PMBW teacher librarians

Thank you to all teacher-librarians and associates who attended today’s stimulating conference with guest speaker, Kevin Hennah, who presented sessions on Library Design and Space Management, and Transforming Your Library on a Shoestring Budget.

Please feel free to obtain an Edublogs username and password and add a comment to this post. Practice makes perfect, and familiarity with blogs may inspire you, as an educator, to use them with students in your beautiful, newly transformed school libraries.

I’ve received a question about the current rap, the Beijing Olympic Games and Book Week 2008 rap, which is going to incorporate a wiki activity.

To join the actual rap, go to

http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/raps/beijingolympics/index.htm and follow the prompts. The rap blog itself, where you enter your class responses, is over at

http://rapblog3.edublogs.org/

There’s still time to join, do jointly-constructed introductions and then Rap Point 1.

I’ve also been asked about one of my school’s Stage 1 teachers’ “Cranky the crocodile” project. This is like a “Travel buddies” set-up, but just for the one class to share. Cranky is a stuffed class mascot/puppet, who goes home with a different selected student each weekend. That child is responsible for documenting the adventure with photos, stories, drawings and small, flat souvenirs (such as cinema ticket stubs).

The teacher took Cranky home the first weekend, then Cranky went home with the most able students first, so there were some good model examples in the first few pages of scrapbook. This set a high standard.

Another school ran a “Travel buddies” project to complement the NSW DET’s “Possum Magic” book rap a few years ago. Grandma Poss and Hush – and their bicycle! – were posted off to numerous schools who’d signed up, and Grandma Poss collected photos, postcards, souvenirs and diary entries along the way.

Details on “Travel Buddies” is at

http://www.oz-teachernet.edu.au/projects/tb

When all our schools have their IWBs, I’d love to do something similar and maybe send a stuffed animal from school to school. I have a great flying fox toy the students have named Phoenix. currently, he’s helping the Stage 2 students with the new rap.

Here’s the wiki page we’ve set up.

Thank you for dropping by. This blog will cover many aspects of teacher-librarianship in primary and secondary school in western Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Over the years, Department of Education & Training teacher librarians in the districts of Penrith, Mt Druitt, Blacktown and Windsor have planned and coordinated professional development together.

The 2008 Committee hopes that a blog will help us unite in an online forum, to keep us in communication between Development Days, share useful websites and, hopefully, to promote the use of Web 2.0 for educators and students. The great thing about Edublogs is that these tools can be readily accessed, and uploaded to, from NSW DET computers. I hope you will join us on the next stage of our Web 2.0 learning journey.

Regards, Ian McLean,

Vice Chairperson, 2008