Shamed into posting

What a shock I have just received when I have seen my own name listed in a list of Bloggers in the South East, in Eclipse the newsletter of the CILIP SE Branch.
I have never really managed to blog regularly and do wish I could get into the habit as it would be a good record of life and progress

So after pondering on what to blog about I thought I would reflect on the impact I make on teaching at the school. Often I am oblivious to the impact that I am making. On a few occasions recently I have noticed English teachers using materials that I produced a while ago for using with the Booked up books. I had produced a whole folder of activities that related to character, plot, setting etc and given a copy to each teacher. Anyway I now keep seeing teachers using the folder. One teacher said that the ideas in the folder are really good and that she uses them alot.

I have now decided that I will make the activities available through our VLE.

More and more I seem to be making my impact by helping teachers with their planning rather than with the actual teaching.

I did a session for NQTs earlier this week and was v pleased with the feedback. I gave them a number of ideas to tell students what to do with the information they cut and paste.

So all in all maybe I am of more value than I sometimes suspect

Great teaching

I have just come across the work of Doug Lemov and have ordered his book Teach like a champion
The pdfs and video clips on the link are great and show to me how much more I need to know about teaching to be effective enough to excite and motivate students in the library.

I think it is this sort of practical teaching techniques I need to know to help improve my teaching skills. I see the students in the role of a teacher relatively rarely and so when I do I need to be able to engage them

It all looks so easy when you see someone doing it

Geeks might be tomorrow's entrepeneurs

From a site I had not used before Big Ambition - your digital career starts here. Also includes a dream career quiz!

There's so much to investigate

What started out as a little search for ideas for our Head of Languages for what to put on our new VLE, Frog and it ended up with lots of exciting finds.
I particularly liked this Social Technographics Ladder

Where are you on the ladder?

 Then noticed this blog entry about Linchpin, which i have read and am definitely going to print out his index for the book.
Holiday working is so useful for catching up with CPD rather than just doing the job

Pulled off at tangents

Today I started by looking the the CILIP weekly update. I think this it great and I always find something of interest. This weeks was no exception, a real gem and am now buzzing with ideas and things I want to do.
But through following a link to MIT open courseware I came across two poems on reading.
I used to panic when I read poetry as I thought I was meant to find stuff hidden in their to help me understand what the poet was thinking when he wrote the poem. But since reading Rosenblatt, Zimmermann, Keene and others I now realise that I just need to think about what the poem means to me, how I connect with it, how it makes me feel, what connections I make, what queries I have. etc. In other words I use the reading strategies that I teach to the students.

My confusion here is in the second poem and I am wondering why the pages bore no print.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book
The house was quiet and the world was calm

The words were spoken as if there was no book
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

The Reader
All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of somber pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shriveled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.

The somber pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven

Wallace Stevens

I'll fight you for the library

I am intrigued as to where we all saw the Taylor Mali youtube performance of this poem. I found it through a like on Seth Godin's blog to What a teacher makes, which in fact I had seen before. Then I spotted the link to this poem. I posted it on SLN and have seen two further links to it since. It is the trail that intrigues.
Also reminds me of Clay Shirky's Here come everybody, in which he writes about the power of social networking to make change happen.

As to the poem it probably strikes a chord with many school librarians. I have two libraries and one used to be used for governors meetings until I moved the shelves around and the space was no longer deemed big enough. So they moved the other library, then I moved that around too.

I loved the line, it is the only place with books!

Cilip feeds

I do like the CILIP information world email that we receive each week, there is always something worth following up. This week I have really enjoyed investigating links from
http://uklibraryblogs.pbworks.com/
I would recommend, have found lots of new blogs to follow, where do you draw the line though, need another few hours in the day