Ten Library/ICT Projects for 2015

I have some really exciting projects lined up for this year; the key will be finding time for all of them!  Around about this time last year I posted about what was on the agenda for 2014.  Each of the four things I discussed then will need more work this year, so let's start with those:

1. Genre-fication.  This went really well but I still have lots of posters I want to make as a result of it: lists of what genres our Quick Picks readers could move on to, based on what Quick Picks series they are reading; lists of what new genres would be good to try based on what students already like; top 10 lists for each of the genres to help with selection; signs linking genres to non-fiction...that sort of thing.  But I have also been inspired to reinvent our non-fiction area and make the signage there much more bold and attractive.  
2. Ninja Readers Book Club.  While a big improvement over 2013 I still think I can make this better.  So I'll be trying new ideas, some based on a fantastic session on Book Clubs by Carrie Bouffard at the SLANZA Otago Weekend School last year.
3. e-Books.  I just squeaked in getting this up and running at the end of last year so I will need to work on promoting this with teachers, parents and students.
4. Library Expansion.  Well, this is a bit of an ongoing saga.  First we had issues with the courtyard area we were going to expand into.  Apparently the concrete there is pavement concrete and cannot be built on without the great expense of digging it up and starting again.  Now the funding is up-in-the-air because of unexpected changes to other parts of the school budget.  So I have to be patient, although I am still getting our builder in to quote for expanding into our resource room :)

As it happens I had three more big projects that came along last year that I'll also be working on in 2015:

1. Te Totara Times.  I started this blog last year in order to have student-created content for our school website.  I worked in conjunction with one of our teachers and it went well, but this year I need to find a new teacher to help me and I also have more ideas about what we can do.
2. Storytelling Club.  Building on from my Moustache Potatoes Comic Club and our foray into stop motion animation, I'm keen to combine the two, plus some other forms of digital storytelling, and make a storytelling club.  But with a cooler name.
3. BYOD.  We decided to centrally manage our school iPads (for reasons I set out here).  Wiping 140 iPads and adding them to Meraki was a big job for me at the end of last year.  Now we're hoping to have BYOD iPads in place by the end of Term 1, with each child being able to purchase a discounted set of apps from the school.  This is uncharted territory so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it goes smoothly.

And now, because I just don't know when to stop, here are my new projects for 2015:

1. Library Skills Sessions.  We finally have enough hours allocated to our library staff that I can run some library skills sessions for our classes.  I'm sure this will be an item on my list for 2016 as I have much to learn about what I should cover and how quickly.
2. Pinterest Boards.  I do already have a few Pinterest boards but I am keen to build these up, especially around picture books that have themes that would be useful for teachers, like confidence, sharing, bullying, being creative etc.
3. Book Fridge.  At the end of last year I noticed that the school was throwing out a fridge that no longer worked.  So I snapped it up and a teacher aide did some wonderful artwork on it (with permission from Scholastic).  Now I need to launch the idea and explain how a Book Fridge works (basically it's a place for students to swap their own books among themselves).

So, a busy, exciting year ahead for me.  I'm also looking forward to attending the SLANZA conference in Christchurch in September.

'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!).

Genre-fication, Ninja Readers, eBooks and a Proposal

Even though the school year does not start until Monday I have done a whole lot of planning over the holidays (as well as opening the library to students every Monday afternoon and issuing over 1000 books!).

Here's what's on the agenda for 2014:

Genre-fication

After reading Jennifer LaGarde's article in Collected Magazine I revisited the idea of shelving by genre and just couldn't find any reason not to. Surely anything we can do to help our students find more of the books they like to read is a good idea.  I found an excellent website by Mrs.Readerpants that gives lots of information about the process of shelving by genre.  She also has a fun genre quiz that I am in the middle of adapting for a NZ primary school.

I worked my way through which genres I wanted (ten of them) and then had fun choosing spine label stickers for them.  On advice from NZ library guru Miriam I approached Book Protection Products, used some of their spine labels and also got them to make up some of my own.  I found a great site for copyright-free clipart called Pixabay that had just what I needed.  I can't wait to see the finished products.

      

Ninja Readers

I started a book club last year for our Year 6 students and while it went OK it didn't meet the visions in my head.  So on to bigger and better things this year.  First, I chose a new name.  I thought it would be empowering for last year's members to choose their own name but then they came up with "Very Important Readers" and I hated it!  I want my book club members to be brave and explore new books so I came up with "Ninja Readers".  Hopefully I'll convince my husband to make a logo for me, but I've had him doing other tasks - more on that later.  

I'm opening the club to Year 5 & 6 students this year and will run two divisions, either by year level or gender.  Given I'm genre-fying I thought I would work through each of the genres with my book club.  I'll start each division with a different genre and give them two weeks and then they can swap genres and recommend books to the other division.  I bought some little notebooks for them to record their reading, based on ideas from Donalyn Miller's "Reading in the Wild" (LOVE this book!).  I also thought I could give them a challenge to read three books from each genre and then they could earn a genre sticker to go in a "challenges" section at the back of their notebook.  Thanks to Donalyn I also have a lot of ideas for conversations around books that I can have with my Ninja Readers. 

e-Books

Thanks to a large parent donation at the end of last year we will be venturing into e-books this year.  I'll have to wait until I can pin down our IT guy so I haven't done much thinking around this just yet.

Proposal

The length of a library visit for each class was reduced in Term 4 last year from 40-45 mins to 25-30 mins.  This was due to an ever increasing number of classrooms in our school.  So, I asked to speak to the Board of Trustees and proposed that we expand the size of the library so that it is possible to have two classes in there at once, and therefore be able to return to 40-45 minute visits.  This took a huge amount of time as I prepared a slideshow, visited our wonderful National Library Adviser in order to get statistics about other school library sizes, and spoke nicely to my husband so that he could make 3D computer models of what the library would look like.  The BOT were impressed and have asked me to investigate further!

So, four big projects and I'm excited to get started on all of them.  And just to prove I did have some relaxation time in the holidays, here's a photo from our lovely holiday in Napier.

Free eBooks for Primary School Kids

I finally had a bit of time to compile this livebinder of free eBooks for primary school kids.  It includes fiction, non-fiction, audio books, plays, create your own stories and eBook research  I was able to build on suggestions from the NZ library listserv, which is a wonderful resource for librarians.

Some public libraries also allow you to borrow eBooks or use eBook sites they have subscribed to.  Hamilton City Libraries, for example, allows you to access Tumblebooks, an interactive eBook site.  They also lend out eBooks, including some picture books and fiction for children.

If you know of any more sites I would love to hear about them.

E-reading Trial - Further Developments

Last week I met with two of our senior management team to discuss our e-reading trial.  I had heard that we were looking to bring iPads into the school and given the benefits of the bigger screen we agreed to postpone the e-reading trial until they arrived (hopefully next term).  This makes sense but I must admit that I'm not a patient person and I hate having to wait!

  by  Yutaka Tsutano 

Another topic we discussed was how to measure whether the iPads make a difference to students' reading.  While the studies I have seen so far have measured improvements in attitude the senior managers felt that we should also try to assess improvements in reading level.  They also questioned whether we are able to know what reading level the e-books are.  These are two areas I will be looking into.


More research
Thanks again to the library listserv another interesting article about e-reading was brought to my attention - Middle school boys who are reluctant readers value reading more after using e-readers.  I think an interesting point is that reluctant readers "liked other students not knowing their reading level or choice of book".  The ability of an e-reader to enable anonymity around book choice is something I hadn't considered but I can see how this would be important to struggling students whose books may look small and babyish compared to those of more able  students.


New technology for the library
The introduction of the new iPad and subsequent drop in price of the iPad2 meant that I was able to purchase an iPad2 for the library.  Combined with an Apple TV I am hoping teachers will take the opportunity to occasionally show an e-book on the TV during their library time.  I have loaded up several Dr Seuss apps and start tomorrow.  Yay!

Welcome to my blog

  by  m.aquila 

This is my first post for my first blog.  I have some interesting projects happening in my library this year so I've decided to take the plunge.


E-Reading Trial
One of the projects I am most excited about is our e-reading trial.  A couple of weeks ago an article called e-Books engage me was posted on the SLANZA listserv.  It is about an Australian research study that gave reluctant readers in Year 5 and Year 6 e-books and found that "boys are more interested in reading fiction when it involves the use of technology".  It also suggests that "emerging tools such as e-readers can have a place in changing the behaviour of reluctant reader to becoming engaged leisure readers".

I forwarded the article to my principal, Brian, and asked if we could buy four Kindles.  I suggested that we conduct an e-reading trial with our target students (boys and girls) in Year 4 and Year 5.  Brian was very interested in the trial and asked me to price the Kindles.

The key point to note here is that we are not looking to lend e-books to students with e-readers, instead we will be providing e-readers to promote reading at school.

Further Research
At this point I have to confess that I wasn't sure I would get the green light for the project and hadn't done a lot of research about different e-readers and e-books.  The reason I had asked to buy Kindles specifically was because they were mentioned in the Australian study (along with iPod touches, which we already have in the school).

Thanks again to the SLANZA listserv I was aware of a fabulous wiki called NZeRT, the New Zealand eReader and eBook Taskforce.  I also had a look at information from the National Library.

Angela Soutar's checklist on the NZERT site (item 5) includes this article - Amazon Alters Rules for Kindles in School Libraries.  Basically while home users can share up to six Kindles on one account, and therefore buy one book and share it over six Kindles, libraries have to have separate accounts for each Kindle and therefore would have to buy separate books for each Kindle.     I approached Dick Smith to get a quote for four Kindles and at the same time they confirmed for me that the same rules apply in New Zealand.

When I forwarded the quote through to Brian I added the following thoughts about the Kindle:

Pros

• It is only used for reading so there are no distractions with other apps on the device
• It is lightweight
• The battery lasts about a month before it needs recharging
• It has a larger screen size than the iPod touch

Cons

• Illustrations are in black and white
• It uses a proprietary format so we can only download books from Amazon (however they are cheap and have a good range)
• For the price you could almost get an ipod touch and be able to use more apps and view books in colour
• You need to open a separate account for each of the Kindles

When Brian asked what I would recommend I chose to conduct the trial using our iPod touches.  I didn't discount the Kindles altogether (or any other brand of dedicated e-reader), but felt that it was worth seeing whether the students did need a bigger screen and no distractions from other apps before spending money. 

  by  chrisdejabet 

Where to Next
I will be meeting with our Deputy Principal and Assistant Principal to come up with a plan about which students to target first and how we can reach as many as possible using the iPod touches available.  I also need to research the best places to purchase e-books from and learn how to download them onto the school's iPod touches.  I will keep you updated.  If you have any advice or suggestions please let me know.