How delicious...

del.icio.us is one of those tools I couldn't live without.

In my main (personal/professional) account -- TheLibrarianEdge -- I have over 1800 bookmarks to date, while in the account I recently set up for school -- UWCSEA -- I'm only at a couple of hundred.

I use the school one to collect links for both students and teachers. For instance, on my Grade 3 wiki, there's a page for the current unit of study, Blue Planet, which is about water -- where I have a link to my collection of bookmarks. The distinction between links for students and links for teachers/parents is based on the tags I've assigned. When I find a relevant website, I make "water" one of the tags and if it's particularly good for the students, I make "blueplanet" a tag. That way I can show the kids the "blueplanet" links and the teachers the more complete list tagged "water".

Tag clouds shows the concentration of subjects -- and I've got two bundles of tags on my TheLibrarianEdge account: Social Software and GreenWorld.

Definitely bother to install the buttons to make saving a link just a click away.

How it gets social is via the network feature. In my del.icio.us network, you can see that I watch 19 people's bookmarks. You can also see that I have 40 "fans" -- or people who have added me to their network. Some of the relationships are mutual. And every now and then I check out my fans' bookmarks because I discover new people worth watching.

My network page is, in effect, an inbox of everything that my network has bookmarked recently. So I can watch their activity. This is a wonderful way to spend hours on the internet...

Sharing the wealth of information

Our TeachIT workshop today on Social Software in School and Life is not so much HOW to use these Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, online catalogs, photo sharing, etc.), but what you might do with them. The power of the social comes from seeing how others make use of tools. So we're hoping our chart will get filled in with examples from our participants.

What is the best way to share information?

SHARING LISTS OF BOOKS: Example 1: PYP Resources

PYP teacher-librarians are always being asked to provide a book that exemplifies the IB Learner Profile. And paper lists of relevant books are always being passed around. My solution to this was LibraryThing, an online cataloguing program.

My catalog -- UWC_PYP (see description) started out as a means of consolidating lists of books that relate to the IB Learner Profile (examples of how we can be Inquirers, Thinkers, Communicators, Risk-takers, Knowledgeable, Principled, Caring, Open-minded, Balanced, and Reflective), however, it's now all-purpose.

For example, my children's literature discussion group recently focused on books featuring contemporary cultures. So I took the various recommendations and information collected them under the tag "contemporary cultures" in my UWC_PYP catalog. Voila! -- an instant "contemporary cultures" reading list.

As the school librarian, I also have been frustrated with finding out (and keeping track) of the sets of novels available (but not easily accessible) in all the grade levels' reading cupboards. I run an after-school book club so always need new sets of novels. Once I got the teachers to give me their paper lists, I quickly entered them in a LibraryThing catalog: UWC_novelsets. Note how the tags tell me where the books are and how many are available (where '?' indicates I'm still not sure!).

Building A Reading Community

Had the chance to hear Helen Reynolds, Teacher-Librarian of the Year 2007 in Australia, speak at the Australian school here in Singapore the other day. Though on the The Southport School library webpage her job title is listed as Senior Librarian, she says she was hired ten years ago as Director of Information Services. Instead, Director of Literacy might be appropriate.

Her talk was titled: Maintaining Momentum: Keeping boys reading in the middle school years, and she gave us an overview of her philosophy and practices behind the creation of an active reading community in a day/boarding boys' school with an enrolment of approximately 1400 preschool to year 12.

She swears by Stephen Krashen's The Power of Reading, Aidan Chambers's The Reading Environment, Young Australians Reading, and Knowing Readers by Susan LaMarca and Pam MacIntyre.

The key is getting the whole community involved -- a giant partnership -- which means not just the library and the English department, but all staff (even the cleaners) and the parents. The goal is an environment which legitimizes wide and comprehensive reading.

Some elements of her successful program:

• * All students keep Reading Records -- lists of the books they've read in and out of school -- that follow them throughout their time at the school (so any teacher can see any student's reading history);
• * Book reports are 40-second oral events, done at the end of term -- no long boring writing about what you've read;
• * Book chat time -- lots of it -- in classrooms, in the library, in the hallways;
• * Author visits -- as many as possible;
• * Regular silent reading times throughout the school, e.g., every English class starts with 10 minutes of silent reading, and Grades 8-10 English classes come to the library every fortnight for a session of book talk and reading;
• * Monthly book club (and newsletter), where students get the pick of new library books to read and review; she also takes club members out to literary festivals and any events related to books;
• * Ongoing collection of data -- such as surveys to find out what the kids are reading and how they think reading helps them; this data is shared with teachers, admin, and parents;
• * Tons of book displays, e.g., the first display of the year is of books which the students voted as their favorites the year before;
• * 7-week parent program at the beginning of each year -- in which she teaches parents the same information literacy skills the kids learn;
• * Big book collection, catering for all reading levels and a wide variety of interests; she said she buys for everyone (including parents); I like her attitude that she's about choice, not censorship -- she says it's not her job to censor what a child reads -- parents can do that by submitting a form;
• * Supporting teachers as readers and getting them to advertise their reading to students, e.g., before every holiday break, she takes a stack of books into the staff room and passes them out, and teachers in all subject areas are encouraged to produce bookmarks of their recent reads and have them available in their classrooms for students to take;
• * Reader's Cup (an annual competition in Australia) -- she always get a team to enter;
• * Writing competitions -- she encourages students to enter any online writing competition and says some students have won money from them.

Three websites she recommends:

• The Children's Book Council of Australia
• Inside a Dog -- a website dedicated to books for young adults
• The Source -- a (subscription) database of children's literature, especially Australian, and connected to the children's literature journal, Magpies

Given my current situation, I was particularly pleased to hear her say, of course, she lets parents borrow. And her response to my query about borrowing limits was, unlimited! (She did admit there are borrowing limits printed in some library policy document, but they are not enforced.) Letters about overdue books are sent to parents after two months and any financial reckoning about lost books is only done at the end of term. So reasonable...

I also noted her comment that circular tables in the library encourage social booktalking. Made me decide I must get to IKEA to replace a few of my dreary institutional rectangles with round colorful ones.

Social Software -- or the power and fun of collecting, organizing, and sharing information

Two major problems with the Internet are:

• too much information
• too many tools to choose from

Given that, it's best to think of an information problem as an excuse to play around with social software.

The problem Barb and I face -- with this workshop -- is how to organize the information we want to share with people while minimizing the "presentation" talking and maximizing the "hands-on" aspect.

For now, I'm going to blog about the kinds of problems social software has solved for me -- and we'll wait to figure out the best kind of online launch pad for the workshop.

PROBLEM: How to get photographs online -- to share with others or simply to store for personal projects?

SOLUTION: Use an online photo sharing site, like Flickr (see How to Select a Photo Sharing Site for Newbies). Flickr has a tour available on its home page, which is one place to start.

Another way is to just start searching for photos on Flickr, e.g., photos tagged "Singapore" or photos including the word "Hmong".

Flickr also allows you to put photos in Sets and then to put Sets into Collections. For instance, I have a Collection called UWCSEA Primary Library, which contains 8 sets, e.g., Writers' Camp 2007: Telunas Beach and 07-08 UWCSEA Primary Library Displays. It's my way of recording what I do in the library. I have another collection called Other School Libraries where I keep sets of photos of libraries taken on professional peer visits.

NB: I can control who can see any photo by specifying its privacy level -- public, friend, or family.

By becoming "friends" with people and adding them to your Contact list, then you can automatically see when they upload new photos. For instance, Barb just became a grandmother and when I login to Flickr, I can see the latest photos she's uploaded of the baby -- because she's one of my Contacts.

There are also Groups you can join. I'm thinking of joining the 365 Library Days Project -- where you are supposed to take one photo a day of your library for a year and post them on Flickr. Search for groups that interest you. Take a look at all these Singapore groups on Flickr.

How could Flickr be used in the classroom? Read about Photo Sharing in Education in the Teaching Hacks Wiki (which has enough material there to keep you occupied for another Saturday or two).

People are doing all kinds of fun stuff with Flickr. I like this "Spell with Flickr" application -- which takes text as input and gives you back photos that spell out the text, e.g.,: