It sounded very much like the scene in my primary school library on any day. I can’t imagine a day when school libraries have vanished completely.

When he says “Although ‘libris’ means book – a book is just a piece of technology for the storage and retrieval of data from which we glean and construct knowledge”, Noel is exactly right. We can only guess what the next few years of advancements in mobile phones, iPods, interactive whiteboards (IWBs), and electronic paper, are going to bring us.

Worryingly, I do see the gap between digital natives and some older digital immigrants getting wider and wider, and I’m so glad I keep being brave enough to explore some of what Web 2.0 has to offer, but knowing there’s so much more out there, and more to come.

When I was editor of “Scan”, we made a point of asking, with every new article that was commissioned, how new technologies and changing pedagogy improved student outcomes. Applying that same question to my daily life as a teacher librarian has certainly helped me keep perspective on what new things I need to try out first, and to prioritise them.

I also have come to believe that using Web 2.0 in my daily life, outside of the education workplace, is what has allowed me to build personal confidence to use new ICT tools with students.

I look forward to the unfolding discussions.

I have no problem with the concept. Working with a group of students on the language used in mathematics, or deconstructing written problems using steps in the information process as a strategy for understanding, or, especially, concentrating on the literacy skills used in reciprocal numeracy, are very much in the domain of a teacher-librarian.

I urged my colleague to take the challenge, but insist on a focus that is drawn from the online NAPLAN support materials. Lots of information-oriented perspectives here!

This term, I’m about to work with several groups of Stage 1 students using mathematical language and nursery rhyme characters, to create wiki pages of short jointly-constructed narratives. Maths literacy is our current PSP focus and I’m happy to share my T-L expertise in this area with teaching colleagues, even though I’ve never considered maths teaching to be a particular personal passion. More on this as the project firms up.

During my time as editor of “Scan” professional journal (1998-2002), I commissioned several articles from both NSW DET curriculum advisors and teacher-librarians on the topic of mathematics and the school library. We had an excellent one from Peter Gould in 2002 on “numeracy” as the “sibling of literacy”. Definitely worth checking out those back issues; some aspects have probably dated a little, but the following list of back-issue abstracts shows that there are many opportunities for TLs to assist with the crucial KLA of mathematics.

GOULD, Peter. ‘More than words’ in “Scan” 21(1) February, 2002, pp 8-12.
“Numeracy involves using mathematics effectively to make sense of the world. It is a fundamental component of learning, performance, discourse, and critique. The State Literacy and Numeracy Plan identifies a range of key objectives in the Department’s support for numeracy.”

TODD, Ross J. & O’CONNELL, Judith. ‘Teachers as learners: transformational leadership and autonomous learning in an electronic age’ in “Scan” 18(3) August, 1999, pp 41-47.
“A professional development program for secondary teachers was constructed… [including...] exploring cross faculty mathematics integration…”

HARDAGE, Paul. ‘The language of other subjects’ in “Scan” 18(1) February, 1999, pp 10-13.
“The social view of language has led to a paradigm shift about language; ‘the language of different subject disciplines’ replaces ‘literacy across the curriculum’. Today’s teachers and teacher-librarians use the explicit instructional practices associated with text types, and emphasise social purpose.”

MAHER, Cynthia, GRAHAM, Peter & LANNEN, Brian. ‘Mathematics + collaboration + technology = success’ in Scan 18(1) February, 1999, pp 20-23.
“Gifted and talented mathematics students from small, isolated schools were involved in the MEGA (Mathematics Enrichment Group Albury) Project. Through email and the Internet, teachers provided activities to a virtual class, culminating in a Maths Activity Day hosted by Holbrook Public School.”

COOK, Jan. ‘Maths on the Net’ in “Scan” 18(1) February, 1999, p 24.
“In the Broken Hill District, a program was initiated which integrates mathematics, problem solving and ICT. Email and the Internet provide communication between virtual teams of students and schools, enhancing: literacy skills in mathematics; cooperation; and training and development of teachers.”

GOULD, Peter. ‘Mathematics K-6: the outcomes addendum’ in “Scan” 17(3) August, 1998, p 4.
“The new ‘Outcomes and indicators addendum for Mathematics K-6′ impacts on schools’ scope and sequence charts and whole-school planning. The article advocates collaborative programming, knowledge of students’ prior achievements and support from the teacher-librarian. A matrix suggests key programming questions.”

‘Research columns 1, 2009: Kindergarten weaves a wiki: the learners tell their stories’ in Scan 28(1) February 2009. (Forthcoming)

Early Stage 1 students at Penrith Public School used a wiki to create jointly-constructed fables, and share the final products (and the annotated learning journey) with their extended school community – and beyond. This research paper is introduced, and peer reviewed, by Dr Ross J Todd.

This article is scheduled for publication in the next issue of Scan, the NSW DET professional journal.

I have such a fondness for Jack. For once I don’t mean Jack, my Jack Russell terrier. I mean Jack, the charming, hilarious, resilient boy at the heart of Susanne Gervay’s very important children’s novel, “I Am Jack”.

I was fortunate enough to be given this book to review for the teacher-librarian’s journal, Scan, in 2000. It was in a stack of about fifteen assorted new books, but it just stood out. First of all, the intriguing cover (as below) was at once bright yet ominous, and, within a few pages of reading, I was rallying to the cause of its appealing protagonist – who goes from lovable, normal, happy-go-lucky kid, to unexpected victim, to proud and empathetic victor, throughout the course of the book. The story really touched the heartstrings. It was probably no surprise, bumping into the author at a literary function some months later, that I learned how much autobiographical truth there was in “I Am Jack”. Susanne and her son, whom I also met at another function, bravely shared their true story of playground bullying so that other children might be empowered.

A few years later, in my role of editor of Scan, I worked with a school team of educators who’d used Susanne’s book with students, and wanted to share their journey and results in the journal. The Scan article went through quite a long consultative process. Crossing over several Key Learning Areas as it did, and being about such a sensitive issue as bullying, it was so important that the article – not to mention the teaching notes, and my interview with Susanne) would cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s (or is that cross all the eyes?). The article(s) eventually appeared in Scan 21(3) August 2002.

A few weeks ago, I heard that “I Am Jack” had been turned into a play for schools. By coincidence, Susanne and I had just found each other again – this time on Facebook, and she gave me some days and venues. It had already been playing relatively close by: at Parramatta, but I’d missed that. In a panic, I realised that all of these other times were for weekdays. Drat. Except today… 2pm. If I felt like getting myself to Campbelltown.

Or I could wait until its return season… Next year. D’oh!

The radio was warning about a blazing hot day but I decided that, if there was no railway track maintenance when I checked the online timetables this morning, and if I could leave it till after 10.00am before I left the house (having confirmed with the box office that there were some tickets left), then I’d venture off to the unknown wilderness that is Campbelltown to see the play.

Timing worked out perfectly. After two longish train legs, and a leisurely walk from Campbelltown Station, past lots of intriguing shops I was sure I’d never get back to, to the beautiful Arts Centre, I was there in plenty of time to have lunch!

At about 1.50 pm, I wandered over to the theatre area and there was Susanne signing copies of “I Am Jack”. It was great to see her again. Her fellow authors, Di Bates and Bill Condon, both of who I knew well from my early days as a teacher-librarian, ended up sitting next to me – another happy reunion – and I also got to meet the real “Rob”, template for fictional Jack’s gregarious and supportive future step-Dad in “I Am Jack”.

How to describe the set? It’s a one-actor tour de force, with Tim McGarry (pictured above, photo by Terry Moore) portraying Jack and ten supporting characters, surrounded by oversized, scribbled-on furniture that at once recaptures Cathy Wilcox’s unique illustrations in the book, and makes Tim McGarry the size of an eleven-year-old schoolboy!

Tim had an array of wonderful shorthand mimes to cue the audience as to which supporting character would be appearing next. Feeble Nanna playing “Uno” against Jack was a hoot, as was Rob driving the car, one hand on the wheel. Also amazing was Jack playing handball against unseen opponents, without a tennis ball being thrown.

The anti-bullying message is crystal clear, both in the book and the play: it can happen to anyone, at any time; bullies isolate someone, in order to improve their own sense of power, and they can peck away at whatever self-esteem the victim has/had until he or she is further and further isolated from the very people who could have helped; it takes the whole group to stand firm against bullying, so it’s a change of culture that will affect a change in behaviour.

The play concluded with a question-and-answer session with Tim and Susanne. Apart from some perceptive questions about bullying and writing by the young audience, a real hit, prop-wise, was Jack’s amazing science experiment: the ponto in its glass jar: an onion grafted onto a potato, which has seemingly successfully sprouted and may, one day, make Jack a fortune as an impossible hybrid plant! Amazingly, the play’s ponto was made from plastic vegetables bought from a two-dollar shop by the Monkey Baa propmaster. (You know what? I want one!)

After that, Susanne invited a group of us back to the Arts Centre’s cafe for coffee. Even though they were “closing in ten minutes”, I’m sure we got in a good twenty extra minutes of gossiping.

I had such a great day. It was well worth the long commute.

So, if you notice that “I Am Jack” is coming to a theatre near you, or if you know anyone who has ever bullied, or been bullied, this play is one to see! And, in the meantime, read the book. Or its excellent sequel, “Super Jack”.

My co-presenter, Cath Keane, had prepared eleven of our PowerPoint pages, I’d added my own hyperlinks to the twelfth and last slide, and we only had 50 minutes or so to fill anyway. We also had plenty of time before our session, “Young rappers”, to play on the interactive whiteboard (IWB), test our hyperlinks and cache all our web pages that we were planning to visit. We also knew in advance that we had about twenty people signed up to hear our talk. Everything worked in the rehearsal and off we went to the first keynote event of Day 2 of this Early Years Conference.

Clinical psychologist, Lyn Worsley, presented her fascinating session on “The resilience doughnut: the secret of strong kids” and, while she probably didn’t say anything terribly new, especially to a ballroom filled with teachers who already had solid backgrounds in early childhood education, the strength of her approach was the clear answer of “where to know?” that one could glean after having used her clever, simple analytical tool for gauging the resilience of a particular student. Wonderful!

Before we knew it, Cath and I were deep into our presentation on book raps, blogs, wikis and Circle Time. Our only hitch was that our computer connection, which had worked so perfectly in rehearsal, had been lost for the presentation. A tech person came in and got us back online most efficiently, but our live connection to the Wilfrid rap blog (on Edublogs) was no longer working. Luckily, our PowerPoint had lots of frame grabs from the site, and the links to the Departmental website and my school’s wiki pages were still viable, so we carried on regardless. We finished off with a reading of my Kinder students’ “Zebra with spots” fable of 2007, and a walk-through of selected pages from my school’s wiki pages. I hope our presentation has encouraged more schools to start dabbling in wikis and blogs.

It all seemed to go very well, but a highlight for me was that two attendees hung back at the end to (re)introduce themselves. It was none other than Warren and Kathy, two of my colleagues from my teachers college days! They’d noticed each other in the audience of my workshop session – I’m not sure at what point they realised that I was also from the same year – but morning tea turned out to be a mini-reunion of the Class of ‘79 of the Guild Teachers College. We swapped anecdotes about the good ol’ days and pocket histories of our lives. It was the first time we’d seen each other since Graduation Day in 1980 – very exciting, and great to know that they are doing so well in their own teaching careers. (I can see a bigger reunion coming up in the next few months! I hope.)

Next up was Peter Gould, Manager, Mathematics at NSW DET – and one of the people I worked with on numerous occasions back in my Scan editor days. Peter’s keynote was “From ABC to 123: what counts in early numeracy” and – despite some frustrating glitches with the movie clip elements of his presentation – it was an invaluable reminder of the essential differences in the ways young children learn to be numerate as opposed to literate.

After lunch, I attended two more workshops, both of which (again) ably demonstrated the amazing array of teaching and learning strategies that interactive whiteboards are bringing to classrooms in the 21st century. I guess that’s the main thing I’m taking from this conference: that most of today’s students are already citizens of the digital world of Web 2.0. The sooner their teachers and parents play catch-up the better. Every presentation I went to was using IWBs as part of their presentation – even my presentation, and today was the first time I’d actually been able to use one! Knowing that a little knowledge is dangerous, I can’t wait to get my hands on an IWB as part of my school library’s facilities and let my imagination run wild. Or wilder.

This conference left its delegates with so much food for thought (and delicious food for the body – the Novotel, Brighton-le-Lands always does well in that regard), great ideas we can start using on Monday (first day back of Term Three), and some wonderful memories of networking with colleagues, old and new. Synthesising all the learning into our daily lives will take time, but I’m glad I gave up two days of my vacation to absorb it all. I’m also grateful for the very handsome, gold-embossed “Presenter” pens, which Cath and I received for doing our workshop.

Roll on Term Three…

Craig asks, “Do government communications discriminate against – or for – the visually impaired?” He continues, “Despite the requirement for government in Australia to ensure our websites are accessible, I worry both that we do not do enough, and that we do too much, in this area.”

The Curriculum Directorate colleague (at Ryde State Office of the NSW Department of Education & Training), mentioned in my initial post, did spread the word about my “condition” – with my permission, of course – and I became an unofficial colour evaluation guinea pig for several Units’ web page revamps for the Departmental website while I was there. It was fun, and fascinating.

Mind you, while I was able to help them with specifications to aid my red/green colour blindness, there are other types. Where does all the beta testing end? I know we tried to address numerous aspects of accessibility for the “Scan” and School Libraries web pages while I was there, and our tweaking of the book rap blogs and wikis have been ongoing. But it seems there’s always so much more you can do to make a site more accessible and equitable.

That web composers are open to suggestions (and complaints) from people trying to use their site, is of paramount importance. For example, as pretty as Flash animations may be, to use only such a visual on the front page of a site can mean that people using old browsers or computers can’t even progress to the page with contact details to lodge a complaint! (I’ve been there before!)

Thanks for the link to my blog post, Craig!

I set the alarm clock for 6.00 am this morning, fully intending to swing past the school, on my way to the railway station to attend the first day of School libraries leading learning, the NSW State Conference of ASLA and the Department of Education and Training. (To my horror, it was still pitch dark outside. My dog looked at me, quite bewildered, and wanted to refuse the only chance he’d have to relieve himself, and I eventually decided to phone in the last-minute instructions to my replacement in the school library. By sheer luck, it wasn’t a heavy teaching load day; much of her day was to be spent policing the preview browsing of the annual Book Fair, which starts in earnest next week.)

I’ve spent many snatches of time over the last month, tinkering with the text and images I intend to use for my talk on Saturday (”Working with wikis”), and I was a little daunted, judging by comments in the organisers’ emails that most of the other presenters were beavering away on PowerPoint presentations, but I had decided to upload my speech notes and dot point headlines to a page on the school library wiki instead. So, unless there’s a power glitch at the conference tomorrow, I can demonstrate the wiki – live – at the same time as I flash up my notes. That’s the idea, anyway. We’ll see. (In fact, I’m tempted to revamp them a little, to incorporate some of today’s ideas – see below; if the notes had been a physical handout I’d printed off during the week, I’d have been stuck!)

Today there were fascinating, insightful and encouraging speeches from Dr Ross J Todd (Keynote, plus “Guided Enquiry: from Information to Knowledge”) and John Callow (”Literacy & Diversity: from Shakespeare to Second Life”), both of whom took their areas of expertise to the next level, with the challenges of Web 2.0 high on the agenda. I know Ross as a lecturer and tutor from my UTS days (retraining as a teacher-librarian in 1990). and then as Scan’s Research Columns touchstone. John, I’ve known since he visited my previous school as our then-DSP (Disadvantaged Schools Program) literacy advisor, and again through Scan when I commissioned him to write some articles about visual literacy and the then-”new learning environments”. I thoroughly enjoyed their sessions and I am glad that ASLA NSW’s website will have their PowerPoint presentations available to attendees. I did take notes as well, but on paper. With a pen. The old-fashioned way.

I also attended a Judy O’Connell session on “Learning is a multi-modal conversation”, which opened up an enormous number of possibilities, although many of the Web 2.0 facilities Judy uses in her current school are blocked to NSW DET schools by our firewall. If teacher-librarians are yet to come to terms with blogs and wikis, then Facebook, My space, Twitter and Second life are going to be very daunting indeed! Judy also challenged the audience to consider why no one appeared to be: using their mobile phone (to send off live shots of the conference proceedings direct to their blogs); or tapping away on Twitter (on their laptops) while she spoke; or seeing the conference as a live feed to overseas locations. Interestingly, such phenomena has been slow to hit our shores – or at least this conference – and this is clearly the next wave of information-sharing habits which will become status quo for conference audiences verysoonnow.

In fact, a brochure I read a few weeks ago, about an upcoming Australian tour by Jamie McKenzie (of “From Now On” website), actually encourages attendees to bring their laptops to the interactive keynote sessions of that event. Well, I’ll have the school laptop with me tomorrow, for my session, but I’m afraid I hadn’t thought that having my head over its keyboard while Judy and the other speakers delivered their talks today. And I’d actually made an effort to turn off my mobile phone – as a courtesy, I’d thought, to the speakers.) I guess it was a reminder that today’s youth (seemingly) have no trouble doing two or three online tasks at the same time. Judy’s words were certainly food for thought.

What was even more daunting about today’s proceedings was the revelation that studies are showing that students are, in effect, “powering down” when they come to school – not only their Web 2.0 devices, but also their brains. Lots of today’s youth can’t wait till they get home from school so they can start being creative and networky on their Facebook, My space and other online social networking pages. Tapping that moth-to-flame attitude in schools seems to be one of our educators’ current challenges. I eagerly await the arrival of my school’s first interactive whiteboard.

I was part of an afternoon panel, with Ross and Judy and Jan Radford. Our topic was “How do you see Web 2.0 working in Australian schools?”. I was expecting a typical four-people-behind-a-desk arrangement, with general questions at the end. In fact, the four speakers were each given ten minutes at the microphone across the other end of the stage. We were going alphabetically and, with a name like “McLean”, I’m quite used to having a turn towards the middle – in fact, I was set to speak first! Mmmmm. Another challenge.

In my session, I aimed to give a pocket history of my own learning curve, and the recent steepness of that curve as I embraced Web 2.0 ideas – but I hope I was also successful in conveying the energy and excitement that the students’ learning had produced. Ross, by virtue of a surname ending in “T”, went last and he was able to give a wonderful, succinct summary of our reported achievements – and even mentioning a few of my points I’d managed to meander away from. He also offered three important culminating points (which I hastily scrawled down) because they’ll make my Saturday solo session so much stronger.

Essentially, Ross challenged us to:
* have a clear vision for the future of learning we wish to see in our schools, with the teacher-librarian in a leadership role
* build from our own experience, and learn by doing
* chart the learning – ie. demonstrate excellence through evidence-based practice.

Well, I’m off to make sure I have all the clear links I need in my speech for tomorrow – the syllabus outcomes, my pre- and post- mini-survey results, and the great student quotes about their emotional responses to the wiki tasks.

Tomorrow – Day 2! Wish me luck!

I plan to have the library’s Internet computers set up, alternatively, to show: this blog; OASIS Web enquiry; the Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge book rap page; and the Library wiki pages. Newly-laminated articles about OASIS Web enquiry, a print out of its home page (and how to find the My applications hyperlink on the Teacher portal page); more from Side-by-Side newspaper and Scan professional journal (including one from me), have already been pinned to a display board by the front door.

Aha! Nothing like a well-fed, captive audience!