Blogging off -- on holidays!

The wonders of learning: This is Parent Night.

A primary student brings her family to show the Smartboard

work she and classmates have done under Michele F's direction.

C'est merveilleux, oui? It was also TL Studio night.

Blogworthy Resources:

• Alan Z sends this great online resource: The Encyclopedia of Earth
  
• Karen C (recently retired - yeah, right!) sends Olympics educational information from this issue of the EdInfo Digest: check Canadian School Portal For the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and the new Canadian Olympic School Program that includes learning resources for students, Grades 2 to 12, and a new website for teachers and students with lesson plans, athlete videos, polls, puzzles and information surrounding the Beijing 2008 Olympic Summer Games.
  
• Meredyth K has just sent the Hot Topics in Literacy (2008) "picks" from the International Reading Association ... and guess what, phonics aren't on this list! But hottest topics include adolescent literacy; check the International Reading Association's position statement on Adolescent Literacy which I have always thought a great paper and see other IRA related resources. [Hey, Meredyth and Gwen, maybe we need to get a life -- it's late on the Friday night that starts Spring Break! Meredyth is sending email, I'm blogging, and Gwen is marking wikis. Just so you all know ... ]
  
• The Coquitlam SD #43 Teacher-Librarian information page has lots of information that is worth having a look at. Love the fact that this page links to this very blog, don't you! This great page is created by BCTLA co-president Heather Daly. Anyone wanting to take on the defence of school libraries against the challenge to our relevance and the argument that school libraries are "redundancies" might want to look at Heather's posting for 26/02/2008.
  
• Greg's Top 10 SS Sites for March are available. Here's a sample -- check out the portal that celebrates Samuel de Champlain's founding of Quebec City 400 years ago in 1608 -- see also the student activities. Greg also picks the Historica professional development site, and a paper: The Purposes of Teaching Canadian History, by Peter Seixas. If you have a keen history or social studies colleague, anything Peter is writing about is worth keeping up with -- it's cutting-edge and interesting stuff.

CLA Announcement: CLA Children's Book of the Year Award Finalists

The Canadian Association of Children's Librarians (CLA/ACB) has announced the shortlist for the 2008 Book of the Year Award for Children. This award recognizes a Canadian author of an outstanding book published in Canada in 2007, for children to age 12. Look for the winners to be announced prior to the CLA/ACB National Conference & Tradeshow, Vancouver, May 21 -24, and the award will be presented there on May 22. The finalists are:

• Becca at Sea by Deidre Baker (Groundwood Books)
• Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis (Scholastic Canada)
• Jakeman by Deborah Ellis (Fitzhenry and Whiteside)
• Baboon by David Jones (Annick Press)
• Schooled by Gordon Korman (Scholastic Canada)
• Darkwing by Kenneth Oppel (HarperCollins Canada)
• Eye of the Crow by Shane Peacock (Tundra Books)
• A Perfect Gentle Knight by Kit Pearson (Penguin)
• Porcupine by Meg Tilly (Tundra Books)
• Rex Zero King of Nothing by Tim Wynne-Jones (Groundwood Books)
  

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

• The Writers' Festival is a wonderful "resource" for those of us who live and teach in the Lower Mainland. Anyone interested in an evening of Extraordinary Canadians with award winner David Adams Richards, historian and author Charlotte Gray, and acclaimed novelist Lewis deSoto? Hal Wake will moderate as the guests speak of their recent works on a series about the extraordinary Emily Carr, Lord Beaverbrook, and Nellie McClung. If you are interested in getting a group together, give me a call or email. 7:30 pm, Thursday April 17, H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut Street, Vancouver. Tickets: $15/$13.
  
• TL Courses for the Summer: Word from Marlene at UBC

Department of Language & Literacy Education
On-Campus Summer 2008 Courses in Teacher Librarianship

LIBE 477A/951: School Library 2.0 *
(July 2-18, Monday-Friday, 1:30-4:00 p.m., 3 credits)
Instructors: James Henri and Sandra Lee

Course Description - Web 2.0 is a metaphor for a spectrum of emerging novel Internet applications. Examples of these are blogs, wikis, social spaces and casting. These innovations are not just novel applications; they provide new ways of understanding the Internet. In this context, Web 2.0 is often seen as a“paradigm shift” to a new level of human understanding and expectations of the Internet and associated technologies.This course is designed to introduce teachers and teacher librarians to a variety of Web 2.0 tools and to facilitate an exploration of how these might be applied to enhance productive student and information-centered pedagogies in K-12 schools.

LIBE 463: Selection of Learning Resources I
(July 2-18, Monday-Friday, 8:00-10:30 a.m., 3 credits)
Instructor: Sandra Lee

Course Description: To select learning materials for school library resource centres, teacher-librarians learn to apply good selection practices to build an effective school library program. They establish a sound program for collection development, assess school and its collection requirements, create effective development and selection policies, understand and apply accepted principles in acquiring resources, and select print, non print and digital resources for a school library, using accepted selection aids. They also weed the school library collection using accepted practices. They understand issues related to Canadian copyright legislation, as well as to censorship concerns expressed by members of the school community.

Biographical Notes on Instructors James Henri and Sandra Lee

James Henri was an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong and Sub Dean responsible for teacher librarianship and information literacy at Charles Sturt University in Australia. James previously taught a summer graduate course at UBC regarding the information literate school community. James is President of the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL) and the author of more than 250 papers. His most recent publication is a Scarecrow Press title co-authored with LesleyFarmer, "Information literacy assessment in K-12 settings."

Sandra Lee teaches the more technical courses in the UBC LIBE program, including Information Services. She taught at the University of Hong Kong with James Henri. Her research and teaching interests have included information literacy, information policy, information retrieval, cataloging and children's literature. Sandra lives in Victoria and is the librarian at University Canada West. She also works for the BC Network for Aging Research at the University of Victoria.

* Gwen and I took the course James offered the last time he was a visiting summer instructor and would recommend this as an excellent opportunity to learn with an internationally known authority on information literacy. I have gotten to know Sandra since she has come to BC and think that course with her would be great too.

Check the link here for further information about these courses and a complete schedule of summer 2008 courses from the Department of Language and Literacy Education.

__________________________________________

"Captured" photographically recently were Betty-Ruth Dragon and some of my co-workers. B-R was later observed being stuffed unceremoniously into a blue bin. This, after weeks of dragonly duty on display here in the lobby. That there was some talk about ransom may be mere rumour. I hope she makes it to the right place. Check your blue bin carefully. She is hoping to reach her HappyRock Home.

Have a wonderful Spring Break.

READ, REST, and RELAX -- this is what I would like to do!

(Maybe I can do this after my four days of knitting at the Hyatt Hotel
downtown where I will be serving for the 12th year as a local delegate
at the BCTF AGM -- so how's that for a holiday!)

Happy Rabbie Burns Day!

Lib/bloggin’ away …

Although I can’t imagine why, the title of this week’s blog is sung to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s song, the refrain for which is:

Slip sliding away, slip sliding away
You know the nearer your destination,
the more you slip sliding away …

This week's blog is a late Friday posting … lots of meetings this week as well as planning for meetings, scheduling and preparing for Pro D, and getting out to schools. Wednesday evening I attended Marlene Asselin and Keith McPherson’s Literacy for Today’s Youth session at the Burnaby Public Library, a Family Literacy event sponsored by the BC Coalition for School Libraries. This afternoon I was off to Maple Grove and Linda’s bright, inviting, and organized collection was a joy to behold. I checked up on Joanne there as well … she’s just fine, but who would doubt that!

If you haven’t seen the National School Library Day youtube clip in which Dave Cubberly speaks in the Legislature about his meeting with TL Aaron Mueller at Killarney, you can click onto it on the lefthand sidebar of this page. It brings tears to your eyes.

With feedback from Aaron, as well, I thought I had figured out how to implant comment options within a weekly entry so you don't have to scroll down to the very bottom but I didn't. I guess I need a one-on-one lesson, Aaron! Soon you will be able to comment on information within the sections. That is, it is my hope that you will soon be able to use the interactive feature of this social networking (Web 2.0) tool.

I have been checking out some really cool ways that blogs are used for teaching and will soon have some local blogs for you to use. Lana at Byng suggests that webpages have been replaced by blogs and wikis -- food for thought, my friends.

The biggest joy this week has been having a parent thank me for access to the free newspaper subscription ... her TL had sent the information home to parents in a newsletter about this resource and so she was now reading the news online. I told her to look at the other resources on the Databases page of Webcat but she knew this too. Way to go, Chris!

RESOURCES

From this week’s Webbits by Linda Hof from SFU: Google for Educators – The Best Features for Busy Teachers is an article by Sara King from Edutopia that identifies “user-friendly tools to you’re your [classes] inspired, inventive, and organized.”

Karen Lindsay, BCTLA VP, Advocacy, posts regularly and frequently to the BCTLA Forum. This week she draws out attention to these great resources:

• Docfish/Pageflakes: Karen writes, "Please share this page with your science teachers. I don't think I've ever seen anything so rich. It has also blown the doors off what I think a web page is. Enjoy. (Warning, the page loads slowly, even with cable, but it's worth the wait.)"
  
• “The IFLA/UNESCO Information Literacy Resources Directory has been redesigned and includes the just-published latest version of the State-of-the-Art report on Information Literacy in different countries.”
  
• Joe Landsberger’s Study Guides and Strategies in multiple languages.

HOT NEWS! FOR FRENCH IMMERSION SCHOOL LIBRARIES! World Book Kids (French) is due in mid-March: This news item comes from David this afternoon.

Email from Maryann Kempthorne: “I noticed this course …” and, well, she thought of you! (She hopes you are all well.) Please check out the schedule for web conferences and workshops offered by the “ei” (education institute) of The Partnership (Provincial and Territorial Library Associations of Canada). Let me know if I should be looking into scheduling us into any of these in the upcoming months.

For Secondary School Libraries, News about Freedom to Read Week: Click here for information about Freedom to Read Week Feb 24 to March 1. Thanks, Anne S., for bringing this to my attention. Kits have been ordered for the secondary schools.

Reminder -- I need DRAGON BOOKS for upcoming VSB Display (Note: opportunity here for student field trips).

EVENTS

Technology Day at Magee has big-name keynote speaker Alan November. Check out his weblog and website. There are 21 different workshops to delight both TLs and their colleagues. There are 7 TLs from Vancouver giving workshops and 2 from North Vancouver as well. These sessions are for teachers as well as TLs so encourage your colleagues to attend. Register online (see "Information Technology.") Although there are lots more to choose from, here are brief summaries of workshops provided by TLs:

Mary Locke and Gwen Ingham will work with Susan Atkey from the UBC Libraries to present a session about "the new learners," including teachers (and TLs) as
newcomers to learning about and within the more highly technical learning
environment.

Katharine Shipley and Frances Renzullo-Cuzzetto are presenting a session on electronic resources that are successful with French Immersion teaching. Look for information about a blog that is under development with electronic resources for using in French Immersion classrooms.

David Brear from Coquitlam -- yes, he's related to one of ours so he counts! -- will bring everyone up to date on the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Virginia Lam and Ciara Kelly are doing an introduction to using electronic databases with both elementary and secondary students. These two TLs are the BIG users of the databases as resources to support inquiry so they will have lots to share about what works.

Sylvia Zubke is presenting with teacher Heidi Cyr on using Smartboards in classrooms and school libraries and again later you can see Sylvia with student William on social networking software.

Pat Parungao and I are doing our session on plagiarism – "Just Copy, Cut, and Paste: Phooey on Academic Integrity" - strategies for teachers and TLs on making it hard to do, not on how to do it!

North Vancouver TLs Lesley Edwards and Hazel Clark will show yograydonu how to enhance research through the use of MS Word, including new note-taking techniques such as highlighting, commenting, and creating tailormade graphic organizers. You may also want to check out how Lesley is using blogs as a means to build online assignments with appropriate resources. The example: Canadian poets.

Other sessions of interest: Raza Mirani from Gladstone on videostreaming; Diane Potts from UBC on the Multiliteracies; Drs. Wanda Cassidy and Margaret Jackson from SFU on the Cyberbullying research in Vancouver schools; Alan Zisman on using technology to create School Newspapers; Gerry Kent on Classroom Discussion using
technology; Alan November has a workshop for teachers and there are lots more
… see online registration for more information.

Register NOW for Literacy Day (see last week’s blog for more information) or go online to view Current Professional Development Opportunities. You can’t register online but you can go online to print out the form, than attach your cheque, and blue-bag it in to Pat Dymond ASAP.

Shari Graydon – she’s here to speak to Vancouver educators about on Feb 6, Room 400, VSB 4 pm to 5:30 pm. I sent out the electronic flyer this week. Please post/copy the flyer liberally, and promote/attend this event. Register online. [NOTE: Please encourage your colleagues, including counsellors, Home Ec and Planning 10 teachers, teachers involved with school-based social responsibility initiatives, Language Arts/English teachers, and others.] Or see Shari later the same evening at 7 pm at the Metrotown Burnaby Public Library, a free event sponsored by the BC Coalition for School Libraries.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Excerpted from Val H's Vancouver Retired Teachers' Association blog, sad news:

Karen Bailey (1942 - 2008) passed away peacefully on January 5 at VGH after a long and courageous battle with breast cancer. Born in Vancouver, Karen completed high school in Vancouver, graduated from Simon Fraser University, and later completed her library science training at UBC. Karen was an active member of VESTA who will be remembered as an amazing classroom teacher and teacher-librarian at several East Side Vancouver schools. After her retirement in 1999, Karen continued to be involved with children with special needs. No service will be held at her request, but donations may be made in Karen's memory to the BC Cancer
Agency or to the SPCA.