Ria Coffey, from St Patrick’s Secondary College in Ballarat, offers her take on last week’s SLAV conference.
‘The Game Changer’ a professional development opportunity hosted by SLAV and featuring the dynamic teacher librarian Dr. Joyce Valenza was held at the MCG on Friday. Valenza over whelmed the audience with her plethora of ideas, innovations, inspirations and motivations for the teacher librarian and all those connected to school libraries. Valenza encouraged her audience to create ‘transliteracy’ opportunities in their school libraries, this being, literature across multiple media. The mind boggled as Valenza then proceeded to offer slide after slide of links and resources that assist in developing connected, collaborating, and communicating school libraries.
Throughout the day twitter ran wild as an online feed was open for discussion of ideas (#slavconf11).
Participants could also contribute to a slideshow of ideas which were then showcased.
All this and much more can be accessed at Joyce’s wikispace.
What an amazing day that was. I thought my head would explode there was ust so much to take in! Joyce is completely inspiring and I have enough material to investigate for the rest of the year! The big ticket idea I took from that day is: “there is no box”. It has changed my thinking about the school librarian stereotype. Previously I was consciously working against it…thinking it was a “box”. Now I know it doesn’t matter, the box is not actually there. All I have to do is provide exciting and inspiring programs and the rest will follow. How liberating! Now all I have to do is settle on 1 or 2 to get up and running instead of the tens that are running through my head after last week! LOL!