Apr 16 2008
Having more fun!
For a variety of reasons, including family stuff, I had to spend the Easter Holidays working at home. I decided to really think about all of the “webbie” things that I am doing:
Strongest Links Website - I think that I want to continue this for a while longer as I believe that it is still useful to school librarians. However, I can only edit this from home in my own time and there is not much of that to spare. It will go on a bit longer. After the CILIP Summit, they are apparently going to create a resource on their website - so where does that leave Strongest Links?
Strongest Links Wiki - I started this as a response to people on SLN asking for a collaborative space to share resources and ideas that came up repeatedly on SLN. I had no intention of doing all of it myself. Just creating the structure for others to fill. But there are few people contributing - has it “died the death” and should I delete it?
The Librain Blog- I enjoy writing this, although I don’t post as often as I should. Some librarian bloggers are really prolific. But I need to think about what I want to say, or else I will end up repeating myself too often. It is a good way of clarifying my own thoughts, though.
School website - I now edit this and try to keep up with things, adding news and tweaking pages as necessary. We have decided to make it an online prospectus and move all resources on to our Portal, which has a secure log-in.
LRC Online Website- I spent a lot of time rationalising what is on this and updating things to include the Web 2.0 stuff that I am doing - e.g. del.icio.us links etc. It is now a bit more streamlined and should be easier to maintain. I would be reluctant to take it down as it represents many years of work from the time when I was learning how to put things on our intranet.
LRC Online Blog- I have made a very basic blog, hosted with the same company as the LRC website. This enables me, using RSS feeds, to put news into the LRC website and the LRC’s Portal pages by only editing one site instead of several. Neat!
LRC Online Portal Pages - I am trying to cross-link everything that I do so that however a student or member of staff finds the LRC (Portal, LRC Website, School Website) they can easily navigate to the resources that they need.
LRC Online Wiki - I have started using a wiki with some students - mentioned in the previous post. This is going quite well so far, but it is very early days as yet and I will devote a post to it later on, when I can see some results.
LRC Online OPAC - we are finally about to install Heritage Online so that we can have our OPAC accessible from the web. This should enable us to reach out to the school community.
I am also playing around with Pageflakes, creating a really useful homepage for myself with RSS feeds about my personal and professional interests. Thinking about how useful this could be, I then tried to build some Pageflakes pages that could be used with teachers. Although I have since found that a teacher has used NetVibes to make something very similar. I will think a bit more about whether it is worth spedning the time on this before I go much further. Some colleagues have also sent me “flakes” to add to the page, so we could work on this collaboratively, then use the pages for our own schools.
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Hi Anne
With your Strongest Links Wiki, I think you may want to give it a little more time. I’ve started to develop an LRC wiki and will be using this to share our resources and ideas, initially within the school. In the future though, I would like to move beyond our walls as it were and the work you are doing here is not going unappreciated.
From my own experience, I think you’re a long way ahead of the majority of school librarians in your innovative use of these tools. Unfortunately, this sounds like a somewhat lonely experience. Do you find that you have to draw on colleagues over a much wider geographical area because of this?
As for my part, I’m only just starting to pick up on the possibilities of wikis, blogs and forums as learning tools. Its all come about due to my signing up for an OU course H807 Innovations in eLearning. I spent last night participating in an online audioconferencing session with interactive whiteboard and concept mapping tools. It was fascinating. I still feel I have much to learn.
Sorry break bell just gone -
Justine Rush
This sounds great, Justine! For my own part, I feel way behind people in the USA etc. There are school librarians in the UK already using this stuff and talking about it - Anne-Marie Tarter was using del.icio.us and wikis way before me. But I think that you are right about sharing ideas - it has now got far beyond any local area.
I use Pageflakes as a way of gathering RSS feeds from the blogs that interest me. Most are by school librarians, but many are by librarians and educators in other sectors. Then I spend time glancing through them and following where they lead - in one evening I can go all around the globe with this. Isn’t it exciting? In a few short years we have gone from collaboration in one area or county (because to share we had to meet) - I used to work for Nottinghamshire and it was great - to sharing ideas internationally through the power of these tremendous technologies.
I never stop feeling excited by all of this! Where will this take us next?