Destiny at IICS - my first ever i-movie

Our New Literacies Team (IICS speak for the ITC integration team) was issued a challenge last November - make a movie to show the new literacies in action in our school. I wanted to show how we use the library management system from Follett - Destiny. From grade 2 our students are given logins to this system so they can use many of its features which empower their learning and literacy development. I think Destiny is an amazing learning platform and we are encouraging our students and staff to use it to the full.

Here is the movie - I hope it gets my message across.

Taking an idea and running with it...

Visiting Department meetings can be dangerous. I went to the English Department meeting a few weeks ago to share the news about our new lexile level search facility on our Library Management System Destiny. The news received some moderate response. The discussion then moved on to how to get our students to read and build a reading culture - I just sat back and listened. It was great to hear my colleagues really wanting our students to engage in recreation reading, for fun. Then came the idea - why can't we have an English Department Shelf in the library? Hmmm I was thinking - how would we catalogue that, how will people find books on a separate random shelf? All the while I was nodding and thinking. This was too good an opportunity to let go by. Okay - let's see what we can do. I found myself saying. So what we did do was create a virtual English Department Shelf on Destiny in the resource List area. Then we photographed the teachers and made little danglers for the books they recommended. The books are now on display throughout the fiction area of the library. The students are enjoying reading the books their teachers recommended and enjoyed. We have a Google Doc list of which book which teacher recommended so that when the book is returned we can return it to the display.  Below is a mosaic showing the work in progress...

Library Orientation

East Coast Bays Library, Auckland, New Zealand

Every time my colleagues go on vacation I ask them to do something special for me - take their photo outside a library. AS a result of their generosity of time and spirit I have many great photos of my wonderful colleagues outside libraries across the globe. What do I do with these pics? I use them as a resource for library orientation.

In New Zealand we gave all new students in year 9 (start of secondary school) an activity that involved finding out where in the world their library was using clues on the back of the photo. We called the Amazing Library Race - once they had the correct location they had to locate resources about their country at specific places around the library thus getting to know the layout of their new library and some of the online resources (database and library web page) as well. The students loved this activity - our library team loved it too though it was exhausting (so much so we only ever scheduled three in one day)

Celsus library, Ephesus, Turkey

Now I am in Istanbul I am using the same idea but adapted for a teacher orientation. I love our library catalogue "Destiny" and I really want to introduce our new teachers to some of its features. I think it is a great tool for encouraging reading and information literacy skills. We took the new staff through this orientation last Wednesday with some great feedback about how useful it was and how much they enjoyed the experience. 

My challenge this year is to add a great library orientation for our new students. I want to use the photos and the activities. My New Literacies Team colleague Caroline suggested I use a buddy approach so that someone in the class who has used Destiny before team up with the new student and they work through a checklist activity to ensure the student has some hands on introduction to the system. I love this idea. I will start to craft such a thing to try out as soon as possible. I guess it should be in grade level for relevance and appropriateness. My mind is a whirl with ideas. 

In the meantime - why the photos of libraries around the world? Relevance and context - I want my colleagues and students to be aware that libraries are contributing positively to communities all around the world. 

An inquiry key

We are working on making very clear links between our ideas and practice, especial;ly for the lower grades. When it comes to searching for information we all use KEY words. For our grades 1 and 2 we made colourful keys and laminated them. The students can use whiteboard markers to write their key words on the keys. They write the main search word on the large line and then alternative words on the lines along side the main word. Then if their main word is not found in our catalogue, Destiny,  or search engine or index then they have alternative words to search. 

Here a student is searching for "hummingbirds" and he alternative word is "birds". There were no books on "hummingbirds" in our library but many books about birds. Once she had found a book about birds she used her KEY once more to search the index for "hummingbirds. Using the KEY brought success in her search and helped to teach her the importance of using synonyms when using key words. 

A simple idea which seems to be working well for our students. 

Love Reading Week starts tomorrow...

http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs42/i/2009/076/3/e
/I_love_reading_III_by_Eowyn_86.jpg

I have written 15 quizzes - one for each day of the week at the three levels; lower primary, upper primary and secondary. The idea is for classes to take the quiz each day. The questions are of course about books, our library, our library management system, Destiny, and searching. Last year these were really popular - I hope they will be again.

In the secondary quiz the final question each day is the answer to a google a day Google post a new question daily and people have to use their search skills to answer it. I am hoping this will lead to some homerooms deciding to take the Google a day quiz each morning. 

Why a daily quiz? It is part of our desire to become an Inquiry Library. 

Other events and activities this week - Ree Gillett is visiting both campuses. It is exciting to have an author visit during Love Reading Week. Every lunchtime we will have story readings for both primary and secondary students. On Friday we have a school spirit day - dressing up as a book character. Our PYA is running a Book Swap at both campuses. 

It will be busy. It will be fun. I hope it will be a great celebration of our love for reading.

Blogging in two places

Our school has developed class and subject blogs this year and of course our library has it's own blog.

We are using Wordpress and have a generic banner for all classes which could use some beautification in my humble opinion. BUT we are there and it is our goal to blog at least once a week. My colleague Pla is very good at creating photo galleries. There are some lovely galleries about lunchtime in our library, seminars and the like. I add the content pages and have started a libguide style section for our staff and students in the tab 'Learning Support for classes'.

Here is this week's offering about the Destiny Quest mobile app. This post will also be added to the IICS Facebook page to let parents know as well.

Book Spine Poetry...

In an effort to teach grade 7 students how to create and use resource lists for citation purposes we gave them a challenge of creating a book spine poem in 10 minutes on the topic of Knowledge. They also had to create a correct citation list for their books.Most groups finished well with their photo and list complete - they could only achieve this if they used the resource list option in Destiny Quest our LMS.

Good job Grade 7 - I hope they can remember how to do this when they have research assignments.