Feeling very angry at this moment after reading John McTernan's article in the Telegraph (http://tgr.ph/oyQV0t). Apparently the fact that I oppose the closure of public libraries makes me a 'Liberal whinger'  and I am only fighting to keep libraries open out of condescension and guilt.....what utter rubbish the man writes! Starting with the old chestnut 'you can get it all on the internet these days' argument. yes, you can get a wealth of information on the internet, this is true in fact you can get such a flood of information from one search that it's all too easy to drown in it."You can become ridiculously well informed ridiculously quickly" with Google apparently - you can also become ridiculously ill informed. Librarians are trained to help people swim in this flood and help steer them towards the relevant facts. "Fast cheap computing has spread to most homes" - operative word there is most and if that's his information then he certainly hasn't worked in any of the schools I visit where internet access at home is by no means a given, and parents are struggling to pay increasingly high food bills let alone spending money on internet access. They certainly don't have the money to buy their children the 'whizzy new mobile phones' the article mentions. As to 'virtually every kid has a desk at home' - utter rubbish, if I had said this to some of the students I used to work with who were sharing their bedrooms with 3 or 4 siblings they would have had hysterics! Not only did they not have desks but the noise at home made it impossible to study and they spent long hours in the local library working so hard to try and safeguard their future employment prospects. Libraries in secondary schools are indeed first class but the sad fact is that many of these are under threat of closure too, or have had their budgets slashed and anyway cannot offer the out of school times access that public libraries can. 
Personally I am a computer geek , I fully admit it and make good use of Overdrive to borrow books to read on my iPad when travelling but I still take out 'real' books from my library regularly , as do my grown up son and daughter.
Citing your qualifications and work experience certainly doesn't make your arguments any more credible Mr McTernan , I do hope you have never called yourself a librarian because you are a disgrace and indeed an embarrassment to the profession. 

Happy National Poetry Day everyone! First day of the Write Path international collaborative poetry project and today we will be continuing poems and finishing limericks started by published poets on the theme of Games which is the National Poetry Day theme this year. Please do have a look at the progress later today: http://writepath.ning.com/profiles/blog/list?q=06%2F10%2F2011
My own favourite poem is The Tiger by William Blake :http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/tyger.html
but in keeping with the theme of Games I'd like to share this one by Allen Ahlberg all about the 'games' students play with The Supply Teacher:http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-supply-teacher/
I hope you enjoy a day filled with rhythm and rhyme. With the sad news today of the death of Steve Jobs I'd also like to dedicate The Tiger to him, he was indeed a tiger of a man and I hope his wifi signal in heaven is strong and unlimited.


http://www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk/

Yesterday I attended Creative Junction's celebratory event, Fete Create in Witney. It was held on a farm, Cogges and I was somewhat bemused to be presenting to a group of young people, in a barn with two very much in love doves cooing loudly overhead! (was relieved to remain clean however after the warning about flying poop I had!). I was talking about the work I have completed as part of a contract to help Ranelagh School English dept use more technology for their teaching. We completed a variety of mini projects - tweeting in the characters from Much Ado About Nothing, blogging as the same characters, using Voicethread to comment on bullying images, writing stories on Storybird, creating glogs for persuasive writing and on the themes of MAAN to be used for revision, making MyFakeWall pages for the characters in a play, writing poetry with Piclits and writing collaborative stories on Neo 2 notebooks that were then published on a blog. Some of the Ranelagh students I worked with were in in my session yesterday and I was very pleased to see them! The creative partnership with this school worked really well, and I think we all learnt something from staff to students. It was different , talking to kids that were perched on hay bales but good fun too!

We had a wonderful picnic lunch in the very sunny orchard and were so very lucky to have a visit from author Philip Pullman. I didn't have a books to get signed so Philip signed the back of my iPad case! Even more treasured now of course.


Such amazingly creative work I heard about yesterday, Creative Junction are fabulous facillitators, such a shame that they no longer have funding to continue. Schools and students will feel their loss greatly. 

Whilst browsing Twitter this morning I came across a link to a new app for the iPad; The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore and decided to have a look. I have numerous apps on the iPad, some that are functional, some that are for fun but none of them are in any way near to the quality of Morris. This is the most beautiful, moving app I have ever seen , it made me laugh and I'm not ashamed to say, at the end of it I even shed a tear. It is the first app released by Moonbot Studios and at £2.99 is a real bargain. I can't wait to show it to .......well everyone really, it is that good. This app has justified my spending on the ipad all by itself, I defy anyone , child or adult to not be captivated and spellbound by it. I will eagerly await more apps from Moonbot but not sure they can top Morris!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-fantastic-flying-books/id438052647?mt=8

Today I have been working with year 9 students in Bracknell who were composing poetry and illustrating it using Piclits.com. The quality of images on Piclits is excellent and I was very impressed by the imagination shown by the young people in the class, who found Piclits easy and fun to use. Such a good, simple resource that can be used in so many ways!

Now, I am not a political animal. Politics and politicians normally do not impinge on my life at all - yes I know that is a shameful admission but to quote Bob Dylan 'the times they are a changing'. This government seems to be contradicting themselves at every point, one moment saying literacy for all is one of their key goals, in the next breath taking away funding from organisations that promote reading and writing to young people. The latest ridiculous idea is that primary schools are to be given a set list of the books they must study - what a sensible idea that is ...not! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13320661 How can you decide on certain books that will appeal to all children, boys and girls from every area and cultural diversity and who is going to make this decision? Surely we should have faith in teachers and librarians to have the specialist and local knowledge to be able to choose books to study that will appeal to children in their school without dictating to them about their book choices - after all they know the kids in their school best. Children are not 'one size fits all' and they are all at different stages in their reading journey, will this be taken into account? I suspect not. Having set texts at secondary school has had the effect of turning lots of young people away from reading - even a great work of literature that would normally appeal to a certain age group becomes boring and tedious when one 'has' to read and indeed, dissect it endlessly. Yes we should be encouraging children to read widely, there are so very many fantastic books written for primary kids from brilliant authors that really understand how to enthrall kids but to generalise and say 'all seven year olds should read this book' is quite ludicrous and will not encourage students to explore authors and genres to find things that excite, amuse maybe even terrify them and 'turn them on' to reading as a pleasure for life . If the government want to encourage more primary school kids to learn to love books perhaps they should be looking to ensure that every school has a visit every week from a knowledgeable, enthusiastic, qualified librarian - this would have far more impact than dictating which books should be studied. 
 

This weekend I was lucky enough to attend the CILIP School Libraries Group weekend course, having been asked to lead a seminar and to deliver a keynote speech. This was a little daunting because of the very high calibre of my fellow keynote speakers, Geoff Barton, Phil Bradley and Adam Lancaster to name but a few so I started the course in a rather tentative frame of mind. Of course I was silly to worry, I was soon surrounded by old friends and making new ones and my lovely new iPad 2 was getting a lot of interest! I managed to get to several seminars run by excellent practitioners (Ingrid Hopson, Barbara Band and Lesley Martin) and attended a session on Storyshaping which was extremely interesting. The only complaint I had with the seminars was that there were so many fantastic ones, it was hard to choose which ones to go to. Excellent author talks too, my favourite had to be Robert Muchamore - irreverent, cheeky, funny and totally engaging. 
I will admit when I left my job as a school librarian I did not renew my CILIP membership as at that time I did not feel the Institute did enough for school librarians, and that we were rather the forgotten section of the profession but this weekend has restored my faith and I will be renewing my membership today. All of the SLG committee deserve heartfelt thanks for their efforts in organising the course, especially my good friend Laura Taylor who seems tireless and whom I have forgiven for persuading me to speak in the first place ;0) .
I am feeling inspired and re energised after talking and listening to so many amazing people and I'm proud to be a part of this talented group. Yes colleagues are feeling a little worried and apprehensive due to all of the cuts but most of them are also defiant and ready to fight for their jobs, not just for their own sakes but for the young people they work with, whose education would be sadly poorer without dedicated, caring, knowledgeable  librarians to help guide them. Very much looking forward to next years conference which will hopefully be a joint one with School Library Association and Youth Libraries Group but it seems much too far away! 

Today to show my support for Save Libraries Day I joined my local public library which is only 10 minutes walk away. I'm ashamed that I have not done so before, but in my defence it is only open for roughly 9 hours a week and is very poorly publicised. It is small, rather shabby outside and sits back from the road and I'd be surprised if many of the other residents are aware that it even exists. The residents association website doesn't mention the library and apparently the council publicity department are aware of this but haven't yet got round to writing anything. (Funny that, you would almost think they don't want to increase loans............) . Whilst I was there a young girl was getting some help from the librarian to choose books from different genres that she had on a list and two people were engrossed in surfing the internet.
The stock shows a lack of funding for the last few years at least but there are still gems to be found - I took out 14 books of the possible 30 I am allowed. Browsing the shelves encouraged me to break out of my usual favourite genres (although naturally some slipped into the bag!) and I'm looking forward to curling up with them. Didn't borrow any DVDs this time but will do in the future. 
The librarian was lovely, so welcoming and she lives very local to the library so is a mine of information. She told me that a new toddler group they have recently set up is very well attended. The area around is full of new housing and there must be hundreds of potential borrowers but they do need to be shown that the library is there! 
At the moment I don't think the library is at threat of closure but the policy of making libraries in the area self service will inevitably have an effect. The librarian, Ms Jones is the biggest asset this poor forgotten library has - long may we keep her in Greenhithe!

So another year, another BETT. Spent Thursday and most of Friday helping out on the Renaissance stand which was fun although nerve racking at times - the day is punctuated by the whack of Neo2s falling on the floor as colleagues demonstrate their durability. Friday afternoon at 3.45 I led a seminar on using social networking and web 2 to bring the world into your classroom, a subject I have spoken on many times so I should have been very confident but I wasn't - I was terrified! guess it was just because it was BETT , I had comforted myself that it would probably be poorly attended but then a friend came to tell me no, it was fully booked so that didn't help my nerves. In the end the session went really well with only 2 people leaving to answer phone calls and many people coming up to ask questions so I needn't have worried. Starting off with the excellent Gotta Keep Reading video helped I think! Spent some time with my friends at Rising Stars afterwards as they had sponsored the session and I was extremely impressed with their new Switched on ICT scheme, looks fantastic and I'm sure it will be popular. 
I managed to slip away several times for a quick look round and was very happy to meet up with Bryan and the other guys from Bee-it, such a great website and all free! Watched a session in the Heppel zone about using Facebook as a sort of out of hours advice service with staff having completely separate accounts from their personal ones and groups set up for Work Related Learning etc The idea of getting people from different profession to 'guest' on the groups each week and answer questions was brilliant, and it's always great to hear the student point of view too. Colleague I was with had a try of all the different seats in the zone - wasn't brave enough to sit on a dolphin myself! Had a quick look at the new Eclipse .net iphone app coming from Microlibrarian - as a geeky former librarian I want it!
Saturday was the day for looking around and I brought my long suffering husband with me (he later commented "never again" and remarked that if it was you first BETT as a member of school staff it must be completely overwhelming......yep!) . Enjoyed hearing Children's Laureate Anthony Browne speak on the Scholastic stand and good to reconnect with Mike from I Am Learning and see their iphone app which I think is going to be very popular. Good to hear they are now selling to parents too, I would have loved this for my kids. I was very impressed with My Big Campus from Lightspeed which gives power back to teachers by letting them unblock sites themselves and use youtube videos etc as well as setting up directed access for blocks of time. Students would love the Facebook/Twitter like aspects of Big Campus too. Apart from this I was a little disappointed this year - products shown seemed very samey and I didn't find much else that caught my eye. Sadly didn't get time to go to any of the Teachmeet Takeovers ;0( ......next year must try harder, sounded wonderful from the comments on Twitter.  I think many people only came for these awesome free demonstrations, probably not much money about this year but there are still diamonds hidden amongst the dross. Roll on next year!

I don't blog nearly enough (perhaps that should be my New Year's Resolution) but this time I'm so annoyed I just had to express it. The news that Booktrust is to lose 100% of their funding has left me feeling not in the least bit festive - the loss of schemes such as BookStart, BookTime and BookedUp are bound to have a negative effect on kids motivation to read. Most of my experience has been with BookedUp where year 7 students are allowed to choose a book from a varied selection that they can keep. For many of these young people the Booked Up book will be the first one they own - they do not come from families where mum reads to the kids before they go to bed at night, and there is often no reading culture at home at all. These kids never see mum or dad lost in a book, if they are lucky they may see dad reading one of the tabloids but most of the time the only reading promotion they will get is through their schools, in most cases from the school library. Being able to give the boys/girls a book each at the start of their Secondary school life gives librarians the chance to start off on the right foot and I have witnessed the excitement that happens when the books are delivered and given out many times. It's not just their own book they benefit from either, many pupils swap their books so they have access to lots of new titles and naturally this promotes talk around the books and leads to book recommendations. 


How can a government that professes to have literacy for all at the heart of its being even consider cancelling funding to Booktrust? It just doesn't make sense, it is an act of lunacy. What a Christmas present to all the children of Britain - ho ho ho indeed.