Inspiration, Innovation & Information for school libraries and learning.
Glenda
What is the mission of a library? Is it all about information and story (the content) or is it about books, databases and websites (the medium) or is it about something more fundamental than this?
As I ponder these questions, I am reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. What do we need in order to become fully self actualized individuals and contributing members of society. As a human being, each of us has physical, emotional, mental and spiritual facets to our selves. What do we need to do to nurture all these facets and what therefore, we should value above all else?
What role does our library play in helping our community to satisfy those fundamental needs? Here is my attempt to play with these ideas:
Libraries have a great potential to fulfill these needs. All these components make us human, to understand ourselves, others and the world around us. It takes a shift in thinking about our practice from “how” to “why”. If you see your role as Librarian as an organiserof books, then you are selling both yourself and your clients short. You are focused on the medium, not the outcome. The medium (books, magazines, blogs, kindles, tweets, you tube clips, Facebook) is evolving and changing. The outcome (the” why”) is constant because it is deeply rooted in human needs.
The information and literacy environment is changing quickly. We are at a crossroads. For libraries to remain relevant and essential we may need to adapt our thinking and practice to accommodate these basic human needs for both personal and global truth and wisdom.
Does my library restrict, or enhance, conversations? Through conversations we make connections. We learn. We develop understandings and we share our wisdom. For library spaces, this requires a layout that accommodates both noise and quiet. We need to deliver services that accomodate different types of learning. We need to encourage group activities as well as individual spaces. For some people learning and creativity comes from conversations with ourselves, inside our heads requiring quiet space; for others it is collaborative problem solving that stimulates learning.
As you reflect on the many questions I have posed, consider the “why” of your library and reflect on how you can ensure that your services are both timeless and relevant.
by Linda M
Has your school got old VHS tapes? Film? Audio tapes which need preservation? Do you need to draw your school’s attention to this? Or are you the one who’s tasked with digitising all the old ‘stuff’?
A team from Silver and Ballard was at the annual school archives workshop recently. They specialise in media migration. Sales Development Manager Andrew Crenfeldt provided a list of issues that need action.
This included:
Andrew also provided a checklist for action:
Once you have this information you are in a position to get an idea of the cost in time and money involved in transferring your archive to digital file – either in-house or out-sourced.
You will also need to consider what you want to do with the content once it is digitised, as different uses may require different digital file types, for example:
It is possible to get several digital file types, for varied uses, made at the same time.
Whether you address these issues in-house, or out-source this work commercially, the message for the day was“Do it now!”
flickr image by Olga Berrios
Thank you to Silver & Ballard for permission to reproduce their checklists.
by Jan
Have you struggled to find up-to-date curriculum-based learning materials to support student inquiry based round the New Zealand dairy industry?
If this is so, then it is time to discover the recently launched Go Dairy education website , where you’ll find interactive resources for students, and a raft of supporting materials to assist teachers with creating engaging and active learning experiences.
The website contains digital texts, digital learning objects as well as annotated and leveled links to other sites. All of these are supported with downloadable teaching plans, fact sheets and suggestions for using the tools embedded within the resources. DairyNZ will even help you to find a local farmer to support your class study.
Currently Levels 1 and 2 are available, with materials for all other primary/intermediate levels set to be in place by the end of 2012. If the children in your school think that milk comes from the supermarket – then this site is a great place to start.
by Gail
In April 2012, school librarians in South Carolina took a snapshot of one day in the life of their school library. They collected data, anecdotes, testimonials, and photographs to illustrate how they and their library’s services enrich the lives of their students. This initiative is a response to challenges being faced with reduced library staffing hours. They will submit data through an online questionnaire, which will be collated by the South Carolina Association of School Librarians (SCASL) for their member librarians to use as an advocacy tool with their communities and legislators. A SnapShotDay wiki has been set up detailing the data to be collected and providing information to assist with planning.
What would a day in the life of your library look like? What could be informative and fun ways to share what difference you and your library’s services make to student learning? Check out the following suggestions by SCASL:
Create a video to share with principals, staff and students. See this example using Animoto by the Anderson School District One Libraries.
Compile a bulletin board (an actual one in school and a virtual one using pinterest!) that highlights your statistics. For example, see Jennifer LaGarde’s blog, Adventures of Library Girl.
Producean infographic to display your data and share on your website, newsletter, bulletin board or by email. For example, try Comic Life - see this tutorial by thedaringlibrarian.
The evidence you collect throughout the year can also be used for your performance appraisal and annual report to your Board of Trustees and school community to show the impact your library’s services have had onsupporting student literacy and inquiry learning.
Traffic training, Karori school, by Morrie Hill, 1957. Alexander Turnbull Library. 1/2-177210-F
The NZTA is running a fantastic competition for secondary schools encouraging evidence of engagement with a remix that students have created to encourage road safety.
Students are invited to create infographics, creative remixes and even a literature remix based on the works of Shakespeare and prizes include $10,000 worth of vouchers.
We’re trying to make it really easy for teachers and librarians to support students in finding remixable content so as well as the Free to Mix guide we have also created a collection of links in a Prezi that gives search tips and hints for various search tools. This Prezi can be embedded into your school’s online environment and used as a teaching tool to enhance the learning experience.
In our Primary Sources gallery, we have created a collection of some great Road Safety images that might inspire some interesting and thought provoking remixes. Many of these images are remixable themselves.
From sound advice to shock statistics to hilarious videos, road safety campaigns have been around for a long time now and we’re looking forward to seeing how some of this is translated by teens of today.
Links:
By Peter Murgatroyd
The Select Committee inquiry into 21st century learning environments and digital literacy currently underway is a critical opportunity for the library profession in New Zealand to contribute to the shaping of the future of our schools and to highlight the significant contribution that the library profession and school libraries can make to enhance learner outcomes through the creation of dynamic future focused learning environments.
The preamble to the terms of reference for the inquiry defines ‘learning environments’ as both physical and virtual spaces:
“The term ‘learning environment’ suggests learning happens in a place and space such as a school, a classroom, or a library. However, while much of 21st century learning takes place in physical locations, in today’s technology driven world, a learning environment can also be virtual, online or remote. The purpose of this inquiry is to investigate and provide recommendations on the best structures, tools, and communities, in both rural and urban New Zealand, that could better enable students and educators to attain the knowledge and skills, such as digital literacy, that the 21st century demands of us all.”
The terms of reference for the inquiry include:
The 2012 Horizon Report highlights the paramount importance of critical information literacy and the need for our students to be able to make sense of and critically assess the credibility and value of information in an environment where information is everywhere. It also challenges schools to remove the institutional barriers that may impede progress on embracing new technologies and pedagogies. These themes are reflected in both the focus and urgency of the Inquiry.
The inquiry challenges us to reflect and redefine our understandings of the school library and the role of the school librarian within the context of a transformed information landscape, shifts in teaching pedagogy, and the necessity to ensure that our students acquire the knowledge and skills, such as digital literacy, that the 21st century demands.
Submissions can be made online via a web form on the Inquiry webpage .
Writing a submission for an inquiry is different from writing a submission on a bill. As there are no specific clauses to comment on, it is important that you use the terms of reference of the inquiry as a guide to presenting your views.
Submissions closing date 11 May 2012
Further reading
By Katie
Our daily lives are now connected in more ways then we ever dreamed would be possible. Digital technologies have revolutionised the way creative content is made, accessed and distributed. However, with this connectedness comes complexity around access to content and the way it can be used. While access to creative content is increasing every minute, our legal systems are hugely complex and make it difficult to understand exactly what we are legally able to do with content we find and create.
In January 2012 I was one of 1034 participants from over 87 countries enrolled to participate in a free five day online workshop called Open Content licensing for educators sponsored by Ako Aotearoa.
The workshops were designed for educators and students who wanted to learn more about open education resources, copyright and creative commons licenses.
Day four of the course introduced the Creative Commons project which gives content creators the ability to refine the copyright restrictions or freedoms attached to their work by using six free licenses. The rest of this post will look at Creative Commons licenses, how they work and ways to introduce them to your students.
The Creative Commons project in New Zealand was initiated Te Whainga Aronui - The Council for the Humanities, and is now administered by The Royal Society of New Zealand. Creative Commons was founded in 2001 to help content creators and users alike by creating a series of attribution licenses that provide a range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. These licenses or attributions are free of charge to the public and allow creators to convey which rights they reserve and which they waive in a flexible way.
Creative Commons licenses consist of four major licensing components which work together to allow creators greater flexibility around the re-use of their work. For more information on the licenses and how to apply them to your work please visit: www.creativecommons.org.nz. A video on the website explains this all in plain language that would be suitable for use in the classroom.
Students can practise searching for content labelled with Creative Commons licenses by using the advanced search functions in Google, Flickr and Vimeo. When students are searching for New Zealand content they can do so by using the filters on Digital New Zealand (note: you can search for content you can share, modify or use commercially, this will include a mixture of licensing not just Creative Commons).
For those of you looking to at ways to re-use digital material in the classroom, Services to Schools and Digital New Zealand have created a guide called Free to mix: An educator’s guide to reusing digital content.
The guide gives you information, activities and ideas to confidently create a remix from material you know you have the rights to reuse. It shows students why copyright and licensing exist, how they work, and how they can apply licences to their own work through simple information, suggestions for activities, and links to more resources. By using it, you and your students will be able to participate in the global remix community while demonstrating creativity and integrity.
By using Creative Commons licenses in the classroom you help your students to understand copyright; how it is used on the internet, the importance of licensing their own work and respecting the work of others in an online environment, ultimately making them a more prepared digital citizen.
We have created a poster for you to print and use in your classroom and library to help learners and teachers to use CC licences.
By Carrie
Sort out your notifications and permissions!
Do you know which apps have access to your personal information? It’s easy to lose track, but mypermissions.org is here to help. The site features a list of common social media apps including Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. You click on the link, sign in and are taken directly to the list of apps that can access your account. Once there you can revoke access to any apps you are not comfortable with.
The results may surprise you! For example, if you have used Twitter to sign in to a site like Pinterest or Storify then those apps can access your Twitter account.
Is your inbox full of annoying notifications from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.? Clicking around the sites to find the notifications setting pages can be time-consuming, so we often just never quite get around to stemming the flow of messages.
Notification Control provides a quick and easy solution to this irritating problem. Invented by two teenagers, it works a lot like mypermissions.org and offers a list of sites. You click, sign in and are taken straight to the notifications setting page, where you make any changes you like. It only takes a minute, but it can make a real difference to your inbox.
These two sites are worth sharing with your students when you discuss their digital lives. Many of them (and us!) are all too likely to click on permissions and notifications agreements without reading the fine print, and they may not understand the possible consequences of pressing that green button.
How do you keep track of your digital life?
image by noii’s
By Lisa O
A while ago one of my library heroes - Joyce Valenza, revised her Manifesto for 21st century school librarians. I shared a link to that manifesto with New Zealand school librarians along with a short annotation. I think it is both an inspirational and aspirational document for us. I received a lot of positive feedback from school librarians around the country who were inspired by reading Joyce’s words. I thought I’d write a few posts based on Joyce’s excellent piece.
This is the final section of the manifesto but where I choose to start. The future of school libraries looks exiting and invigorating, and very different than the past. Ubiquitous ultra-fast broadband is delivered wirelessly into our schools and libraries. E-books and other digital content stream into our libraries. We know that print publishing is changing and we don’t know where that will eventually lead, but we know that soon the proportion of print books in our collections will be smaller than it is today.
Joyce writes that the future of school libraries is a moving target. But also, as she told us at SLANZA last year: “there has never been a more exciting time to be a librarian”! So while we all work to shape the future of school libraries, working with our colleagues in education and the wider libraries sector, there are some things from the past that we will hold on to and carry forward with us for the benefit of the learners we serve.
School libraries provide equitable access to resources that support the curriculum and that grow readers. Ensuring that we continue to provide ready access to all our students, physically and digitally, to quality resources in our libraries and through our online presence is core business that we take into the future.
Carefully selecting, organising and annotating resources tailored to support the educational and reading needs of our community goes with us into the future – even though the formats may change and change again. With so many new tools and apps to help us to both curate and distribute this work, we can get much more mileage from our work in this area. We can maximise the utility of our work by sharing our curation work freely with our colleagues.
While the resources are growing in number and format we will continue to lead students and collaborate with teachers through guided inquiry as we support students learning.
Getting to know our students then getting a great book (e-book, graphic novel) into their hands that they enjoy so they then come back for more has not changed. The types of containers for stories and information have increased; we’ve got novels and non-fiction on paper and magazines, and graphic novels. We have e-books and blogs and e-zines. We’ve got articles on databases and wikis and websites. Formats change.
Creating readers, encouraging the joy of reading hasn’t changed a bit. We have to be on top of our game so we can continue be a trusted source for our students in this brave new world.
As a group, we librarians have always been particularly good at sharing our learning and work with our colleagues to grow our own skills and develop the tools for our practice. Again, the function is the same but we have so very many tools at our disposal for both consuming and sharing our learning with our professional colleagues. Twitter, online communities, blogs, e-pin-boards don’t replace our face to face learning and sharing networks but expand our opportunities for continuous personal, professional development.
So looking to the future, let’s hold on to the important elements of our practice even as we leave behind some tasks and practices that no longer add significant value to students’ learning and literacy achievements.
By Amy guest blogger from the Alexander Turnbull Library
For 15 years Timeframes has been a great site for finding digitised heritage content from the largest public collection of photographs in New Zealand, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. You may have used it. You may have also used its content delivered through DigitalNZ or Matapihi.
However, 15 real-time years is roughly 65 digital years and Timeframes is now gracefully retiring from the public arena; going to do a lot of gardening and go for long walks on the beach and …. Ah, what was I saying? Timeframes has been a great service for people to find images online, but it has come to the end of its working life.
Replacing it as the premium channel for finding and browsing the digitised, born-digital and physical collections of the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library is the National Library online channel or Beta, as it’s currently known.
I would love you go have a play with this brand new service and let the library know what works for you, and what doesn’t - there’s a feedback opportunity on every single page. We are still developing and changing the site, so what you say could make a real difference to what we do. Really.
In Beta, you can dive into nearly half a million digital photographs, paintings, drawings and many other different types of images alongside all of the published collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and National Library, including the books that you can borrow for your classroom or library.
The team that is developing this new discovery platform is pretty excited about the large size of the images, the continuous scrolling gallery and the fact that all the huge collections of the library, from an old newspaper article to a digital cartoon, will show up together in response to your search.
Would you use this site? For what? If not why not? I look forward to your questions and suggestions.
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