International School Librarians' Knowledge Sharing Weekend in Brunei: my take-aways

A huge thank-you to Karli Downey and her team at Jerudong International School in Brunei for hosting a valuable two-day workshop for international school librarians, Feb. 21-22, 2014.  About thirty of us came together from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, and Brunei to share our practice and thoughts.

See the LKSW Libguide for an overview.

The highlights for me included:

• Lyn Hay, from SybaAcademy and Charles Sturt University, spoke on the concept of the iCentre (see her slides here)
• Read on: Mal Lee blog: http://schoolevolutionarystages.net/ and "digital normalization"
• Lyn Hay also spoke about guided inquiry -- and Linda Twitchett (AISS) spoke about how she developed a scope and sequence of information fluency for her secondary school.
• As Lyn listed the seven survival skills a la Tony Wagner, I mentally tried to remember the 9 elements of our UWCSEA profile:  Qualities ( Commitment to Care, Principled, Resilient, Self-Aware) and Skills (Critical Thinker, Creative, Collaborative, Communicator, Self-Manager).  Information fluency/literacy is implicit in the descriptions of each.
• Made me realize our library team needs to schedule time with our curriculum dept to continue to hash out our own research model.  Linda came up with four main stages: Exploring, Investigating, Processing, and Creating.  Our middle school has most recently settled on five stages:
• Identify and ask relevant questions
• Gather and organise information from different perspectives
• Analyse, synthesise and evaluate information
• Communicate
• Reflection
• Made me re-read my blog post on "Carol Kuhlthau meets Tim Brown: Guided {Design} Inquiry"
• Lyn highly recommended Keri Smith's book, How to be an explorer of the world -- which is one of those books I hesitate to buy for the library, as it's meant to be written in and personalised.
• Check out Linda's Libguide on Research.
•  Crys Mills reminded us of some great Australian picture books -- I put the list here in LibraryThing -- and will double-check we have them.
• Library tech topics....
• In the RFID discussion Rob George reminded us that RFID isn't sufficient for security, that most libraries still use magnetic strips for that.  We don't anticipate going to RFID though the self-check and ease of inventory are appealing.
• Thumbprint (biometric) recognition for check-out with Follett Destiny: Kim Beeman said she has a working installation -- which I look forward to seeing when I get to Bangkok next.  I always envisioned it for primary, but several people warned me that it doesn't work reliably with kids younger than seven or so -- as their fingerprints are too soft? unformed?  Others also mentioned parental concern over storing biometric data of children.
  
• Book Weeks.... listened to others discussing what they do.  What we all do is cram a lot into one week.  Why not make every week "book week"?  Spread out more author visits over time, matching the right author to the right age level during the right curriculum time.  World Book Day in April could be the excuse for the whole campus to dress up as a book character.  The UN provides enough days throughout the year to focus on (especially for us as we aren't a nation-based school), e.g., World Literacy Day, Mother Tongue Day, etc.
• Engaging readers.... Lots of good ideas and resources.
• Collection development... Ditto.
• Audiobooks and e-books....  A topic we all have opinions about and experiences with, e.g., Shrewsbury has Overdrive, so we were quizzing Kim Beeman.  Many of us have FollettShelf, Bookflix, and TumbleBooks.   Barb Philip shared the wealth of her experiments in her primary school library.
• Style of PD.... this small group worked well.  I'm now thinking our network in Singapore (ISLN) should go for one-day Bootcamps designed for no more than 50 participants at a time, on various topics, e.g., on graphic design and signage, copyright, RDA and cataloging, managing genres and the trend to genre-fication, etc. -- for all library staff.

Next year LKSW might be in Bangkok..... ? 

Photo above:  a snapshot of the fabulous biscuits made specially for the conference!