My Top 3 Blog Posts

I've been having a look at the stats for this blog, which I started almost three years ago.  If you've ever done any blogging you'll know that you can exist in a bit of a vacuum as people don't tend to comment much, so a look at the stats every now and again can be quite surprising.  For instance, my biggest audience is from the U.S., then New Zealand, France, Germany and Russia.  So, um, Hi, Gidday, Bonjour, Guten Tag, Zdravstvujtye! (I hope that last greeting is right, I had to Google it).

I thought I'd share a photo of the view from where I blog from - my bed!  As you can see I can watch my boys on the trampoline (but at the moment they're playing computer games). 









 Here's the inside shot. I am currently ignoring the pile of washing on my bed, but I have tipped it out of the basket so that is the first step done!









And now for my top three posts of all time:

#3 Unconferences, Twitter and ANZ 23 Mobile Things  

#2  PlayBuzz - Seriously cool tool for creating quizzes

#1  7 Steps to Creating a School Website

I am pleased that the school website post is popular.  I am still responsible for maintaining our school's website and I have managed to make weekly news updates to keep our home page fresh just as I had hoped I would.  In fact, that is why I started the 'Te Totara Times' (our school blog), as it allows me to have our students help me create content for our website to link to.

Thank you for reading my blog.  I am getting in to the swing of things now and hope to write even more posts in 2015.  As usual I have a large list of projects I want to start, I'll share that with you soon.  Have a Happy New Year!!

'Tis the Season to be VERY Busy

It's that time of year when I'm counting down how many days I have left at school (nine) and trying to work out if I will get everything done.  At the same time I have my sons' end-of-year school events to attend.  My youngest has a leavers' dinner on Tuesday, he is Year 6 at my school and will be leaving me behind and going to intermediate.  That is going to take some getting used to, plus my eldest is finishing intermediate and moving on to high school (how did I get old enough to have a child at high school?!).

Here's a look at what I'll be doing over the next nine days at work:

• Helping Esther run our shelf monitors' cupcake morning tea and our librarians' pizza lunch. 
• Working out how much money I have left in my budget and spending it!  Yes, I still have money left, I'm paranoid about over-spending.
• Summer holiday planning:
• Checking with Barney, our caretaker, about whether he knows we'll be opening the library over summer again.
• Making sure I change the due date for all lending to be 5 February (the last day of our first week back) and increase borrower limits.
• Selecting and wrapping books for our mystery books promotion in preparation for our first afternoon of lending on the 23rd.
• Liaising with Hamilton City Libraries about the nuts and bolts of running their Summer Reading Programme again.
• I've managed to meet with our D.P. and ask about running library skills sessions in the library.  Now that I have the wonderful Esther to do all the book processing I finally have time to do this.  Our D.P. asked me to put together an email about my proposal to go to all the teachers.  That's on tonight's agenda.
• Meeting with the teacher I have been working with on our school blog, the Te Totara Times.  We're going to review how the first year has gone and see what we can do better.  I might blog about this later (after at least nine school days!).
• Meeting with our A.P. to show her the Sphero, oh, must go charge it up.  We've been given one, with the possibility of a set of ten, and I'd love to see how we can use it next year.
• Speaking at our two Year 3/4 assemblies to ask for volunteers to be shelf monitors next year.
• Attending the school assembly on Friday and giving out the library's awards for 'most active borrowers'.
• Finishing a guideline for parents and students about how to use our new eBooks.
• Sorting out what's happening with getting laptops and iPads to the new teachers starting next year.
• Loading the final three sets of iPads onto Meraki.
• Seeing if Barney can fit in attaching my Book Fridge* to the library wall, and typing up my FAQs for it.

Oh man, that's intimidating.  And I'm blogging instead of working now, but my excuse is that this list will help me remember everything (plus it is Sunday).  On the other hand, while there's masses of work on the list a lot of it is very interesting to me.  In fact most of it is there because I wanted to do it so I can hardly complain.  Panic attacks yes, complaining no. 

If you're finishing up at a school somewhere I hope that things go smoothly for you and you're not "cracking under stress" - the caption for this picture I found on Flickr!

Image by Bernard Golbach

*What do you mean you haven't heard of a Book Fridge?!  You'll just have to wait for my blog post (after at least nine school days!).