Feature blog – Karen Kearney

Whitefriars College teacher librarian Karen Kearney has kindly agreed to share the development of her blog – Childhood Memories. Karen explains:

 The SLAV “23 Things” course during 2008 saw the creation of my Childhood Memories blog.  Our very first “thing” to do was to set up a blog, where reflections on each week’s tasks could be recorded.  

Homepage

Homepage

It was very difficult to decide just what the main focus of my blog should be.  There were so many possibilities!  I wanted something that was going to be of continued interest for me to write about, and that was interesting for anyone who wished to drop by and read it.  After chatting away about some favourite childhood books in the first post, I decided to incorporate all of my interests into the blog, and write down some memories of my childhood. 

As I explored each of the subsequent tasks, many times I was able to tie in the task with something from my childhood.  Theatres have always been a large part of my life and the image generation tasks allowed me to explore some of the different ways I could present photos of our Melbourne theatres.  The week we explored YouTube.I looked at different book trailers.  Later I had fun exploring some old doll television commercials and some clips from classic television shows I watched as a child.  These commercials are absolute gems if your classroom is comparing values important for girls growing up, as I did, in the 1960s, with that of today’s young girls.  Exploring podcasts led me to many different podcasts related to both my professional and personal interests, so much so that I am now a devotee of podcasts as a source of information!

 The blog has also been a place for me to record different ideas which have been useful both in classes and the school library, and as a reminder of useful sites and applications.  I thoroughly enjoyed watching the black and white videos at Connect Safely  for example, yet would probably have forgotten all about them unless I had recorded the site in a blog post. 

 Book Week ideas also made it into the blog.  Last year our school library created lots of posters, using Glogster to advertise our book week activities.  Some examples of ones I made can be seen on my blog.  We also designed some Book Week activities using Web 2.0 technology, and again, posts were made on my blog to remind me of these ideas. 

Karen's glogs

Karen's glogs

Wordlewas used to create word clouds.  Examples of Wordles have been made, and can be seen on my blog.  Short, written reviews of both Kill the Possum (James Moloney) and Miss McAllisters Ghost (Elizabeth Fensham) were found and then copied and pasted into the Wordle box.  A click of the mouse then randomly arranged the words and created a word cloud, where words appearing more frequently were larger, and less frequent words were smaller.  This was explained to the students and it was their mission to then work out which Wordle went with which book.  Very popular books were chosen and students had to analyse each Wordle carefully and gather clues to help them correctly identify each book.  Blurbs could also be used for this activity, or students could create their own Wordle by writing their own book reviews.  

Miss McAllister's Ghost

Miss McAllister's Ghost

Kill the Possum

Kill the Possum

Mosaic Maker, part of Flickr’s Big Huge Labs was used to create another competition.  Around 10 well-known books were chosen and a mosaic was made for each.  Using scans from the front and back cover, as well as finding other pictures which identified objects found within the book, twelve pictures in all, were used to create each mosaic.  Examples can be seen on the blog.  Students were able to try to guess which book each mosaic represented.  If they found any too hard they were able to collect a sheet which had all of the titles listed, but each title was jumbled.  Titles needed to be unjumbled before the mosaics could be matched to the books.  

Black Dog Gang

Black Dog Gang

Both of these activities were very successful.  They were easy to prepare, and create, and were enjoyed by many of our students.  They could easily be incorporated into Library classes at both primary and secondary levels, as either activities or displays.  Better yet, have students create them.

 I enjoy sharing my thoughts through writing my blog, and reflecting on the different Web 2.0 tools I have explored.  Writing and commenting on blogs are a wonderful way to get to know people from all over the world.  Whilst there may be few people in your circle of friends who share some of your interests, there will be many worldwide who do, and connecting with them is extremely satisfying. 

Well done Karen and thank you for sharing your blogging journey with us.

ISLM Bookmark project

Rick Mulholland, the International School Library Month Bookmark Project Coordinator has released the following information:

Once again the ISLM committee is organizing a bookmark exchange project. Currently, we have a shortage of participants from outside of North America.

The details of this projects is as follows:

The ISLM Bookmark Project involves matched schools making homemade bookmarks (any style, shape etc. – be creative) that reflects International School Library Month’s theme of: School Libraries: The Big Picture. The bookmarks must be mailed to your matched school in October 2009.

If you would like to become involved in this project, you will need to send the following information to the bookmark coordinator:

– your school’s name

– your school’s location (city , state/province/ country)

– the grade/age level of the students to be involved

– number of students involved (this is very important to ensure that you are matched to a school of similar size)

– the contact information (name and email address – include an alternative one where you can be reached during any school holidays)

Every few weeks until early September 2009, a new list of schools will be sent to the participating schools to choose a match.

For more information or to add your name to the list of participating schools, contact:

Rick Mulholland

Bookmark coordinator

conri@shaw.ca

This could be a fun project for students. It could be incorporated into Book Week activities.

Feature blog – Mossgiel Park Primary School

Lisa Hill is the Director of Curriculum and teacher librarian at Mossgiel Park Primary School in Endeavour Hills. She has developed a comprehensive and engaging library blog that features categories such as “Reader of the Week”, “News” and information of interest to their IASL Bookmark Project partner school. 

Front page

Front page

Lisa has also created a resource post for the current Year 5/6 project including task requirements, a slideshow and links to research sites. She has lots of video and word files embedded into the site, for both students and teachers to explore and to link to the curriculum.  

Lisa completed the SLAV Web 2.0 course and says, ‘Although I don’t think I had any really clear aims in setting up the blog, I mainly wanted to show our library program to our IASL partner school. I also wanted the children’s parents to be able to look at what we are doing in library; this was an element of library promotion.’  

Book Week

Book Week

Lisa continues, ‘Ultimately I want the blog to be a motivating activity for students. I encouraged them to make comments after I uploaded a photo of a literacy week activity we had, and eventually I want to have student wikis and pages about projects, but that seems like a long way off at the moment!’ 

Getting to know the library

Library teddies

As Director of Curriculum (and teacher librarian!) at Mossgiel Park Primary School, Lisa has really led by example in developing this blog. Here’s hoping that other Mossgiel Park teachers are inspired by her creativity, resourcefulness and sheer hard work.

Feature blog – Fict.it.ious – Sacred Heart College Geelong

Maree Macdonald and Heather Carlin of Sacred Heart College in Geelong have created a wonderful blog called Fict.it.ious.

Fict.it.ious home

Fict.it.ious home

Maree says, ‘We have always recorded every book read by every staff member (believe  it or not!) giving an abstract, reading level, score out of 10 and a  critical comment.  So, when it came to setting up a blog for book reviews, the process was relatively easy – we only used those books that scored 8.5 or above.  We launched the Blog during Book Week this year, promising prizes to any students who left a comment or recommended a book for review – not a great response, but the next target will be teachers.’

She continues, ‘Humanities is, at the moment, studying Medieval History, and one of their activities is to read a book about the period and review it.  Perfect!  So, at the moment we’re putting a good selection on the blog and we’ll email the site to the Humanities teachers.  We also plan to put our High Interest/Low Ability books on, with a tag to Learning Enhancement so the books are easy to find.  Our Literature Circle books are also going on, so the students involved will be able to comment on their books online.’

Maree and Heather have set up links to reviews by genre, with clever titles such as: 3 hanky reads, Action aplenty, Girl meets vampire, Good sports, Horror!, Love and other adventures, Medieval mayhem, Mysterious ways, Nail Biters, Out of the past, Out of this world, Private lives and Side-splitters

The page below can be found under the Girl meets vampire genre link.

Girl meets vampire page

Girl meets vampire page

Maree and Heather also put together a brilliantly designed Book Week page, which outlined activities and competitions for the week, enthusing students to join and celebrate Book Week. Maree says, ‘We used the site for Book Week as well, creating a page outlining all the activities running throughout the week.
Book Week

Book Week

‘We also plan to make up some posters and bookmarks (maybe using the image generators we learned about in the Web 2.0 program!) promoting the site to students and staff alike and, of course introduce it to staff at the first available staff meeting.  We have decided to  purchase glow in the dark wristbands promoting the site and will be distributing them to Literature Circles students and students who review books on the blog.’

‘We see lots of potential for the blog.  The great thing about these web 2.0 tools is that they can be unpredictable and lead you in directions that you never envisaged.  I would love to see students reviewing their books via podcasts on the blog, or maybe writing a collaborative novel!  Who knows?’

As Maree says, ‘Libraries and Web 2.0 are a marriage made in Heaven!’

Please see photos of Sacred Heart College’s fantastic Beijing Olympics display in our Picture Gallery page as well as photos of the terrific library layout and design. Congratulations to Maree, Heather and all of the library staff at Sacred Heart College Geelong!