The Librain

I must be getting tired! Or real life is grabbing hold of me again? I feel I have become so immersed in a Web2.0 world and am so excited and inspired by all that I am reading and experiencing that I cannot immediately look up and engage with a real person!

The podcasting presentation was excellent and I feel that I could try this out, when the opportunity presents itself. I have saved the presentation and also all of the links so that I can return to it later on.

I also dropped in on the “chat” session just to see that it works OK before our session at 8.00 pm tonight. If I have the energy, I may add to this post after that.

This afternoon, I tried the session on The Seamless School Library – well, that had me bowled over but totally drained at the same time. This is not a quick Word document or a .pdf, but a whole website to explore. It was too much for an afternoon – trying to fit this between the normal library stuff. I am also getting quite tired as I have been staying up too late reading stuff and then I cannot sleep as so much is whirring around my head!

Anyway, I will again come back to that section at a later date as I cannot cope with it today.

So, I spent some time working on the Library Online website. Having watched the social bookmarking presentation, I was reminded that I could use the “link rolls” script from Delicious to show visitors to the Subject pages the latest links for each subject that I have added to Delicious. I have only made a few of these pages as yet, because I have not reached the point where I am working closely with teachers. I just made these as examples – although the English one is starting to develop because the Sixth Form students are starting to ask me for help – wonderful!

Update: What great fun it was chatting to other school librarians on Meebo last night. Now I can see why teenagers get so addicted to MSN! Then I spent some time setting up Skype and got through to a friend in Australia. I still feel so starry-eyed by the power of technology! Maybe that is why I chose the picture below as my main avatar!

I gave a presentation on the future of school libraries to two conferences in Reading and Leeds. This was my first attempt to put together some thoughts about where we might be going and how we can use Web 2.0 in our work. It took a lot of thinking and research (using the blogs listed on this site), to create the presentation. It will be interesting to see what kind of feedback I might get.

I have spent days building Pathfinders on LRC Online for Art students in our college to help them with exams. The pages cover various art movements and have links to appropriate artists. This is the link: LRC Online: Art Pathfinders

SO…

Some students used them as directed…

BUT…

Others just “Googled” as normal. They wanted to find images and by-passed all of the informative sites that I had tried to find.

SO…

What is the best way to support students and make the best use of my time? I gather the links first on Del.icio.us, then build pages around the themes that the teachers have asked for. Does anyone have any better suggestions for the best way to use limited time – after all, this was “just” Art. What about all of the other curricular areas that we are trying to support?