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”

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