Santa Sabina College

In the morning of the 4th of September, we had SCEGGS Darlinghurst and in the afternoon we trekked across Sydney to get to Santa Sabina College in Strathfield. What a contrast this visit was to the one in the morning. Both girls schools, but two very different functioning libraries.

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We had an excellent presentation from Helen Schutz, Coordinator of Information Services on the role of the teacher librarians in promoting development of information literacy and research skills.

Is there room for a specialised Library in a digital world

We visited the Australian Society of Genealogists on the Wednesday 3rd September in the afternoon.

At the start of my visit to the Australian Society of Genealogists I was taken back by the amount of old technology, old books and old library structures. It was a membership-driven reference library with access to a wide range of non-published or widely-distributed collections. They were very much still reliant on using older technologies such as microfiche and microfilm.

SCEGGS Darlinghurst School Library

SCEGGS Darlinghurst was the first of the K-12 schools that I visited as part of my Sydney Study Visit. The presentation was an excellent overview of a traditional lending and research school library.

We started off in the Fiction or wider reading section of the library. A light filled room with lots of resources and comfortable beanbags or chairs.

Beanbags had a corner where they
could be placed at the end of a session.

ABC Sound and Reference Library

We hit the ground running after the State Library visit on the morning of the 2nd September and walked from one end of Sydney to the other to visit the ABC Sound and Reference Library.

It was a non-lending library servicing the needs of ABC producers and reporters. It is not open to the public and only holds collections which are directly relevant to the core needs of the ABC.

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Our guide was Kate Burnham who had been at the ABC Library for 11 years and had worked in the industry for 43 years.

Parked Links

via Flickr

I am parking a few links here so that I can follow them up later. I find this a good habit rather than bookmarking them and forgetting them ....

• Study Skills -  it is interesting to see how other schools implicitly teach Study Skills to their students. I am a believer that the path to success is via good study habits.
• The Forgetting Curve and its implications for training deliver -  I am fascinated by how we remember things and how we can teach students to take control of their retention levels.
• What do good readers do poster -  I am on a mission from God to improve the reading levels at my school. Looking at some posters to go up in each English Classroom.
• Collection of Google posters for teachers and students - despite having taught with the internet for close to 15 years, our students and teachers still don't grasp the idea of a search engine well enough for my liking.
• What is 'metadata' and should you worry if yours is stored by law? An interesting bru-ha-ha happening in Australia at the moment where incompetent people are running the country. A definition from a business dictionary of metadata.
• National Writing month support via the State Library of Victoria.
• I'm loving Google's Ngram Viewer and the possibilities of using this within the classroom.
• Evolving role of Libraries in the digital age.
• Creating Classrooms we need: 8 ways into inquiry learning
• Use writing activities to bond with students. 
• The case for preserving the pleasure of deep reading. Just because students can read SMS messages doesn't mean that they are skilled in deep reading.
• Learning Myth: why I'll never tell my son that he's smart. As a teacher I have seen the damage caused by telling kids that they are gifted. 

Ken Roberts - The Future of Libraries

I really enjoyed Ken Roberts talk on The Future of Libraries.

Writers Block

Can anyone else relate to this?

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A visit to the Tutor Collaborative Learning Centre

I visited the Tutor Collaborative Learning Centre at Trinity Grammar last Friday. An old friend Colin Potts, who used to be Deputy Head and was on the planning Committee for the new building.

My relationship with Trinity Grammar is a long one, it was my first teaching job out of Uni 20 years ago! Colin took a gamble on me and hired me to teach a Year 11 class.

I taught in a lab without internet access (because there was no such thing as affordable internet access at this time). So the students were not distracted by the interwebs, and every morning and every night we switched on the internet computer, downloaded and uploaded emails. 20 years later, kids have non-stop access and this building reflects the growing needs of those students.

The space, even though many who use and work in it regard it as a library, had many positive attributes that you might look at if you are building new learning space.

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Future of Libraries: 7 Questions Librarians Need to Answer

My earliest memory of a Library involves a calm space where I could go to quietly read, reflect or study.

But in the last few years, the idea of the Library as a quiet reflective space has been dirtied by educators claiming that this makes the Library old fashioned and outdated. They want the Library/Information Commons/Information Resource Centre to be dynamic, loud, colourful. It should be a happening place that sparks interest and encourages questioning. 

But once you have that question, what do you do?

Data Visualisations: World as 100 people

I love my data visualisations and this one is a new take on the 'world as 100 people'.

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Here are some more links to resources about population: