney, less than an hour from the CBD.

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Skerricks in the world: word walls and other inspiration

As you can see from the blog header, and elsewhere in this blog, our word walls are an important part of the library, our billboards and statements of purpose. (And beautiful, and fun, and more - we love them and the kids like them too).  I was originally inspired by seeing work done by the Robin Hood library initiative in New York.

It was lovely to see, cruising around blogs in the bloglist over there on the right, that MissLibrarian (at ButYou'reTooLoudToBeALibrarian) has taken this idea and worked out how to use it in her different library space in the UK (hey, that's three continents - US, Australia, Europe!).  Take a look at progress on her word banners here.  Applause!

Jill at CLC Eltham painted a word wall in her library, inspired by ideas she found here - hers looks FANTASTIC!  See it here.

Fiona over at Reader's Random Ramblings has mentioned Skerricks a few times, too - thank you.  I was interested to read her thoughts on learning to be a teacher librarian here and 'what is a library?' here,  and she had some thoughts about whether audiobooks are 'reading' here.

Mrs Mac's extensive and varied ideas for Book Week 2009 (theme: Book Safari) also draw on ideas she's found here - thank you for the mention!

What I love most about this is the stew and soup and brew of ideas we are all sharing, passing around, working out in our own ways, the aha! moment of mine that becomes a fresh aha! moment in your hands, and then travels on its way to others.  I learn so much from others - and appreciate what I do learn, what inspires and encourages me - that it's just grand to be able to return the favour and be a part of the sharing culture of teacher librarianship.

Cheers

Ruth

DailyLit (and Sherlock Holmes)

So if you've got kidlets paying attention, they may have twigged to the arrival at the end of 2009 of a new film version of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (as Watson) and larded with explosions, smart dialogue, mystery, intrigue and other stuff likely to be enjoyable Boxing Day cinematic fare.
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And do you have a copy of the book in your library?  A nice copy?  And even then, is it too big or offputting for a Young Person to enjoy?
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Fear not, because you can offer them the chance to read it in bite sized pieces.  Delivered free, direct to their email, in 131 instalments.  Really.  It's what DailyLit does.  They're building their library of copyright material, and will charge you for that, but they also have a bunch of public domain material too (Pride and Prejudice? Romeo and Juliet? Yes, and yes again).  Five minutes a day, or less.  Achievable.  Amusing? Fun? Different? Worth trying?
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I think so.
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Thanks to Wonderbooks for alerting me to DailyLit (and for the lovely entry mentioning how a Skerricks idea had been useful, too!)
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Cheers, Ruth
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PS. I will be going to see the Sherlock Holmes film for assorted reasons, one idionsyncratic one being that it includes the actor William Hope.  Who?  He and Laurel Lefkow are the readers on the unabridged audio version of Audrey Niffenegger's novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, one of my favourite books ever ever ever (on the wrong side of the bonking line for a school library, though) and probably my favourite audio book.  The best audiobook readers may well be those who you don't know so well, so you don't get distracted by your preconceptions of them from elsewhere.  But Hope and Lefkow do the most brilliant job with TTTW as Claire and Henry.  I don't know how I'm going to cope when later this year the film of TTTW comes out, and Eric Bana becomes Henry (and, curiously, Rachel McAdams who is in the Sherlock Holmes film, is Claire in TTTW film).   If you want to listen to TTTW unabridged audio (note the unabridged, there is an abridged version with different readers), it's obtainable on CD from Amazon etc, or to download from audible.com - even in Australia, which is not always the case.
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But enough about me.  Try DailyLit.  Let your students know about it.

If you build it...

Just as a snapshot of this blog in the middle of its second year... (if you click on the images you'll be able to see larger versions).
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People from everywhere!  Thank you!
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Total counter: 24,721.  13 Bloglines subscribers, 8 Blogger followers.
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319 blog entries. (Dunno how many words...!)
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It's fascinating to see how an online presence is established - how people find this blog, how many, which posts have been most popular.  And then the challenge is to keep it fresh and engaging.  My first audience is me - I'm recording what catches my attention, for any of a number of reasons (amuses, intrigues, provokes...) as part of the terrific, fascinating, sometimes frustrating, always challenging and so often rewarding profession of being a teacher librarian in Australia in the early twentyfirst century. 
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And then, if this blog is useful to others, especially teacher librarians, that's great too.
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So thanks for dropping by - particularly if you're a regular - and see you again!
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Cheers, Ruth
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Tomorrow belongs...

...to work.  Or at least being back to work.  But judging by the upshot in visitors, some of you regulars were back at work today.  Hello!
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Had a nice moment today, as I was looking at the blog stats.  Alison over at The Story Space mentions Skerricks as her favourite TL blog, and lists it in her Librarian Idol list.  Woohoo!  Thanks Alison!  Always good to find another blog I want on my blog list over there on the right.  One of her blog entries is a great list of postmodern picture books.
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I've written up some entries for the coming days of term 2 - free things, wonderful things, and what we painted in the holidays...stay tuned.
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Do leave a comment if something's been useful, or you can add more info, or suggest a link, or otherwise add to the value this blog can have for others.
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So.  Term 2.  Winter.  Plenty on the slate, the school year in full gear.  But today I'm still on hols.  Tomorrow belongs to school (insert own musical accompaniment).
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Cheers, Ruth

Skerricks in the world (thank you!)

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Ah, the Skerricks influence extends...(yesterday we had over 1200 page views - that's A-mazing!).  Here's a school that's running with the bookmarks idea.  Lots of ideas on the Salesian College blog - take a look.

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Skerricks in the world (thank you, thank you very much)

A couple of nice mentions of this blog recently - thank you!

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The Feminist Peace Network liked our International Women's Day activities. (And I learned a new webbreviation, h/t meaning hat tip!)

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Moonlightquill liked our Harmony Day ideas (more of those coming later this week, to show what we did this year).

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