Booked Inn

At my school, it’s been a long tradition that every class prepares a Book Week display for the library. The displays, either 2D or 3D, stay up until just before the next Book Week, and help the library to be a colourful and fun environment. Here are our displays to celebrate Book Week 2009. Theme: “Book Safari”. Click photos to see bigger versions.

Collecting colour by SCLB

“Book Safari” culture pod by SCHM - “It’s culture – in a pith helmet!”

Every picture tells a story by 6P

Nobody owns the moon by 4/5M

Puffling by KFM

Pull to see 1C

“Book Safari” poster by 4W

Tuart dwellers by 1S

How weird is that… by 2CH

The wizard of Rondo by 5/6D

Sunday Chutney by KB

The big book of happy sadness by 3G

Tom Tom by 2KS

“Book Safari” tree by 3M

How to heal a broken wing by KI

“Book Safari” decorated box by 5B

“Leaf” by SCHC

Shoot animals with a camera, not a gun! by 6W

Safari print balloons

In preparation for next term’s “Bear and Chook” book rap, our library’s own Bear and Chook travelled by taxi to Caddies Creek Public School to meet author Lisa Shanahan and illustrator Emma Quay.

But they also were able to meet Caddies Creek’s infamous Mr Barden (a new resident to the nursing home next door to “Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge”, created during a book rap last year), and a sleuth (or sloth or pack) of friendly bears.

What a great day!

“When will that taxi ever arrive?”

Bear and Chook meet Mr Barden

There’s a Chook in there – and bears as well!

I’m often asked to explain what a wiki is, and I usually liken it to an electronic communal scrapbook.

I’ve seen the following snappy little video a few times now, but I’d forgotten all about it until I was re-investigating the preliminary “how to” pages over on PBworks, in preparation for my sessions on wikis at Saturday’s TESOL conference at the University of Technology Sydney (Broadway).

“Wikis in plain English”

When one displays a Common Craft video on a site, creator Lee LeFever asks for a link back to be provided to the Common Craft web site. Free versions of Common Craft’s videos are for “non-commercial” use. (This means that commercial organisations can’t display the videos without their express permission. For example, if you owned a podcasting company, you could not display “In plain English” series videos internally or externally, without permission.)

“Scatterbrain” (2003) is the third general collection of science fiction writer Larry Niven’s works, much like “N-Space” and “Playgrounds of the Mind”. This volume contains 26 works of various kinds, from speculative articles and humorous essays to science fiction short stories and extracts from his novels, all previously published in previous works, except for the introduction and epilogue.

The Introduction is an interesting discussion of how the author comes up with his crazy ideas. It seems that he is “scatterbrained” (hence the title of the omnibus): notions just pop up in his mind and stick to each other. (Sounds like many teacher-librarians I know.) More than that, he has a tendency to daydream almost anywhere as these ideas pop up and breed. (Still sounds like many teacher-librarians I know.)

The Epilogue is also about the way the author thinks, but specifically “What I tell librarians”. As Niven summed up a talk he once made to a convention of librarians: “If there were only one thing you could teach a child, it ought to be this: to play with his [or her] mind“.

He then further elaborated that we should encourage students “… to make up his [or her] own homework”.

Niven reckons he has spent most of his life designing toys for imaginary playgrounds.