All right stop. Collaborate and listen. ♫ ♪

Be it school or business, collaboration is the essence of any good organisation. It might take some organisational change to go from an individual-centered, self-promoting cut throat organisation, to one that values collaboration between individuals and group success, but it can be done if staff are prepared for the inevitable confusion and conflict that comes … Continue reading →

Blog Task 1 – TL role in regard to principal support

Using your readings for this unit, choose one of the following topics and write a reflective piece that demonstrates your understanding of the role of the teacher librarian with regard to this aspect of the TL practice. Chosen topic: Principal Support After reading the literature, I have come to the understanding that the role of … Continue reading →

Librarian-proof libraries? Teacher-proof curriculum?

Librarian-proof libraries? Teacher-proof curriculum? Curriculum executes itself no matter the teacher running it? What a bunch of hooey. I invite you to read the entertaining guest rant by Gary Hartzell on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk blog in 2009. He makes a very good point about the profound differences in school organisational culture and says that … Continue reading →

TOPIC 2: Principal Support = Support, Scheduling, and Funding

I have just finished reading the plethora of articles provided for the topic “Principal Support” in Topic 2 and I have to say, as a future TL, I get the message loud and clear – collaboration cannot happen without the active support of the school’s principal. And if the library and TL doesn’t have the … Continue reading →

TOPIC 2: The role of the Teacher Librarian – some authors’ views

Compare and contrast the views of Herring, Purcell, Lamb, and Valenza. How should TLs prioritise the roles they play in the school? Herring (2007) prefers the USA’s Informational power’s view of the role of the teacher librarian to the Australian Learning for the future document (p.31). The US document sees the roles as being mainly … Continue reading →

When does a source hit its geriatric years in the digital age?

I have just finished listening to Schmidmaier’s (2007) podcast on Education for the Library profession in the Digital Age and have also finished reading Herring’s (2007) chapter on Libraries in the twenty-first century: charting new directions in information. Both were read as part of the introduction week for the coursework of ETL401. I had my … Continue reading →

TOPIC 1: Searching Databases

Related to my previous post on whether I represent Herring’s poster-child for web searching, I have just finished the tasks for Topic 1’s ‘searching for relevant resources’ on library databases. So what did I learn? That I now love and actively use the truncation function. Truncation is where you use the starting letters of something … Continue reading →

Hello world!

Hello Bloggers’ World. Soon I shall begin my MEdTL course and will be posting here as often as possible. I have never worked as a teacher librarian nor do I currently work in a school (I’m a casual teacher bouncing around about 30 schools!). The only real experience I have of what a TL does … Continue reading →