How not to look like an idiot on social media (or in real life)

When I came across the article on mybroadband, entitled If you shared any of these stories on Facebook, you are an idiot, I did a little dance of joy. It's so great when I can use examples that someone else is putting out there because it makes what I'm trying to teach my students so much more real for them.

I've also been using some of the sites that they gave examples of in my classes - getting the students to evaluate them. The problem for them is that many of these sites fulfill some of the criteria for a reliable website - there's an author, a recent date, a well-laid out site, and references to where the information comes from. In fact, many of them look like reliable news sites, probably because they've been design to replicate them. So how do our students know what to look for?

One of the things I find my students gloss over is who OWNS the site. Who runs it? What is its purpose? I get them to find an 'About Us' section, and to really examine this. Often it's at that point that they make the connection that something is dodgy about the site. I'm teaching them how to use Whois and other domain name sites so they can find out who bought the domain name.  I'm also making them study the articles on the sites, then getting them to do searches for similar topics to compare them and analyse them.

They're not happy with this. They're not happy with the fact that they have to scrutinise these sites to the nth degree. So I'm working on them - showing them that it's not just about finding information for projects, but finding information about life, about politics, about health, etc. So articles like this one are awesome to use to convince them that they need to be sure about the information they read.

• Did you read this article? What do you think?
• How are your students handling the saturation of information out there?

Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!

Skill 2: Collaboration

As the Library Journal says, collaboration has always been part of a librarian's job so nothing new here. But what it also mentions is that this collaboration should now extend beyond the walls of our schools. So some food for thought:

• Do you have a professional network (see my previous post on this) where you can share ideas?
• What can you share with another library? This could be from actual resources to skills.
• What does another library have that you could 'borrow' from them?

Do you already collaborate with other libraries? What resources or skills do you share? 

Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!

Do you accept the challenge?

I had such fun presenting my workshop at the EdTech Conference earlier this month. I spent about 20 minutes working through my presentation, then set the teachers their own Google Challenge to see if they could do it.

Click here for the link to my presentation, and within the slideshow there are links to the Google Challenges for you to try out.

If you want more information on how to use Google Challenges in your research classes, you can mail me at philippacameron@gmail.com or leave a message below.

What to do after you been to a conference - breathe!

The EdTech conference held at Dainfern last week was once again a knock-your-socks-off affair. It was quite overwhelming when you see some of the amazing work local schools are doing out there, but it was presented in such a way that you could see yourself being able to implement a variety of ideas in your own school.

Here are just a few of the workshops I went to that, and hopefully will be able to transfer these new skills to my schools:

• A virtual field trip anywhere in the world, using Google Cardboard. 
• Using Persepecs to aggregrate news stories that offer neutral and biased points of view.
• Edpuzzle - a tool for creating quizzes using video.
• Literary field trips, using Google StreetView.

Once I catch my breath, I'll put together a post on how I'm going to use these in the library and in my lessons, but if you want more information in the meantime, please email me: philippacameron@gmail.com or leave a message below...

Save the date for next year's School Librarians' Conference

The first Save-The-Date has gone out for next year's School Librarians' Conference! Here are the details:

Date: July 2 to July 5, 2017
Place: Highbury Preparatory School in Hillcrest, KZN
Theme: Leading out Loud

We will be covering our theme through talks by fabulous presenters, interactive discussion groups and practical workshops.

So don't forget to include the conference in your budget for next year! Early bird specials will be publicised within the next few months, along with programme information

For more information, email Debbie at DVermeulen@marisstella.co.za or visit the School Librarians' Conference website.

How professional networks can help us

When I came across the term "professional network" years ago, I didn't pay too much attention to it. In my previous life as a journalist, I had taken for granted the contacts that I had built up - in fact, they sort of built up themselves. Starting a new career in the media centre, however, I quickly realised that I needed a new network of professionals. Fortunately, I was able to join Infolink, which meant in an instance, I had a connection to many librarians around the country. And closer to home, our Midlands group of librarians meets once a term at different school each time, so we get to visit each other's libraries and share knowledge, support and advice. At our meeting this term, we:

• discussed next year's library conference, 
• shared our schools' professional development structures, 
• watched a video on an Australian school's new learning hub, 
• swapped books,
• vented about our library computer systems, and 
• and shared our strategies on how to get students to return books!

Often working on our own or not being part of a larger department, being a librarian can be a lonely job. Some of us like it like that! But still, it's good to know we have people to turn to, even if it is just to moan about computer systems...

Challenge Accepted! Presenting at the EdTech conference

Last month I pitched a presentation idea to EdTech for their Global Summit - and I was super excited when it was well received! My topic is: Challenge Accepted! How to use Google Search Challenges in your classroom. It's not a fancy, bells-and-whistles presentation - just some simply steps on how you can use Google's Advanced Search Challenges to help learners cope with digital reading and searching, and this can be used in any subject.


You can still register for the summit, which will be held at Dainfern College from September 2-3.

Skill 1: How politics can change your library

No, I'm not talking about our country's politics! Here is the Library Journal's first tip on the top skills needed for tomorrow's librarians:

For school librarians, this means dealing with organisational politics: ensuring budgets are appropriate and are met; keeping the pressure on management to ensure library services are continually seen as vital, and not as a nice-to-have; and flying the library flag high so that all stakeholders know what these services are.

11 skills today's librarians need for tomorrow

I came across this interesting article (click on the image above) from the American Library Journal listing 11 new skills that librarians need. After reading them, I agree with the last sentence in the blurb above: "Not complete departures, rather they build on trends already in evidence."

Over the next few months, I will  be looking at each of these 11 skills individually, to see how far we have come and how much further we need to go. I've listed them below and I'll start tackling them next week...

When good resolutions go bad

One of my resolutions this year was to set myself a professional development plan, and stick to it.
In an earlier post on Where do we find professional development for librarians?, I wrote that I had joined the International Librarians Network that runs a programme pairing you up with a fellow librarian in another country.

In due course, I was given the contact details for a librarian in Australia, and, a little nervously - felt like I was writing up a bio for an online dating service! - I sent an email introducing myself. Perhaps I shouldn't have made the first move. Perhaps I was too forward. Perhaps I wasn't what she was looking for. Because I never heard back from her...

Now, we were urged to contact the ILN if we didn't hear from our designated partner so we could be re-assigned - which I didn't do in time because, well, I went away on holiday! And there are many more awesome success stories of librarians hooking up all over the world through this programme and I still believe it to be a wonderful idea. But that doesn't help me and my resolution to stick to my professional development plan.

I needed something else to take its place, and I found it. The Geneva Learning Foundation was offering an open-access course on Digital Learning, it was being run online smack-bang in the middle of the July holidays, and my application was successful.

What could go wrong?

Absolutely nothing, except the couple of hours I was expected to set aside each day for the course got eaten by novel reading, novel writing, novel editing, gardening (something I seldom do) and baking (something I never do).

In a nutshell, I didn't do one iota of work for the course. Another failure.

But onwards! It's the Google in Education conference at the beginning of September and the RASA conference at the end of September, and, touch wood, hopefully my professional development plan will be back on track...

The biggest misconception about social media law

Last month I attended a social media course at UCT run by the UCT Law@Work project. After two super-intense days with an energetic group of lawyers, I emerged more cautious than ever about social media use, but also armed with more knowledge than ever about its potential dangers. I say potential, because like many things, social media is only dangerous when used incorrectly. 

But the key takeaway from this course is that social media's biggest danger possibly is that there actually ISN'T any such thing as social media law. Lawyers and courts are having to draw from existing laws, and looking to other countries to see how they are dealing with individual cases, where perhaps an employee has brought their company into disrepute, or someone has infringed on the rights of another. 

Now, I am not a lawyer, but to me, this makes social media dangerous because no one quite knows what the outcome of a particular case will be. I'm running a workshop with our staff at school, giving them feedback from this course, and we'll be including it in our social media lessons with our students.

Of course, legal dangers are easy to avoid. If you follow the good old T.H.I.N.K. rule, you'll be fine. In fact, I always tell my students if they can't remember what all the letters stand for, just remember the advice from the last letter in the acronym...can't go wrong with that.

The cheater's guide to in-text referencing

I start the next term off with my Grade 11 classes, and first up is teaching in-text referencing. 

In-text referencing. Yawn.

Except, being the geek that I am, I'm actually quite excited this time around, because it's the first time I'll be teaching them how to do in-text citation electronically. In the same way I feel it's more important that the younger grades acquire the skills to be able to interrogate sources, these senior students need to become better writers, and I'd rather spend more time on this, than getting them to parrot-learn how to write up a citation.

Now, I'm not saying they shouldn't use these and they still have to gather all the information for their references; just that, if there's a quicker way of doing citations, then I've got more lesson time to teach them writing skills. Some of our students already use digital referencing, but are unsure when and where they should be doing this, and often pop them into their text willy nilly. They know WHY they should reference; only, they're unsure HOW this should be used within their text.

Most of our students use Microsoft Word or Google Docs for their assignments, so I'll be covering these. But before I even start with that, I'll be teaching them how to use quotes, indirect quotes and paraphrases correctly within their essays and research projects. And when they've got the hang of that, then I'll show them how easy it is - click, click! - to insert their citations.

Why reading a classic is cool

This week's library display promoted classics so along with stands filled with Austen and Bronte and Hardy and Dickens, I blew up this article from The Guardian: Teenage opinion: why you should read classic books.

The blurb goes like this: "What could possibly be interesting in a long, tedious text full of difficult language and a repetitive plot? Well, surprisingly, quite a lot...So get over your pride and prejudice about reading them!"

Because some of the students are fearful of classics, I still had to do some encouraging to get the books off the stands and into their hands, but they all enjoyed reading the article and hopefully some walked away knowing what we always knew: that reading a classic is cool!

Do you struggle to get your students to read classics? Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!

When a battle is not a bad thing

The launch of the Battle of the Bookworms, our Grade 8 reading programme, has seen our junior selection of books flying out of the library! Here is how it works:

• The students challenge themselves as to how many books they can read over a three-month period - so the "battle" is with themselves...
• They can choose any book on our Bookworm list - these are books that we already have in our library that we have selected for this programme and there are about 300.
• The book list divides the books into different genres.
• When a student has read eight books (and done a book report and oral on each), she receives a certificate from the head in assembly, and for every eight thereafter. (Last year, one girl read 32 books!)
• They have to read from 8 different genres and 8 different authors for a certificate, so it’s a wonderful way to them to explore different genres.
• We hold a prizegiving at the end of the period where we award the top readers in each class as well as readers who have benefitted most from the programme.
• If we get new books in that are suitable for the programme, then we add these to the list.
• I put up a display for them for the whole three months that they can help themselves to, usually focusing on a different genre every couple of weeks.  

Do you run a reading programme for your junior students in high school?  

Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!

I flipped out - and there's no going back...

Our Information and Digital Literacy department - of which I'm a member - decided this year that we were going to award marks to a variety of projects and exercises - usually open-book - over the year that would appear on the students' reports. (I have another blog post to write on this process...)

So I set an exercise for my Grade 8s on how to check the reliability of a website by selecting a page on a particular topic, and on how to write a reference for that site. I revised the work in class, and set the exercise for their homework. It was done on a digital worksheet that had to be saved in a particular folder - which they have to do for most subjects.

Well, it took me two weeks to track down all these worksheets, which managed to find themselves in all sorts of weird places on our system! As a result, I wasn't able to go over the exercise with the class, as my lessons with them had come to an end (I only have three), and there were several poor results that needed attention. (I ended up running a workshop after school to deal with these.)

So my two issues were:

• Difficulties in getting the students to hand their work in electronically.
• Not enough time to go over the exercise once it had been marked.

Then I read an article on flipping in the library - you can read it here - and even though it was talking about a much younger grade where all the work still had to be completed in the library, it gave me an idea. My next three classes were with my Grade 9s and their exercise was similar to the Grade 8s. This time, I was ready:

• For lesson one, I introduced the work and we did some fun exercises together, like Google search challenges and looking at hoax websites. 
• Instead of using my slides in class, I reworked them so the end of each section had an online Google quiz that would help the girls review the work. 
• They had to go through the slides and complete the quizzes for homework. 
• I used Flubaroo to mark the quizzes so that they were emailed their results before the next class. 
• At the beginning of lesson two, they had to look at their results, I answered any questions, and then they had to compete their written revision exercise - in class. This meant I was on hand to guide them (and help two students who had been absent previously), and could ensure that all the exercises were saved in the correct place before the bell rang!
• For our final lesson, I had time to go through the results with them, focus on areas of concern, and get them all to do a last practice on writing a bibliography. 

While I did the groundwork for this course during the classes, I basically handed over one of the lessons to them to do for homework, so they would be prepared for their revision exercise in class. The quick online quizzes meant that I knew they had completed the work. And after their revision exercise,I had a whole lesson to go over their marked work. 

As a result, I'm reviewing all my lesson plans for all the grades, and seeing when there are opportunities to flip out!

Have you tried flipping your lessons? Please comment below or send a mail to philippacameron@gmail.com - I'd love to hear from you!