Anne Johnston’s Library Blog

A couple of weeks ago I attended two days training for Glow mentors. It was good to actually start to build things on Glow. By the end of the two days my head was buzzing (pardon the pun!) with ideas we could try in schools. I am now trying to set up some glow group ideas to show other people the possibilities.

At the end of last week in ICT Librarian mode I showed edublogs to a colleague from East Lothian Library HQ. He is keen to have a blog and may well have contacted David Gilmour by now. I also encouraged him to look at one or two other blogs, including Euan’s. Same colleague was interested to see the structure of the GLOW portal. I’m sure there will be places to link public libraries in East Lothian to GLOW. Our students and staff already have access to several online services/portals via East Lothian Library Service.

Also last week I experienced one of these “it’s a small world moments”. I had a phone call from Fiona MacIntyre in the Unison office. She has been contacted via Friends Reunited by one of her best friends at uni who also turns out to be one of my former flatmates. You can run but you can’t hide!

My last unexpected bit of info from last week was when I discovered that one of the founders of Wikipedia has set up Citizendium - a competitor for Wikipedia. Cataloguer Librarian was particulary attracted to The Big Clean Up whilst Research Librarian liked the idea of quality assurance. More details here: Wikipedia ‘broken beyond repair’ says co-founder and Citizendium goes live in beta

Tomorrow is our CRAW lunchtime when our Creative Reading and Writing group meet and Storyteller Librarian gets a rare opportunity to appear.

Glowing successfully at home, having logged on to the new portal. Now to find some victims - sorry interested colleagues and students - to try out the new Glow tools.

Also on the trail of Extreme Learners interested in developing a virtual librarian.

An interesting week and its only half way through. On Monday I attended the open exc-el group meeting at John Muir House (photographic evidence currently available on Ewan’s blog ) where the group morphed into the edubuzz open group. Tuesday morning at Prestonpans East Lothian Glow mentors got a first look at the new portal. Initial impression was that the look of the site hadn’t changed much. Thanks to further investigations by Tess at Knox Academy we now know that it has developed a great deal. I’m looking forward to being able to access the portal next week. Various colleagues in DGS and the Library Service are keen for a shufty as well.

Today’s best bit was the last period lesson. One of our S1 classes is in the Library to participate in Accelerated Reader, only many students in this class have severely underdeveloped reading muscles - can read , won’t read. We wanted to make sure that everyone had attempted at least one quiz to get them started, so tried a different approach. We read a short book to them and then everyone sat the same quiz. All seemed to enjoy the experience but the proof will be what happens next Wednesday. The relieved librarian will confess that she is really happy to discover that you can log twenty people on to the same quiz at the same time and it works - something she din’t think about until she was giving everyone instructions to log on. Nothing like forward planning!

Apologies for the break in transmissions. I do intend to contribute to my blog more regularly than every 5 or 6 weeks. Not long after I posted the first entry my PC at home died quite suddenly after years of loyal service. At the same time we were experiencing network problems in school. Hence the gap of several weeks. I am about to try to set up wireless broadband tonight. I know the broadband works and since my PC can’t sit in the kitchen beside the main phone line socket wireless it is.

I attended a wheen of meetings during September -all of them important and producing benefits for our students and staff - but I am looking forward to spending a whole week in my own school. Continue Reading »