Anne Johnston’s Library Blog

This month I have been engaged in major tasks for both of the literacies in my remit - information literacy and the original literacy, i.e reading.

I was involved in two key information literacy sessions. We have a group of senior students keen to develop the school website. Their involvement will mean a much more interactive school site and I should learn a few new things about ICT too. I was able to arrange a meeting of the students with David Gilmour and Pete Gray, East Lothian Museums Officer and a parent, who has been the mainstay of our website for the past few years. Interested staff, including our HT, also attended. We looked at software possibilites for what we would like to achieve with our site. As a result we are shifting existing content which is still relevant to a new package then we will start to change the layout of the site and involve other students and staff in contributing. As part of the Schools of Ambition, Paul Raffaelli, our HT, intends to have a designer work with students to create a standard look for all school communications - a “corporate look”. The website will be part of this.

The second ICT event was a Ewan McIntosh session for school librarians. This was held at Knox Academy a couple of weeks ago. Ewan, I was going to say demonstrated, but he actually got us to do the work so we saw straight away how easy it is to use tools such as http://del.icio.us/and http://www.netvibes.com/ to track relevant information. I came away from the day with lots of ideas to try with students and staff. I am going to speak to the History and Modern Studies PT about trying a new way of helping Advanced Higher Students keep on top of research for their dissertations and I intend to approach our biologists to see if we can improve the way we already guide students to relevant information, not only at Advanced Higher level but across the board.

As for yer actual, real literacy, we now have several classes in S1 and S2 using Accelerated Reader. I was sceptical of this system when I heard about it first. I thought it was yet another reading system with graded readers but it uses “proper” books, i.e. ordinary published books. So any students reading for this scheme are being encouraged to read the same books as everybody else. It is clear from other schools in East Lothian, particularly Ross High, that Accelerated Reader does motivate students.

Coming Soon - “Libraries separate ideas”

I can’t believe we’re well into November already. The last couple of weeks have been hectic but in an enjoyable way (well mostly).

I have attended my second meeting of the 3-18 Learning and Teaching Strategic Group. I find the overview perspective this gives me fascinating. I have always kept up with developments and initiatives in DGS to make sure that the library provides relevant support to the school community. Now I have the opportunity to do so at authority level. As Field Officer for East Lothian Library Service I am able to feed back relevant information to my fellow school librarians and also to the SMT of the library service. There is a great deal of potential to be explored. The first example of this being the Extreme Learning project. The meeting at the Marine recently allowed us to begin considering in detail the relevance of our professional information management skills to the aims of Extreme Learning. 

In the same week as the 3-18 group and Extreme Learning, I also attended the briefing on single status and job evaluation, our McCrone if you like. Check Brian’s Blog for more details on support staff’s concerns.

Last Monday was another of those woman versus technology days - loser again! But the week improved. On Wednesday CRAW (our Creative Reading And Writing group) met as usual. We heard the third installment of our novel, courtesy of Ms Aiken. Chapters 1 and 2 had been written by students. Everyone in the group has to write a chapter and we will think of a title for it at the end. I can’t remember when my turn is. I hope it is several weeks away. The standard has been set high.

The new library space is proving  a suitable venue for all sorts of events. On Thursday we had an author visit by Keith Gray. Keith has visited DGS before. He gave a talk to all of S1 and S2 - an audience of over 200. This time we opted for a creative writing workshop which was attended by about 20 students. It worked well. I know this because we were supposed to finish at 12.30pm and most people were still there at 12.45 and having to be forcibly evicted! It was a mad gallop to Haddington to make sure Keith had time for lunch before he went on to give a talk at Knox Academy. Next month, thanks to EL Library Service and Scottish Book Trust, we will be visited by Beth Webb who will be talking about her new book.

Question of the week - from Thursday and fairly obvious. “Do you need a hand tidying up miss?” i.e. “Its 15 minutes to lunch. Do I have to go back to class?”