Library report – February. We love reading…

by Library | Feb 28, 2014 | Library News, Library reports

Library report February 2014

Successes

Staff training at Follett Workshops: On 20th and 21st January Ozlem, Lindsey, Serife and I attended the workshops run by Follett Corporation at Robert College. There were more than 30 people at the workshop each day, mostly from Istanbul but also from other cities in Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and  Qatar. Follett provide us with Destiny, our Library management system, as well as sell us many of the books and ebooks we purchase each year. Day one covered many of the features of Follett Destiny. I was asked to present an overview of how our school uses many of the additional features of Destiny. I made this video (2.54 minutes long) to accompany this presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rjdIAzoihc – my first attempt at i-movie, thanks to the NL team for their encouragement and support to do this. Day two was more librarians presenting to each other. I presented a workshop I gave at a conference last July in Wellington, New Zealand about our library developing as an Inquiry Library. Both workshops were well received. As we reflected about the workshops we discovered that we do some things very well, such as using Destiny to encourage reading and we have systems to help students locate books. We would like to try some new ideas like using QR codes so students can access audio book reviews made by other students.

Love Reading Week: Thanks to the library team, Jen Gokmen and Sezai Kara and all of our colleagues and students who did extra things – readings in the library and ECC, decorating the stairs, posters, photos. There were some great initiatives, higher grade levels reading to lower grade levels, readers’ theatre and the book challenge from the primary teachers to mention a few. Our visit from Jo Hodgkinson was a huge success and it was fun to catch up with her, our students were especially delighted. I have requested feedback from colleagues but only 13 have replied so far. I will send it out again. Every time we have run this event we ask for feedback and have incorporated suggestions to add to the event. This was our third annual Love Reading week and I think the best yet. It was fun to see everyone express their enjoyment of reading in different ways. Below are just a few images from the week. There are more on the library blog http://library.iics-k12.com/

Grade 3 Digital Storytelling: Caroline Lewicky and I worked with grade 3 teachers and students as part of their Traditional Tales unit. The students created a short digital story to encourage their audience to read a traditional tale. Here is one about Pippi Longstocking We used Photopeach to create the stories as it allows comments at the end. This was a very successful unit combining all three New Literacies for effective learning. Caroline and I plan to make a short i-movie about this for the New Literacies website.

Challenges

Grade 11 Extended Essay: By the end of this week I will have presented the second workshop to this grade level. The first one was on Information Search Process to offer the students a structured approach to this large independent research task. The second workshop has been to create a good research question. While working on this workshop with the students I could see that very few of them were using electronic databases to research information for their DP subjects. This is a very important skill to develop for tertiary studies. Next week we will also be able to offer our school community, and these students in particular, the use of the ebrary electronic library resources. In addition to planned reference interviews for each individual student I will run workshops on using EBSCO and ebrary in the next cycle during their SDLT times. These will be optional so it will be interesting to see who will take advantage of this opportunity. It may be worthwhile showing secondary teachers how to use these resources as well.

I am using some specific reflection questions with Grade 11 to see how useful these sessions are and what their perceived needs are. It would be useful to ask my colleagues what they think their students’ research needs are. Comparing the two different perspectives may be interesting.

Opportunities

Thanks to Chris Andre for taking the Proposal: Student reading during extended homeroom session once a cycle 2014 – 2015 to HODs. This links in with the Language policy discussions and Mother Tongue initiatives in the school. Creating this proposal was also one of the library goals for this half of the year. I look forward to hearing about their response.

Noodletools and ebrary half year subscriptions: We are able to provide our staff and students with these electronic tools for the rest of this year and next year as well. Noodletools is an electronic research tool which provides students with a way to track their progress, make plans, take notes, keep bibliographic records and collaborate with one another and their teachers. Ebrary is a large electronic book library, remote hosted which has academic collections useful for our senior students. It will enable our students to access high quality resources to assist their learning. Once these come online fully I hope to find interested colleagues who would like to work with these tools with their students.

Reading thought – in honour of Love Reading Week

“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” Hazel Rochman

Amanda Bond

Teacher Librarian

February 2014