Catalyst

The Catalyst Awards are on, but one’s Husband is providing expert interviewing skills with mock interviews. He needs to get Daughter to school first, so I ask Lovely Friend for a lift (Thanks, L F!).
Unfortunately, Daughter’s school closed due to heating issue, so she comes along with Husband. Go and ‘fess all to Boss who [...]

Read Full Post »

Can you be a constructivist librarian?

Brooks, G.R. and Brooks, M.G. (2000) “Becoming a constructivist teacher” in A.L. Costa (ed),  Developing Minds: a resource book for teaching thinking (pp. 150-157). Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
There’s plenty of fascinating stuff in this tome but I’m particularly taken by this article. The authors define constructivism as
a theory of learning that places the [...]

Read Full Post »

After Glow

First day back, stinking headache. Too much time spent in small room, staring at a screen might be the reason.
Could also be lack of scones.
All day I’m seeing investigations and activities and wondering if they would be best served on Glow, or fine where they are.
S2 History are still working on JFK, and the same [...]

Read Full Post »

Still Glowing

Day 2 on mentor training answers a few more questions – but there’s still no scones.

There is a simple survey creator – but you can’t export the data. Hmm.
There is a text editor, but you can’t copy and paste. Right….
You can drag and drop on a PC, but not on a Mac. Sorry??????????

Today we also [...]

Read Full Post »

Glowing

First day training as a Glow Mentor and I’m confused.
Why are there no scones? In-service without scones just isn’t the done thing!
Also, what’s the role of the website, if we’re all on the intranet? I see roles for both, it’s just figuring out what’s to go where, and what needs duplicated, and so on. One [...]

Read Full Post »

Audience Development Officers

Librarian = Audience Development Officer?
I don’t think so.
Why Audience? Could be a nod to the fact that people use libraries for lots of different reasons, not just reading. Can’t you imagine the discussion?
We need a word that means “people who come to use the library”, but not library users because that’s too long and people don’t read enough [...]

Read Full Post »

Head down, thumbs up

OK, so it’s good to be back. I may have been stood up by the second class of the new year (teacher forgot), I may have accomplished nothing on my development plan, I may have two days to spend the rest of my budget or lose it, and have several squillion books to shelve, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Could you hand me a brick wall, please?

Last week I spoke to the students about how to get the best out of their school library – how to help the Librarian, what to expect in return, not forgetting “we are all individuals“. I thought my mindmap of notes just required printing, but instead it was nowhere to be seen. And I knew [...]

Read Full Post »

A day in the worklife: lunch: CfE meeting

Busy lunchtime, with kids reorganising the books on the shelves and a CfE meeting. My new LRC helpers are exactly that, very helpful, but when I asked them to swap the books on to the next shelves, I neglected to point out that the spines are usually read from left to right. It really didn”t occur to me [...]

Read Full Post »

Catching up

The LRC was shut for three days so allow the 1st years to do a test. At the time it was booked, I was smilingly informed that those three days would give me time to “catch up”.
Yeah right.
What I actually accomplished was clearing about ten shelves worth of returned books. Not reshelved them, you understand, just organised [...]

Read Full Post »