Award and Gala Season for School Libraries

Canadian Library Association/CASL Awards Announced

BCTLA Winners Score "Triple Crown for BC School Libraries"

Whoo-hoo! It's official! For a third time in recent years, a Vancouver TL has won the Follett International Teacher-Librarian of the Year Award. Joining this list of prestigious winners that includes General Gordon TL Mary Locke and now-retired Prince of Wales TL Karen Cordiner is our long-time accomplished TL colleague Michele Farquharson who, you may remember, last year, won BCTLA recognition for her work. She will receive this award at the Canadian Library Association Conference in Montreal next week. When asked to write a letter of reference, Ken Haycock said, "I have only one question: What has taken so long?" We are pretty proud of you, Michele.

Whoo-hoo! It's official! We have another provincial winner not unfamiliar to local TLs in Karen Lindsay of our BCTLA Executive and Victoria School District note. Read about this year's winner of the Ken Haycock Award for Promoting Librarianship. This award was established in recognition of CLA/ACB past president Dr. Ken Haycock, distinguished educator, administrator and advocate, not unknown to us here in the Vancouver school district!

Whoo-hoo! It's official! The BCTLA Executive has won The Angela Thacker Memorial Award that honours teacher-librarians who have made contributions to the profession through publications, productions or professional development activities that deal with topics relevant to teacher-librarianship and/or information literacy. Well, this was a "win" for school districts and schools that undertook the DEAR initiative in the Fall. The Award also acknowledges the cross-sector collaborative work with public, academic, and special libraries and the Ministry of Education's Public Library Services Branch in a range of provincial initiatives, including digitization, literacy, and database licensing.

Your BCTLA Executive members who jointly received this award do include some local TLs (VP Sylvia Zubke, Liaison Chair Ekdahl -- that's ME -- and Web Steward Val Hamilton) all under the truly excellent direction of our amazing leader and Coquitlam's Chief TL, Heather Daly, with help from nationally recognized VP Karen Lindsay.

Note that, while we had awaited this announcement for some weeks, it was disappointing not to see the names of our winning BCTLA Executive members who have all worked as a team with such keen energies and passions, and most of them are returning! Next year we will welcome
Chris Evans as Treasurer and Michele Farquharson as co-chair for Continuing Education, with Lynn Turner. It has been a joy to work with such committed and visionary TLs.

Click here for a review of past BCTLA members who have won such significant awards.

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Chocolate Lily Book Awards 2009 Gala!

Kidsbooks 3083 West Broadway, Vancouver
Date: Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
Time: 6:45 pm doors open; 7:15-9 pm

Because of the popularity of this event, tickets are $5.00 per person but can be redeemed for full value toward any of the nominated Chocolate Lily books available, during the event.

Meet BC children's authors, have a book signed, and see which authors’ books were voted the best by BC elementary school readers.

For more information, call 604-738-5335 or email general@kidsbooks.ca

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From Patricia Carmichael, GiggleIT Team Coordinator, IASL:

GiggleIT with GiggleCritter!

Motivate, engage, encourage and support - but most of all have fun! Registration is FREE!

Cute, loveable Gigglepet prizes! Meet new friends from around the world! The GiggleIT Project is a global collaborative publishing project hosted by the International Association of School Librarianship (IASL), working in partnership with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL). Designed to help children around the world improve their English language literacy skills, the GiggleIT Project encourages students ages 10-14 to contribute their writings to an online book (eBook) celebrating stories and humour from their culture. Humour, just like tragedy, is a vehicle that can be used to promote cross-cultural understandings and collaboration for children and young adults around the world. Children’s work will be published internationally and will identify their culture through literature.

Written by children for children, the eBook will contain children’s stories, jokes and poetry. The project will inspire children to be creative and make cross-cultural connections with other children from around the world as they learn about humour from other countries, while improving their literacy skills.

A range of competitions, as well as teaching and learning packages, will motivate and stimulate reading and writing skills whilst supporting teaching and learning with examples and worksheets which can be downloaded into handouts for the class. Yes, all teaching resources can be downloaded!

Register now to be part of this incredible international project here at the IASL WEBSITE. Check out the global regions page for IASL as well.

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As ever I have some out new and interesting school-library-related "stuff" of professional interest to 21st century TLs, from book news and launches to technology tools and insights; this week, have a look at:

• Twitter/Austen/bloggy mash-up? Yep! Check out the Mad-hatted mom-blogger friend of Maryann! Well, you had to guess that last part. Just consider the educational uses of Twitter.
  
• The new Related Blogger link, Free Technology for Teachers. What took me so long to find Richard Byrne and his blogful of reviews and suggested applications for technology integration! Winner, Edublogs Award, 2008. AMAZING AMAZING stuff here.
  
• Also the newly-added Related Blogger link, Dangerously Irrelevant. Amerian academic blogger Dr Scott McLeod reflects on insights of Canadian social historian and comementator Gwynne Dyer as he blogs to address some of the K-12 incongruities in technology, leadership, and the future of schools. Read Dyer quote: Why this title? This blog has archives worth checking and sharing with administrators.
  
• Gary Hartzell's guest posting to Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog, on being able to provide a ready defense when, "in today’s electronic environment and damaged economy, the value of libraries per se is ... questioned right along with questions about whether you can defend continuing to spend money on print as opposed to electronic resources."
  
• Film Showing: June 1, Rm 400, Ed Centre, 4 pm: FREE showing of Mr H and his Unruly Puppets, featuring Mr Heidbreder himself and film director/producer, as well as Vancouver educator, Annie O'D from Dickens.
  
• Book Launch: Some of you met Tiffany Friesen (Poirier) for the first time at Winter Tonic. This young Vancouver "gifted" educator (third in a line of well-known local educators) will have her first-ever book launch event for Q is for Question: An ABC of Philosophy on Wednesday, May 27, at 7:00 pm at Kidsbooks, 3083 West Broadway. There will be prizes, snacks, special presentations, speeches, and fun mingling with local teachers, librarians, parents, children, and more. Please pass this invitation on to anyone you know who may be interested. Tiffany is very excited.
  
• Reading Rules, a student reading blog which is an excellent model for consideration with classroom reviewing and reading activities.
  
• The original logos captured in this 2006 Flickr graphic of Web 2.0 companies compared with British social photographer Meg Pickard's 2009-adapted Flickr graphic of those Web 2.0 companies still around.
  
• The new-look sidebar of this blog that includes new links, like the new-look BCTLA webpage under Wikis and Links.
  
• The latest from the various Related Bloggers: Joyce Valenza (SLJ), Phil Bradley, and Kathy Schrock have all made recent blog-posts about WolframAlpha, interesting as extensions of the comments posted here just last week! Blogs like these are where you find out what the "big names" in TL'ship are talking about ... well, unless you take up Twitter-ing.
  
• Twitter: You can mass-monitor tweets with the help of a beta desktop downloadable feature like Tweetdeck set to capture particular twitterings! While I have actually downloaded this, I tend to belong to and attract a group that is following each other but going nowhere! I think we must all be waiting for someone else to tweet (or re-tweet)! Twittering immigrants? No, largely tentative and rendered tweetless.
  
• Learn more about Creative Commons licensing for copyright:
  
  
  

Have a great weekend.

Happy Easter Holidays!

We here at the Mothership wish you all
a well-deserved long weekend,
as well as bouquets and a here-to-stay Spring!

(free photo in the public domain from morguefile)

It's spring -- when the world is puddle-wonderful!
-- e. e. cummings

GiggleIT Project

In need of a little fun for your students between now and June? Have a look at the GiggleIT Project, and join educators from around the world working with children ages 10 to 14 who are searching for fun. Have your students meet Gigglecritter who loves to laugh and searches the world for tall and funny stories, gags and jokes, limericks and tales of the weird and wonderful.

Let's help make Vancouver the first funny young Canadians! To register your funny class, click here. And some of you may remember Australian TL Pat Carmichael, hard at work behind the scenes here, for her session about Sproosejoos and "just doing" collaboration during the 9-day conference in February!

World Digital Library

Also on the world scene is the anticipated launch of the World Digital Library on April 21, 2009. The project, co-sponsored by UNESCO and several national libraries, "will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

Writes California TL Tom Kaun (whose wonderful Bessie Chin Library at Redwood High in Larkspur, CA, I toured last summer), it looks as though there will be some cool tools -- translation, audio transcription, etc. -- of the documents in the database. We can all be looking forward to exploring what looks like a really rich resource for the international community.

Interesting Bookmarks, Libraries, and Bookstores

Thanks, Donna, from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, for this lovely link that, besides surely being the most comprehensize site ever on bookmarks, provides links to stunning photographs of the world's most interesting bookstores and libraries. Now that I have viewed these and found none in Italy, I will simply have to scout out Italy's most beautiful bookstores and libraries. Mercifully, one library in the photo gallery doesn't require a lot of travelling for us here in BC. And thankfully, these ventures to magnificent libraries are always part of the IASL Conference agenda. Anyone coming along to Padua (near Venice) this summer with me and Chris?

Bulk Buy = Digital Storytelling by Jason Ohler

Maryann is compiling a bulk buy for the Digital Storytelling book Dr Ohler introduced us to at Technology Day in February (see also blog entry, March 8). Did you get a copy of the order form sent out to Pro D chairs and administrators? I can fix that. Are there staff members in your school who attended and who wished they had picked up a copy of this book? Perhaps you need to see your Pro D chair about purchasing one for your school library's Professional collection? All orders, with COA numbers or cheques, are due to MK in MLST by April 29.

Meet Phil Bradley

From Jo Anne at Tech comes this recommendation: Feb 1 09 issue of Booklist identifies Phil Bradley's weblog "where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development." The first sentence of the review reads:
"There are plenty of people blogging about technology, but Bradley, librarian and Internet consultant, reports on developments as they relate specifically to libraries." Notes Jo Anne, it looks fairly extensive and very useful.

On looking this week (April 7), I found that Bradley features a cool looking tool which, if you like words, you'll love playing around with. It's called Visuwords, ... a graphical dictionary. Type in your word and you're more likely than not to end up with a graphical creation. You can hover your mouse over each definition and click to re-search the dictionary. The coloured links indicate useful information about the word and its relationship to other words. It uses Princeton University’s WordNet, an opensource database built by University students and language researchers.

There simply cannot be enough ways to engage our students and selves with text, right? Thanks, Jo Anne. So now we can all follow Phil now as I am adding him to the Related Blogs (left hand sidebar here).

Social Networking Sites
How Much Access? Who Decides?

Schools and Online Social Networking by Dr. Nancy Willard, Director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, as posted to Education World, provides some really helpful advice about approaching student use of social networking sites with educationally sound principles. You can also check out Nancy's Centre site.

Article Abstract: Most educators working with middle and high school students are aware of the explosive involvement of youth on social networking sites. Few are prepared to deal with it. Internet safety expert Nancy Willard discusses the risks and benefits of such sites and offers schools a comprehensive approach to addressing student Internet access. Included are advice for parents and teachers as well as online guidelines for students.

Wikipedia generation is lazy

Toronto Star Education Reporter Kristin Rushowy created quite a frenzy of comments in response to her article "Profs blast lazy first-year students" this week: TheStar, April 6, 2009. It's one thing for our high school students to avoid databases in favour of finding the "good enough" answers of Google (a technique called satisficing) as the only search tool of value and Wikipedia as a citable academic source. It's quite another to imagine our students heading off to do academic research not knowing how to find a book or even how to ask for help. Oh dear. Things, the article would suggest, are going downhill rapidly as students' skills are poorer now than three years ago.

What might be the causes of this decline? Do today's students' have a sense of entitlement, also called attitude issues? Are we seeing the effects of underresourcing in the public secondary school system? Is society inculcating leisure values and concurrently a poor work ethic? Have recent structural changes in Ontario's education system -- students are now coming a year earlier than before -- created this "blip," which would suggest the same is not true for other Canadian loci such as BC? Are we graduating students who lack critical thinking skills and the ability to work independently?

Interestingly, at a SLRCCC last Fall, we had asked our UBC and SFU academic librarians to survey those who work with our "undergraduates" in the university libraries. What, we asked, are the ten things our graduates need to know if they are to succeed with the demands of academe? The first drafts came in this week quite coincidentally as Toronto assessed its own dilemma. We are saving the answers for the Secondary TL May 28 pm Update at the UBC Ike Barber Learning Centre, formerly the Main Library and still that in part. Have you registered online for this event yet?

Assessment Webcasts are Now Archived

Should your teacher colleagues or administrators want to follow up (catch up?) with the Ministry of Education's Assessment for Learning Webcast series of three presented this year, they are now fully archived with print materials including handouts and powerpoint presentations for taking notes. While over two hours long, I think they are really worthwhile. Also archived in the same format are the six Informed Assessment Practices webcasts from the previous two years.

Virtual Bookmark

Looking for some professional reading this weekend? Have you checked out the Virtual Bookmark lately? Al Smith, TL extraordinaire from Kelowna, keeps us all up to date with news and features relevant to thinking educators who work in BC's school libraries today. Could be good for a quiet few moments over the holiday weekend.

Happy Valentine's Day

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Winter Tonic with a Theme of Love

This year's Winter Tonic was perhaps the BEST ever. Certainly well attended, the event at once entertained us, moved us, nourished us, and informed us, all in good spirit and spirited participation. Thanks to all kinds of people who made this a success, including the VTLA Winter Tonic organizing committee who always do such a great job, the VTLA Exec who saw the need to invite and welcome new TLs, the newbies who came and we know will be back, the presenters who "wow'ed" us, and the out-of-district TLs who always join us too.

Our Superintendent warmed to the invitation to say a few words on one or more aspect of this year's theme of Love, Libraries, and Chocolate. Using a booktalk approach, a strategy we are very familiar with and were delighted to see, Chris shared three authors' perspectives on love.

• From Robertson Davies (in When We Were Young, ed. Stuart McLean), on the subject of a young boy's realization of love and life while gazing at peonies -- for a review of McLean's collection, see page 66 of Adult Canadian Books for Strong Teenage Readers, by Margaret McKey et al, published with 10th edition of Resource Links. Davies' use of this moment in other writings would suggest it is for the child a moment poignant and exquisite, as well as autobiographical.
  
• From Shantaram: A Novel by Gregory David Roberts, the largely autobiographical story of Lindsay, later renamed Shantaram, or "man of peace," who escapes an Australian jail to become a slumdweller and petty operator out of the Mumbai slums. Writes Lindsday in the opening lines, “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is an universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.” No copies of this 900+ page read are available from our schools!
  
• Finally, from Buckminster Fuller, in his 1970s free verse book Intuition: Fuller coins the term synergy, seeks to explain life's complexities as well: Writes Fuller, “Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and tender and compassionately attuned to other than self.” Suggests Kelly, as are schools.
  

Mary, looking for all the world the proudest mom, was with us all for the early evening. The young performers astounded the crowd, taking us instantly from thoughts of love to high culture. Amazing, they were.

I went to see the Adult Reads this year, where Jennifer from Hager Books "booktalked" 25 books in 45 minutes. I will attach her recommended list to the tlspecial wiki (linked to this blog in left-hand sidebar) ... this was unquestionably a dizzying repertoire of reading possibilities and one of the very best we've seen do this.

I dropped in on David Brear's Web 2.0 lab session where 40 people were jammed in. Suzanne from Maple Ridge, who was extremely happy she had come in for the event, noted that the hand-out alone was worth the trip! I found the lab just as jammed when I came to find a seat for Ciara and Gwen doing databases. Fantastic amounts of work went into making databases more accessible for inquiry and curriculum-related projects.

I am hoping that people who attended Tiffany's session -- she talked about her new book, to be published in the Spring -- will add reviews of her session as comments in this blog. Also, Linda's puppets were very busy. Your reviews are important. Please use the comment feature to add to the description here.

Sales of books and puppets seemed brisk. Thanks to our friend Helen for the fantastic meal and Valentine desserts, along with the serving princesses Nancy and Sylvia whose very presence at an event makes everything more fun. Thanks to Cecil for putting up with all of us.

Allison thanked me for bringing in Dr Jason Ohler for next Friday's Technology Day. She'd heard such great things from her husband who had seen him in October and she was so pleased she'd be able to see him too.

So here's the reminder: Have you registered for Technology Day yet? We are still looking for 70 more to register. AND I need more people (10 to date are committed) to the online conference which I am sure will be something like the Summer Institute, an event you won't want to have missed.

Coquitlam's Pro D Day:

Three of us took the New Databases / Technology Integration workshop on the road and travelled out to Port Coquitlam to Coquitlam's Technology Day event. In addition to doing a workshop for 20 or more TLs, we knew we could hear their keynote speaker Marco Torres, an educator whose work with new visual and other technologies, whose message to become more involved with the verbs than the nouns, whose focus on the process, has inspired young learners in his San Fernando school and community. We attended Alan November's session as well. I also ran into Tom Grant ... and guess what? He blogs every Friday!

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Be sure to READ the GiggleIT information (Feb 10 posting) below!

What funny Canadian stories do we need to share?

IASL: The GiggleIT Project Launched Today

TODAY IS THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH!

International Association of School Librarianship : The GiggleIT Project

Check out the new website and think about how Canadian stories can make them howl!

The GiggleIT Project grew out of the Berkeley IASL conference and the creative mind of one Patricia Carmichael.


Media Release from GiggleIT Project Leader Patricia Carmichael in Australia:

The IASL Children's and Young Adult Literature Special Interest Group (SIG) has been working extremely hard, developing and creating this teaching and learning package designed to motivate and encourage children around the world to read and write about their own culture and that of other countries. Humour was chosen as a motivational tool and so the Gigglecritter was born and the GiggleIT Project is now ready to launch.

I would like to thank Barbara Combes and Karen Bonanno, for the incredible last few weeks effort and their technological expertise, Emily Manck and Katy Manck, for the beautiful graphics and support always, and Rhonda Cooney and Moira Ekdahl for their support and hard work. Also the SIG members on the NING for their support and help. It has been a mammoth collaborative effort. Please send this media release to as many contact groups as possible in your region. Thank you for your support in this venture to promote cultural understanding between countries of the world.

Pat Carmichael, Chair CYAL SIG, IASL

So, let's start capturing those stories and signing up our classes! Canadian submissions are important.

You can read more about Pat in the Fall Virtual Bookmark. She will be one of the key presenters in the online conference for those of you interested in pursuing professional development through a 10-day global journey. Check out: http://www.yourschoollibrary.org/ -- Pat's session is called, " You don't teach collaboration; you just do it. "