Photos from the Cook Islands - Day 1

Dear all,

Day two today and it has dawned hot and humid after down pours of rain yesterday.

We worked with Kathy, Liz, and Peo yesterday in the morning finding out what had happened in their schools since May. So much work and enthusiasm! At Liz's school they had painted the library making it look fresh and inviting and with beautiful floral curtains.

Yesterday after noon we went through the blogging process again then straight into the SCIS- ing process. There is no Internet access in the library in most of these schools so we had to do the SCIS-ing in 2 stages. Scan the books onto word in the library, then save onto flashdrive then walk up to the office and work through the SCIS process then save and back to the library to import into Musac. We managed to SCIS approx 100 books and worked through a powercut and then the office closed, so no internet access.

Alice and I took 3 boxes of books back to our apartment last night to scan theISBNs into word to hasten the process.

We also a assisted Liz in her library to weed the fiction collection to make way for the new books ( I think she is to have a bonfire in her backyard)! Fiona and Rosemary you did a great job on selecting the books!

Off to Peo's schools soon so will add the photos and hope to post again tomorrow. Hope you are all well!

Dyane

Of Wearable art and other things...

Kia orana,
Just back from a great weekend in Wellington at the Wearable Arts show (3 1/2 hours long with no break so we had some very sore body parts!). http://www.worldofwearableart.com/category/image-galleries/winners/2008-winners

Wellington was beautiful, windy, wet and then beautiful again. I treated myself to a very exotic facial and massage which involved chilled jade stones and a suggestion that I try Botox!!

On the work front, Rosemary and I had a great day yesterday at Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate. We were supposed to do a collection assessment - a daunting prospect as it is a 0-13 school with few sequences separated for the different age ranges - but the librarian knows her collection really well and had already written a list of the gaps. So that made life a lot easier.

Hope you're all well and enjoying lots of lovely fresh fruit.

Lisa

delicious

first meeting...

Welcome Dyane & Alice to the Cook Island and thanx for the rain.....

Kia orana to everybody in Cook Islands for Stage 3

It's one of those sparkling spring days people wait all winter for here in Auckland- actually it's a little cool and cloudy. But... Anyway we hope the travellers have arrived and wish you all the best over the next two weeks. Keep them busy won't you. We're looking forward to hearing your news, so got in first.
From the team (sigh) back here.
Ra manea

Pride Presentation at 9th Regional Workshop September 2008

Pride Presentation of Cook Islands School Libraries

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

This presentation was given by Elizabeth Jones in Fiji as part of the Pride Confrence. September 2008


SlideShare Link

Guided learning for rich learning

Kia orana everybody,
I've wondered what to put into Runanga Marama for July- I've only just made it!- and we decided to report on the two big seminars held by Dr Ross Todd in Auckland and Wellington. All the Library advisers and about 300 other people attended, teachers and school library people. It was an exciting seminar.
Dr Ross Todd is Research Director at the Centre for International Scholarship in School Librarianship (CISSL) and Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University, USA; he is an Australian who has taught in New Zealand.

Ross talked about rich learning- the sort of learning that takes place when students are actively engaged in learning, in the "information to knowledge" experience- and what needs to take place for this to happen. He calls it "guided inquiry". Students (and their teachers) need to know what information they need and why. Research shows that most of the time when teachers and librarians think about the Library they are thinking about finding information. But what do they do with it once they have found it? He talked about squirrels who hoard stuff- is that all that inquiry learning is about? (It got me thinking about other animals- ants who just seem to move stuff from one place to another- like kids who just copy pages into their books; or pigs who wallow in the earth- learning should be absorbing; or birds who find things to build a nest with- learning should be useful.)

So learning should be purposeful. It is the job of teachers and librarians to help children to think about what they need to know. And then guided learning involves helping students to manage themselves and their learning environment (the information resources of people, places, books and internet, etc.)

Libraries need to keep pace with the needs of rich learning, and teachers need to know how to guide students as they learn, how to set up an inquiry and how to intervene when students need encouragement or help with learning.

CISSL has a very useful website that tells us more about the thinking and research of Dr Todd and his colleagues. Have a look at: http://cissl.scils.rutgers.edu/guided/guided_inquiry/ constructivist_learning.html

Over here we are just about ready for the end of winter, so we are thinking about you in the tropics. Welcome to August and ra manea, from Rob

Many Answers Tag Cloud

We have added a new dimension to our blog!!

We added a tag cloud (to your right) that will be updated on a regular basis. By clicking on one of the words in the tag cloud eg health, it will take you to an educational website that relates to that word.

This is part of the NZ any questions and many answers project. http://www.manyanswers.co.nz/.

We have just learnt how to filch (steal) the tag cloud, - which means to take a copy of it from the source eg the Many Answers site and place it on a blog, wiki or website.

Let us know if it is useful!