Holiday Time is Here!

Active artwork by one talented Vancouver elementary student
captures the joy and colourful nature of winter and play

It's Winter Reading Time:

Reading List Fever: this promotional youtube video reminds us of the importance of reading widely.

Check out Rex Murphy's Cross Country Checkup Annual Christmas Reading List for this and past years.

Browse the VPL's Staff Picks Fiction List for December or their Perfect Presents for Adults 2009.

If you have run out of reading ideas, try plugging the title and author of your last good read into The Book Seer for recommendations for your next book.

Want to catch up on professional reading? Here are some readings about assessment-for-learning.

How about the most recent (50th Anniversary) issue of The Bookmark? BCTLA members will be receiving the last-ever print version in the mail soon. Have you renewed your membership? Check for details at membersonline.

Into reading online? Try fora.tv's Programs on Books. While here, check many other programs about the economy, the environment, politics, culture, science, and technology to "feed your inner genius." Thanks for this website, Phil in HR.

Got an urge to brush up on some of the new digital tools and resources? Try the ERAC "EBSCO bundle" Toolkit, developed by TLs and featuring a great video with our Sylvia as "the star." Or have a look at the Smartboard information.

Why not consider the future of books and libraries with Doug Johnson's E-books, E-learning, E-gads! Thanks, Lana, for this one.

Here's one more promotional video for libraries and e-resources posted to BCTLA Forum by North Van's bookminder:

Otherwise, simply ...

Have a wonderful break!

PS: I'll be taking a break too but will be back
to blogging the school library scene in January.

October on the Move

Professionally, we have so much to do in October, what with DEAR (the annual BCTLA promotion of Drop Everything and Read), the BCTLA Champions of Literacy Conference in Richmond, and putting our school library programs on track.

The Bookmark (last print copy, celebrating fifty years of publication) has gone to press. Copies will be distributed at next week's BCTLA Chapter Councillors' meeting in Richmond. The Bookmark is now an online FREE publication to serve our members' needs. But we are finding remarkable benefits to having a universal presence as well. More on this issue is available on The Virtual Bookmark. Thanks to our fantastic editors Angie MacRitchie and Al Smith, hard at work to meet your needs in the Okanagan.

There's more going on in October:

• TLs are gathering parents as Friends, then inviting them and colleagues to the October 27 evening meeting at Tupper. Friends Of the School Library (FOSL) will be co-hosting an event for parents, educators, and anyone interested in school libraries and literacy. Please consider attending as it is bound to be interesting.
  
  

  Topic: Issues in Reading and Learning for Boys
  Presenter: Dhanook Singh, Secondary Teacher, VSB
  Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 7 PM
  Tupper Secondary School, 419 East 24th Avenue
  



• TLs, also, are considering how to attend the after-school symposium event at UBC's Ike Barber on October 26. Videogames, Virtual Worlds, and Real Learning. You may attend virtually as well.


• I am working on a workshop for the 2009 Richmond BCTLA conference, Champions of Literacy, with Pat from Gladstone; our topic is Plagiarism, and we ask, are we missing the mark? More information and registration for the conference, including its kick-off event at the new Richmond speed-skating Oval are found here.


• A small group of Vancouver TLs will be off to the Legislature in Victoria for National School Library Day, October 26, including me.


• There is a first meeting for the new mentorship model planning team this week. Next we will be asking for names of those new and nearly new TLs seeking mentors.


• SLRCCC (School Library Resource Centre Consultative Committee) meets on Monday morning. A 20-page report on the state of school libraries in relation to the strategic directions set out by The Haycock Report has been prepared and submitted for consideration by SLRCCC.


• Thirty TOCs will receive training in two sessions this week: Horizon and Daily Operations of the School Library.


• Promotion needed NOW! Your attendance is invited to the YSL online course on School Library Design. Contact me for information about BCTLA participation.

Check this out: Human books, you ask?

Parkland's librarian presents human books by Jeff Bell of The Times-Colonist, October 8, 2008. Shared via AddThis

And Meredyth is into vampire books. For her reviews, read the Late Literacy blog (link found in the sidebar).

Generally, despite the pace, all is well, legs are often better but weekends are imperative to recovering capacity, and I must say that I do look forward to November!

Maryann is back on Monday. Bless her!

Have a Wonderful Spring Break ...

Here are a few things for your consideration. Have a great and restful, relaxing break.

Literacy 2.0

The theme of the current issue of ASCD's Educational Leadership journal (March 2009; 66:6) is Literacy 2.0; it is available online FREE (as well as by article in EBSCO) and is worth your reading time. This valuable journal link providing FREE access to feature articles in this and older issues of EL came as a surprise to me but I am marking it as a personal favourite. If you feel the need to get up to speed (or to refresh your thinking on the "new" or "multi" literacies), this set of readings will both inform and inspire you. I particularly liked the article by Howard and Davies on plagiarism.

Recently, The Bookmark, our BCTLA publication, began to make its editions available FREE online. Access to the articles used to be a right or benefit of membership and one paid up one's dues expectantly and waited patiently for the fat little volume to arrive. But increasingly, in the Web 2.0 world, as the information is made available, the benefits of sharing knowledge are experienced in other ways. For example, we have found that the growing readership and newly focussed content has drawn new interest amongst those writing in the field, hence, different contributors, a wider range of contributors broadening the new and current threads of discourse, shared and sharing interests, a community growing, and more.

Shifting grounds ... nothing can be counted on to be the same! Lifelong learning for all! Lots to read, but you can rest after you have a little time to read and to ponder everything, including what is next:

Library in the Clouds

When you are thinking about Web 2.0 and trying to imagine how it quite probably is going to have an impact on school library programs, it's good to have some indicators of direction and some sense that others are looking there.

From North Vancouver comes the blog of TL "Bookminder" or Lesley Edwards (aka The WebFooted Booklady); I have now added this link to Related Bloggers in the lefthand sidebar of my weekly TL Special blog. Valenza's post for today (March 14, 2009) is entitled Library in the Clouds and is prompted by a Twitter from US Library Media Specialist Joyce Valenza, notably a regular contributor to School Library Journal and chatelaine of the Springfield Township Virtual School Library.

Valenza, in her Twitter, directs readers to a new school library blog entitled The Unquiet Library. You can check out the noisy space at this site ... but what makes it particularly "unquiet" is that it has been catapaulted into the ether using a technique called "cloud computing." What is "cloudy" is the presence of The Unquiet as a wiki, on del.icio.us, on a blog, on Pageflakes, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

Click here for The Unquiet's shot of fortitude inspired by Dr David Lankes of Syracuse U, hopefully a shot that will inspire you despite dark times! Unquiet puts forth the rallying cry in her blog that, despite the effects of the economy, of No Child Left Behind, of teachers and others who don't get what we do, of the worrying that educational change is simply too slow to keep pace with our students, here in Canada as much as in the US, it is important not to give up but to carry on in your school library program. Says blogger/TL Buffy Hamilton, "While I may personally feel discouraged at times, I never lose my inspiration or passion for what I do. If I suffer a setback, I dig in that much harder and continue my efforts as an agent of change in my school and community." Don't miss out on the youtube clip either: 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes.

Lesley also pinpoints an article, written as a response to those in direction-seeking mode, by Jeffrey Hastings from School Library Journal (March 1, 2009) that has LOTS to say to us here in Vancouver. Don’t Worry, Be Scrappy: Good, Cheap Tech for Schools, Cloud Computing and More: It’s the perfect time to try cheap new technologies


UNESCO Posters on Indigenous Knowledge

Download all seven Posters on Indigenous Knowledge in pdf format. These posters introduce important concepts and issues about knowledge in indigenous societies today. They are illustrated with case studies and images from around the world. The posters serve as a learning resource that strengthens awareness of opportunities and challenges facing indigenous knowledge holders. They may be used in a variety of educational settings within schools or the community. They are available in English and French, as well as other languages.

Book Review: Why The Book of Negroes Matters
By Donna Bailey Nurse, from Endpapers, The Globe and Mail (F16, 14/03/2009)

Nurse's analysis of Hill's tale of Aminata Diallo suggests he draws upon the traditional slave- narrative genre, of which tales such as Toni Morrison's Beloved are examples, and upon the 19th century or Victorian-era novel genre best exemplifed by writers like Dickens whose twists of plot and character take complex social issues and create the rollicking world of the "urchins" to seduce and keep readers spell-bound. Concludes black critic Nurse, frequent contributor to the GlobeBooks Review,

Today, the geography of Aminata's life remains eerily familiar, a restless route that keeps many black people travelling in circles in search of home. The best black Canadian writing articulates a diasporic experience arising from the cultural collisions of the Atlantic slave trade. And nobody does this better than Lawrence Hill.

You are Invited:

The LOMCIRA Annual General Meeting

“Rethinking Reading Comprehension, Writing, and Learning in an Online World”

This invitation comes from Meredyth Kezar, who writes: Dr Donald Leu (board member, IRA; co-director, New Literacies Research Lab, U of Connecticut) spoke recently at the BCLCIRA meeting in Vancouver in February. [See this blog, February 12, 2009.] If you missed this event and/or would like to learn more then you might like to attend the upcoming LOMCIRA AGM. To be held in the library of the new “green” Charles Dickens Elementary School, 1010 E 17th Avenue, Vancouver, near Fraser and Kingsway, on Thursday, April 23, 2009, the event runs from 4 to 6 pm, includes a tour of the school, and may be followed by a dining-out experience.

If you are not a member of LOMCIRA, visit the LOMCIRA website for more info. The cost of this event for non-members is $5, payable at the door. Register with Meredyth until April 17.

Again, have a great break. We will need you back refreshed and recharged.

A Break on the Horizon

News to report this week:

Collaboration in the Library

Last week I told you about the BCTF workshop offered by our Vancouver TLs Janet, Katharine, and Michele. This week I have added their blog into the "Related Bloggers" section of the sidebar. See blog Collaboration in the Library. New TLs, this is worth your time.


UBC Infolit Project

The long-time project in which retired and practicing TLs work with elementary and primary teacher-candidates in the UBC Education program is happening now. Recently Gwen showed UBC instructors and others supporting the students how to integrate the database and electronic resources with their information literacy lessons. This week Michele and I worked with the project, alongside retirees like Sharon, Vi, Bev, Carolynn, and more, to build understandings about inquiry, resource-based learning, and the collaborative capacity of TLs.

The Bookmark

The Winter 2009 issue of The Bookmark is online now. As usual, it is a remarkable piece of work that is drawing attention for its quality and innovative format. Editors and Okanagan TLs Angie MacRitchie and Al Smith are hard-working, active, and fun members of our BCTLA Executive; we are really proud of them both. By the way, rumour has it that some members of the BCTLA Executive are saving to go to Padua for the IASL Conference at the end of the summer; there are similar rumours that more than one Vancouver TL will be there too!

In this issue find articles by Marlene Asselin, Ray Doiron, Jennifer Branch, Diane Oberg, and Margriet Ruurs, as well as the regular contributions of Greg Smith, John Goldsmith, Stew Savard, Carolyn Cutt, and Pat Parker.


The Lieutenant Governor's Literacy Program

Each month, The Honourable Steven Point posts four pictures and invites students, children, and young adults to write stories for the pictures, stories he personally will read. Wouldn't this be a wonderful opportunity for further development with digital storytelling or more of what we saw with Dr Jason Ohler?

Literacy 2.0

The March issue of Educational Leadership features the theme of "Literacy 2.0" and Dr Jason Ohler as the lead contributor with his article "Orchestrating the Media Collage" (EL March 2009). In her introduction to the issue, Marge Scherer summarizes the content as articles that will examine "what this new 2.0 literacy entails; how it differs from, yet relies on, the skills of traditional literacy; which new possibilities and challenges it raises — including how to counsel the multitasking student and how to foster the endangered capacity to read deeply; and finally, where and how literacy 2.0 should fit in K-12 curriculum and instruction."

If you missed the opportunity to hear Jason Ohler, the link to the EL article I sent out would provide an opportunity to read about what we learned and what everyone is talking about. Don't forget that EL is included in the EBSCO database package so you can search for this and other articles.

Many people who attended Technology Day at Magee with Dr Ohler have requested copies of his recent book so we will be looking at taking and placing a bulk order. Information will follow shortly, but you as the TL might want to share your resource expertise -- check who in your school would like to own a copy and where the funds can be found to put one into the school's professional collection. How many copies for your school, then?

Digital Storytelling in the Classroom:
New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning, and Creativity.
2008. Corwin Press.
ISBN: 9781412938501

CWILL and Planning for Author Visits

Mark at Cunningham reminds us that the very best place to find an author or illustrator for school library visits is the website for Canadian Writers and Illustrators BC (CWILLBC). We have so much local and easily accessibly talent here in Vancouver.

• Mark recommends former Vancouver teacher and award-winning children's author Robert Heidbreder for annex and elementary audiences.
  


• I can also recommend my neighbour Glen Huser, by the way, who is a former TL and TL Consultant from Edmonton as well as an GG award-winning author for his book Stitches.
  


• Melanie Jackson, local author and fellow denizen of the VSB here, is nominated for a Chocolate Lily award this year for her book Shadows on the Train.
  


• And don't forget Nancy Hundal, our very own practicing TL and children's author, whose tenth book -- a first chapter book, in fact -- is due in April.
  


• Did you hear Tiffany Poirier from Brock at Winter Tonic this year? If so, you will remember that her first book Q is for Question is due soon too.
  


• And Vi Hughes has another one coming soon too.

Great Resources -

Webspiration and Graphic Novels

Our new membership in the IASL has been worthwhile. The following info comes via IASL-Link's Gerald Brown from Winnipeg and retired consultant for Pembina Margaret Stimson:

• Did you know that the New York Times has added a new best seller list to the collection? It's the New York Times Graphic Books Bestsellers list. Librarian Joshua Carlson believes graphic novels are important for all libraries. Graphic novels have become important in our school library collections but there are still many obstacles to general acceptance this is an important format for engaging young readers. This bestseller list adds support. They are both worthwhile and worthy of recognition.



• Webspiration? It's the public beta version of Inspiration, software created for your use FREE by the same company. "Use Webspiration's diagramming environment to create bubble diagrams, flowcharts, concept maps, process flows and other visual representations that stimulate and reflect your thinking."

WebWord and Netbooks, Reviewed

From Online Edition of Costco Connection and high-tech reporter Marc Saltzman: check page 13 of the March/April 2009 edition for his "latest" on the little laptops (called "netbooks") you may be seeing around and for this valuable tool:

• WordWeb: this is a FREE downloadable dictionary and thesaurus that, if you hold down the CTRL key and right-click on any word, activates a pop-up window with the definition, synonyms, antonyms, as well as links to other sites such as Wikipedia. It can be used offline as well. It takes up 7.4 mb and has more than 150 000 root words and 120 000 synonyms. It is available in "Canadian" English.
  
• Of the new Netbooks, Saltzman says they are one of today's hottest tech tools (although I am still thinking I need a video camera like Alan Z's Vado) ... So, for cost-savings, netbooks often use Linux open-source operating systems, as opposed to Windows. The small keyboard is ideal for kids (and the lightweight affordability makes them ideal for geo-caching, I am told). They have small storage capacity and do not have the gaming or video capacity of laptops. But they are perfect for email, word processing, and checking the internet. At under $400 each, might these be the solution to some of our technology needs?

Obama cares about libraries:

"At the moment that we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold, that magic threshold into a library, we change their lives forever, for the better. It's an enormous force for good."

Barack Obama, keynote speech

American Library Association Conference, 2005

Best Wishes, Professional Reading, Online Resources, and Calendar

*

Happy New Year and Welcome Back

*

If you didn't get to this before or over the Holidays, now is your chance. Please check the upcoming events which I will keep current until posting again on January 16.

*

Downtown
Bay Window

Hudson's Bay Company, 1916
Library and Archives Canada / PA-122005

Best Wishes

... for a restful and joyful holiday from the staff "downtown" who support strong school library programs in our diverse school communities:

ME, Diane, Maryann, Irinya, Thyrza, Donna, Jesse,
Fay, Ingrid, Mike, Larry, Sharon, Frank, and Val.

Where's Santa? Google for Educators is a great place for new ideas for information and tools to empower students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Or how about enabling kids of all ages to learn about geography as they follow Santa on his Christmas Eve journey around the world. Google works with NORAD to track Santa's progress (in six languages) on December 24, with daily updates and surprises until the 24th.

Mark Your Calendar: The busy season is coming so you will need to rest up! New professional development opportunities for January are now online. Many more events to choose from as well.

*

Resolve to attend one or more of the following:

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January 21: Assessment For Learning and Descriptive Feedback, part 2 of the Provincial Webcast Series, 2008/9, at DT, 3:30 to 6:00 pm.

Each session will include the webcast program with experts and facilitated discussion, electronic copies of all materials, and handouts. Archived materials from earlier webcasts are available here. Assessment is a hot topic in the district so be sure to share this with your colleagues. Register online.

January 23: Family Literacy Day; consider registering your school. Break the Guinness World Record™ for Most Children Reading with an Adult, Multiple Locations by reading Robert Munsch. See email notification sent December 18.

January 27: After-school workshop at Gladstone: Strategies for Reducing Plagiarism; see Miscellaneous and register online. Invite colleagues.

January 28: TL Studio 1, Kerrisdale. Register online.

February 3: 4:30 to 7:30 pm -- Dr Leu on The New Literacies at the Italian Cultural Centre. For more information, contact Meredyth at mkezar@vsb.bc.ca. $65 includes dinner.

February 4: TL Studio 2, Gladstone. Register online.

February 10: Winter Tonic, Tupper. Watch for flyer and email details.

February 20 (am) Of particular interest for TLs at District Day:

Literacy Day at Killarney (check link from online registration under Literacy to view program and get registration information)

Technology Day at Magee. Alan November, keynote speaker. More information about sessions and speakers, will be available in January. Registration will be online.

PLUS

NEW! Online Conference for TLs: 21st Century Learning: Transforming school libraries with Web 2.0 tools -- 1 pm to 2 pm at Magee.

After Technology or Literacy Day events, you can attend the official launch of the 9 days of online sessions and discussions amongst TLs from Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. James "the Guru" Henri and Sandra "Web 2.0" Lee will be hosting more of what we saw in August. If you missed them at the VSB Summer Institute, or if you want more of the same, watch for details of how to pre-register in January. I will let you know when registration will be available online. Cost for VSB TLs ($60 per person) will be subsidized, and lunch will be provided.

February 25: TL Studio 1, Kerrisdale. Register online.

______________________

Some Professional Reading for those Quiet Times

Linking into and from the BCTLA's Virtual Bookmark provides TLs with lots of reading for professional development in the quiet moments of the holiday. Here are a couple of articles posted by online editor and Kelowna TL Al Smith, with links to deeper reading on the topics:

Students Struggle with Information Literacy, by Justin Appel, Assistant Editor, eSchool News:

For additional relevant articles on eSchool News, check here: Measuring 21st Century Skills

Strategy for Overcoming Resistance to Technological Change, by Tom Haymes, Director of Technology and Instructional Computing at Houston Community College Northwest

If technologists just build it, they (the users) won’t come—you need to shape users’ behavior by acknowledging their world view rather than your own as a technology implementer; here is the link for the complete with the 3E strategy (that is, those charged with technology change need to build user awareness that the innovation is evident, easy-to-use, and essential) in EduCause.

Educational Leadership (Dec 2008/Jan 2009): Data: Now What? The New Stupid, by Frederick M. Hess.

An interesting read about assessment and accountability trends in the US, interesting in light of the recent FSA vote! "Educators have made great strides in using data. But danger lies ahead for those who misunderstand what data can and can't do." The New Stupid, writes Hess, is characterized by "an enthusiastic embrace of data [that] has waltzed us directly from a petulant resistance to performance measures to a reflexive and unsophisticated reliance on a few simple metrics—namely, graduation rates, expenditures, and the reading and math test scores of students in grades 3 through 8."

Launch of A Great New Online Digitization Project:

The British Colonist (1858-1910)

A great digital resource became available last week: The British Colonist Digitization Project is a joint effort by the Times Colonist, the University of Victoria, and a consortium of British Columbia libraries. The website covers the period from Dec. 11, 1858, to June 30, 1910, and offers 100,544 pages. Because the digitizing is only as good as the original or microfiche, you can try searching on the site but may also want to use the Index of Historical Victoria Newspapers.

NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)

INBOX blog:

Most read blogs for 2008 Inbox on NCTE were about effective writing assignments and strategies for teaching nonfiction along with the summer series on 21st century tools for the classroom. Check out the IRA's ReadWriteThink Resources linked here too. For the rest of this excellent NCTE newsletter, click here. You can subscribe and get this every week.

Great Science Resources to Pass Along

Learning Science:

Here's a really useful site for online tools for teaching science. Collaboratively developed by teachers and Eucation faculty in Pennsylvania, it features the best science interactives and resources from around the world. SFU site-reviewer Linda Hof writes that Learning Science is divided into seven sections: Physical Science, Life Science, Science & Society, and more. Browse through teaching resources: web-based lessons, pedagogical tools, and links to external resources. Particularly good, says Hof, is the "Tools to Do Science" section: find printable rulers, a printable protractor, a stop watch, and printable graph paper. Or search the entire site via a convenient search engine and send along comments.

YT or no YT?

The New Media Literacies on YouTube is a video explanation of how various literacies enable students to have more skills and confidence that will prepare them for the 21st Century.

New Literacies for a New Age on YouTube is the history of how heffalumps brought new technologies to the education system and caused havoc as standardized testing benchmarks and students' abilities to memorize began to falter.

Education from the Outside on YouTube makes the case to bring the images from popular culture into classrooms to teach our students to read them and to learn ourselves.

Web 2.0: Cool Tool for Schools is a wiki full of social networking software programs that can be integrated with classroom learning processes and projects.

And finally, Teachers: Is There a Place for YouTube in the Classroom is the product of the research of a Toronto-area TL on the pros and cons of using YT in the classroom.

Storytelling and Booktalks
From the Honorary Ambassador for the IASL!

This list of suggested resources was compiled by Margaret Stimson, Retired Library Media Co-ordinator (Manitoba), and received via IASL post from Gerald Brown, Honorary Ambassador of the IASL:

Totlol. Developed by a Vancouverite, this video directory is intended for use with younger children, although more senior users like us will enjoy many of the selections. The site is moderated. It's powered by YouTube.

Book Video Ning. Visit or join the ning to find or share videos about books. The ning
was initiated by Joyce Valenza on December 12, 2008. As much as anything, the
ning serves to show us what is possible in the area of booktalks.

Speakaboos. If you like Storylines, you'll love this site as well. There you'll find online books, celebrity readers, teacher resources, and technology that enables kids to make their own recordings.

CogDogRoo Story Tools: This blog is more about making digital stories (or booktalks). Alan Levine offers 50+ web tools you can use to create your own web-based story. He provides several samples that have been made with each tool. In fact, the story of Dominoe the dog is told repeatedly using all of the tools.

Also from Gerald Brown in Winnipeg:

"I wish you a day of ordinary (library) miracles and little things to rejoice in.

Eight hands that go up to request the title you've just book talked.
A computer that goes for an entire day without crashing.
A less-than-successful baking experiment taken to the teachers lounge, gratefully
eaten before 10 am.
A child asking for another book "just like this one."
A software installation that does not cause another program to crash.
A parking spot close to the school door.
The principal saying a sincere thank-you.
An unexpected larger amount on your paycheck or a smaller amount on your mortgage payment.
A new book just published by your favorite author.
A student who is actually concerned about the quality of his work.
A dozen doughnuts as "thanks" for service above and beyond the call.
A quick and pleasant response from a technician.
A kid who wants to help you.
A human voice on the phone when you expected a recording.
A student who wants to become a librarian when she grows up.
A chance to show a tech-tip to a teacher who thinks you are a "guru."
A library with windows and sunbeams in the winter.
A request to use the library for a meeting because " it is the nicest room in the school."
A smile of accomplishment from a student who shows you how to do something on the computer. A quickly-answered reference question asked by a teacher.
A library aide you like and who likes you.
A student so absorbed in a book, he doesn't hear the bell ring.
A call from a parent about a lost book found while cleaning.
A student who wants to hold your hand.
Students who give genuine praise to each other.
A small space of time to read for pleasure!

What strikes me, says Gerald, as I read this list of "ordinary" miracles, is how we, ourselves, often make them happen. It is by treating others well that good is returned to us.

__________________________

Blogging off now for a rest from the pace.

Oh, DEAR ... and so we read!

Thank you, Minister Bond.
Education Report: 2008 October 31

and this Gold Star is also for Steve Mulligan for

drive-by readings at FIVE schools

on National School Library Day

and for his on-going attentiveness to school libraries --

Thank you, Steve, from all district TLs.

Vancouver schools took part in DEAR on October 27 National School Library Day with enthusiasm. Our Trustees and BCSSTA office staff read at 11 am, Education Minister Bond read at 11 am, colleagues at Learning Services and MLST were observed reading and eating "School Libraries: The Heart of Literacy" chocolate bars , and staff at The Vancouver Sun read too.

October 28, The Vancouver Sun:

Here's a "snapshot" of what you could have observed in our schools:

• Van Horne experienced a rare silence throughout the school
  
• Henderson featured some readers dressed as favourite storybook characters
  
• Trudeau readers with painted faces listening attentively as firefighters read to them
  
• Tillicum's “the reading train” ran down the entire central hallway, complete with whistle stops and loads of book-talking


• Mt Pleasant kicked off One Book, One Class for November and Steve Mulligan did two readings


• Weir's guest readers included Maryann Kempthorne, Angela Brown, Gary Little, Denise North, Steve Mulligan, and VPL children's librarian, Noreen Ma


• Carr students camped out and read in tents; Steve Mulligan appeared here too for a reading!
  
• Moberly invited Wally Oppal; see the picture with Wally Oppal (see blog, October 27) in the blog archives for October 27
  
• Gladstone has silent reading every morning; they read again in the afternoon and teachers were seen nibbling the same chocolate bars as were featured here in Learning Services and elsewhere (but then a student at Gladstone had designed them, so that made it okay to eat chocolate!)
  
• Tupper students got their heads into the brand new school library books
  
• Templeton stopped everything from 10:30 - 10:50 am, as agreed by Staff Committee, and it worked so well that a number of teachers will be incorporating a stop and read on a more regular basis

What's new?

Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable Hycroft Event - November 12, 6-9 pm, 1489 Macrae Avenue, just east of 16th and Granville. Light refreshments after the presentations. Street parking only.

Special Guest Kathy Stinson plus BC authors and illustrators will be presenting their
new children's books

BCTLA Forum posting by Val H this week has generated a flurry of commentary. Read: "Flip This Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution/School libraries need a revolution, not evolution," by David Loertscher in School Library Journal, 11/1/2008. The article begs the question, so how might this look?

My new Australian friend, Patricia Carmichael, whom I met at the IASL Conference, is presently working on her PhD at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. To see how this might look read a summary of a program that offers one version of a program that incorporates the notion of "learning commons" click here and scroll down to the last summary. Consider also that our local university libraries both have Learning Commons within their campus academic library programs.

James Henri suggested revolution to us in August; we need to focus on the teachers, he said, and if we see that the learning that takes place in school libraries is integrally tied to the needs of 21st century learners, we need to find ways that it can evolve with our leadership to better support the learning styles, experiences, and interests of our educational community, including teachers and students. We need to explore ways of building our programs on the "google" concept ... if they build it (the program, the curriculum, the learning landscapes), they will use it. What we have built needs to be carefully considered for nudging along the continuum or we risk being rendered obsolete.

Remember, we are at the start of a revolution and the outcome will be uncertain and it will be stressful along the way. But we most assuredly need to ask ourselves, is what we have been doing working? Is it the best way to serve our educational communities?

Multi-vendor Display and Chapters Workshop

This year's event seemed a great success. Those of us who enjoyed Chapters/Starbucks hospitality had a great opportunity to shop in "gaggles" and hone in on the real bargain-price items, as well as hot new reads for students. Maryann's workshop provided plenty of direction for program and collection building. There were more secondary resources than last year and will be more next year too. Wednesday seemed busier than Thursday, but everyone seemed to be very focussed and deeply occupied with that most challenging part of our job, shopping!

Workshop with Judith Comfort

A few of us "secondary types" spent late Thursday afternoon at Churchill with Coquitlam TL Judith Comfort exploring the possibilities of her approach to technology integration, a strategy she calls multi-level resource-based online learning. Click here and check out some of the Teaching Activities. The group is going to try some out together ... stay tuned for how we do. And thanks, Judith, for a very interesting afternoon. We were a keen audience.

7 from Greg Smith's Social Studies "Top Ten" List

Being Victorian. Welcome to Victoria BC circa 1858-1914! Visit this great new site with an innovative format and written for Social Studies

Green Learning. Comprehensive, fun and free lessons aligned to the BC curriculum and designed to help students participate in their own learning regarding today’s complex energy and environmental issues.

History of Quebec. Get to know La Belle Province a little better. This site has all the information plus great self scoring tests and tutorials.

History Wire. HW invites your perspectives, stories and opinions on the relevance of history in understanding current events, the importance of history education and much more.

Law Courts Education travels BC. The Law Courts Education Society of BC will hold 6 regional law workshops for teachers in early 2009. Kelowna, Prince George, Surrey, Coquitlam, Vancouver and Victoria. Contact Marylou Leung at marylou.leung@lawcourtsed.ca or call 604-660-9874 to attend.

Online Publishing for Social Studies Teachers. Check out Judith Comfort’s site on why, what and how to publish as well as a portal to other great Social Studies resources.

Women in World History. This unique site is full of information and resources to help you learn about women’s history in a global context.

Virtual Reading

The Spring 2008 issue of The Bookmark, all 46 pages of it, is now available online. Here's what you can read about during your prep block:

• the October BCTLA PSA conference that will be held in Victoria on October 23-4 ("Mission: Literacy / Teachers and Teacher-Librarians: Not-so-secret Agents of Change"); workshop presenters will include such noted "literacy experts" as Susan Juby, Sarah Ellis, Sylvia Olsen, Diane Swanson, and Jennifer Branch.
  
• retiring Okanagan TL Kay Treadgold's reflections on nearly thirty years of changes in our field from the early days of card catalogues as the primary tool for inventory to automation, from filmstrips and 16 mm film as the newest resources in educational technology to internet, videostreamiong, and a world of electronic resources, from the days of the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature to microfiche to online databases and the new focus on teaching for critical examination of information sources, ethical use, and effective search strategies, and from the despair of seeing the erosion of TL services to a note of appreciation for the enthusiastic new crowd coming into the field
  
• what's happening with the Library 2020 initiative -- read Heather Daly's column "In circulation"
  
• how to get a job teaching in an international school -- read the message from Evelyn on how she retired from being a TL in Vernon, having got her next job in Dubai
  
• where the courses you need for TL'ship are being offered
  
• other conferences further afield this summer, such as the IASL conference in Berkeley, and during the fall, why not attend Calgary's Kaleidoscope?
  
• how to advocate for your program and support advocacy through your local specialist association, the VTLA
  
• the educational oportunities identifed by Al Smith in the Web 2.0 application iTunes which he is finding useful for storing homework, podcasts, TV, as well as music and audio content, and for working with Google Tools, email, content management, blogging ... mind-boggling!
  
• John Goldsmith's latest thoughts on social bookmarking and his substantial collection of New on the Net sites that span pedagogy and curriculum and many pages of this issue
  
• Greg Smith's Top Ten Social Studies sites, times two, as this April and May lists are both here
  
• Stew Savard's recommended titles for Science Fiction and Fantasy acquisitions
  
• the online directory of lessons and units created by teachers and TLs, called "The Lesson Vault," including Lynn Turner's project Renaissance Idol and Karen Lindsay's InfoTech 101 ICT lessons for grades 7 to 9
  
• how one district turned its failed TL PSA conference (we were on strike, if you recall) into literacy success with an author visit program
  
• edited book reviews, always a Bookmark feature, compiled by Pat Parker and Carolyn Cutt, noting that there is a call for more reviewers on page 37
  
• Al Smith's factoids about the world we live and work in

Further readings?

• Try the 27th annual survey of our working and learning conditions, also online.
  
• This came from Alan at Maquinna: How We Read Online
  
• Thanks, Val, for this post to the BCTLA Forum: The 2008 Kids and Family Reading Report: Kids age 5-17 believe technology will supplement -- not replace -- book reading and say they will always want to read books printed on paper; tweens and teens who participate in online activities are more likely to read books for fun daily.
  
• If you are looking for one more item to add to your collection for September, try Free Spirit: Stories of You, Me and BC by Gerald Truscott. Val H. bought it last week and showed me; she's right, it is fascinating. It comes with a DVD of BC tourism travelogues from the 1950s and 1960s. Appropriate for Grade 3 to adult.

BOOKMARKS ...

THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF BOOKMARKS

Social Bookmarking:

I have to thank Mary Locke for insisting I needed to get into social bookmarking. No, it doesn't mean she thought I needed to get a life ... it's not like LavaLife or PlentyofFish!

I am still working with this Web 2.0 tool to fully understand how it works. Maybe you could let me know which of these you like better as a way of gathering and sorting teacher- and TL-recommended websites and how you think we might use these.

del.icio.us: The first is posted on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/tlbookmarks. You can ask me for the password and enter your own recommended bookmarks for TLs to use ... or you can start your own list. I imported the del.icio.us list of great websites for TLs and for teaching, a list I had called "tlbookmarks," into Diigo.

Diigo: Another social bookmarking program is provided by Diigo which is an acronym for Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff. Diigo (dee'go) is a step beyond social bookmarking -- it is, or so the site tells us, about Social Annotation: "By combining social bookmarking, clippings, in situ annotation, tagging, full-text search, easy sharing and interactions, Diigo offers a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform for knowledge users, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media."

I am not sure how long Diigo will be free for users. I invite you to the group that can view the list, but I can do lots more, like highlight parts of webpages and add sticky notes to the bookmarks too. You can check out Diigo here: ttp://www.diigo.com/. Email to ask me for an invitation to the group that can see and add to the list being developed, the one called tlbookmarks.

Here's the article from School Library Journal that got me started on Diigo -- "Cool Tools: Best of Social Bookmarking," by Steve Hargadon (12/1/2007). Here are some preliminary notes about social bookmarking and these two tools:

If you "bookmark" a website into diigo, as opposed to del.icio.us, you can actually choose what you want others to see on the list by "expanding" the listing.

As you "bookmark," you also "tag" (add keywords or descriptors) so that you can re-sort or "bundle" the sites together by the same tag. I have created a few of these lists on each page, as you will see.

If the site creator lets you, you can add bookmarks too. That way we could begin to compile a list of useful sites for all school libraries, students, teachers, etc.

There are more kinds of bookmarks ...

The Virtual Bookmark - Check here as there will be regular posts to supplement the BCTLA's professional journal, The Bookmark.

The BCTLA's Bookmark, Winter 2008: "School Libraries as Classrooms" - it's online, 67 pages long, and beautifully done. The article by Mary Locke and Heather Daly (who has a job like mine in Coquitlam) provides more depth to the description of the role and responsibilities of teacher-librarians. Ken Haycock writes on The Teachers' Professional Library and The History of School Libraries in the VSB. Denise North presents a unit on children and injustice. Read about Val Hamilton. Check out reviews by teacher-librarians. Angie MacRitchie and Al Smith, our Okanagan BCTLA Exec editorial team, have put this edition together and have done an amazing job.

Other Kinds of Bookmarks / Books that made a mark

Remember it's Freedom to Read Week

Here's a little reading centre bound to make a mark
on a little reader! Thanks, Helen, for the nice visit to Bayview on Friday.

Hello??? Still no comments on my blog. Maybe I have set it incorrectly.

Try to post a comment: What do you think about these social bookmarking tools?
Do you have a gmail account? Have you checked out the many features of gmail?