Nicola McNee

We’re beginning to think about our topic of Superheroes for Year 7 Challenge Day and I had great fun creating Superlibrarian on the Marvel Comic Site Create Your Own Super hero . I happened to post a link on Twitter and was interested, then dismayed, to discover from @lordfolland that Marvel comics already featured a library mutant called Annika

Her Superpower was as a Living Respository of Human Knowledge but oh noes she was DEPOWERED on M-Day.

Is this telling me something I didn’t know I wonder? Is this why my job is to help students navigate the Information Tsunami for themselves? Swimming not drowning!

http://storify.com/NicolaMcNee/rapping-on-a-saturday-night
I’m getting ready for presenting a Digital Publishing workshop at Lighting the Future (a School and Children’s Librarian’s Conference in June) and I just had to storify these great impromptu raps on Twitter from Jimmy Coates author Joe Craig.

I feel the Carnegie Award has become a follower and no longer a leader in the magical realm (or rather unreal world) that is children’s books publishing. Back in 1995 Philip Pullman won with Northern Lights, Part 1 of his magnificent Dark Materials trilogy while Patrick Ness had to wait till Monsters of Men Part 3 of his Chaos Walking series to be similarly acknowledged last year. What has happened?

And how about those “sorry we think we missed the boat” titles that have won in the last few years – like Just in Case by Meg Rosoff (2007) because the library community failed to find How I live Now (the Guardian Children’s Prize winner 2004) or Siobhan Dowd who won for Bog Child in 2009 when A Swift Pure Cry (awarded the Branford Boase in 2007) was the one that got away? Or Philip Reeve who was rewarded for Here Lies Arthur(2008) when he clearly should have got it for Mortal Engines (Smarties Prize winner 2002)?

The press release for this years shortlist makes much of the fact there are four first novels on the list – the subtext is clearly that we’ve wised up to the fact we’re no longer cutting edge and are trying to be different. However, on digging a little deeper, it becomes obvious that these titles are hardly “newly discovered” gems but, dare I say it, have been manoeuvred into position by their publishers – three of the four were published first in hardback (a luxury which surely means they were packaged for adult buyers and aimed at the award market). Nina Douglas from Orion has just been shortlisted in the Publicity Campaign of the Year category of The Bookseller Awards for Annabel Pitcher’s My sister lives on the Mantlepiece which is revealing (it costs money to conduct a publicity campaign and few first novelists get that kind of help without an ulterior motive). I am also not surprised to find two of the other authors are high profile in the media (Lissa Evans is A BAFTA award winning TV producer and author of 3 previous adult novels and Ruta Sepetys has her own marketing company). Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying these books aren’t good but I’m pondering whether there might be better titles out there.

So how can CILIP members go about really finding the best book of the year? And whose best book is it anyway?

Surely we need to restructure the way the titles are discovered for the shortlist. Getting young people themselves involved in choosing the longlist might help. And how about making the “shadowing” site the real thing – let children choose the winner!

But in the meantime ..Andy Mulligan who has already hit the media headlines with Trash (which was withdrawn from the Blue Peter Book Awards for containing seriously “bad language”) and, most helpfully, won the the Guardian Children’s Prize last year for another title Return to Ripplestrop is waiting in the wings.

Overdrive are in the process of streamlining the customer experience
Soon customers will be able to log which e-reader they regularly use and, when loaning an e-book, they will automatically receive the compatible format without first having to choose epub or pdf or kindle formats .

Using new software, developed by Overdrive, customers will be able to read e-books on a desktop browser as well as their mobile device. This will mean they can use library computers to read digital texts. (I’m thinking that although I signed up to enhance our students leisure reading this will be good for independent research in the school library and might have implications for managing e-textbooks too)

Overdrive are using newly collected data for advocacy work with publishers

I was reminded when Steve started talking about “data” how until I was “enlightened” by @briankelly I used to pronounce this word the American way! But, however you say it (like the song says tomato, tomato-potato, potato), data is the key to getting publishers involved in e-book lending. During March 2012 the company surveyed its US library websites to discover that 146 million pages had been viewed by 5 million unique visitors from over 200 countries around the world. On average customers spent 9.5 minutes browsing with the most popular time being 9pm in the evening. There were also 2.6 million reservations made for books that were already on loan! This kind of exposure of book cover images to people who are readers (and potential buyers of e-books) makes a very compelling reason for publishers to participate in Overdrive’s Library Channel. Steve explained that this message was being used in over 150 meetings with publishers during the London Book Fair this week.

Dancing with Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation That’s Transforming the Way Business Is Done by Heidi Gautschi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve enjoyed dipping into this book. It suggests that “digital natives” (anyone born since 1983) are adapting new technologies created by older generations and using them differently from the way their creators thought they would! We need to understand this and accept the fact that “once our ideas are in their hands, this generation will make of them what they choose”. The development of new technology is a partnership and we can’t control it. The various contributers to the book then go on to discuss how we can best support innovation in the areas of business, marketing, entertainment and education.



Mary Ann Bell contributes the chapter headed “Native Knowledge:knowing what they know-and learning how to teach them the rest”. She suggests young people need guidance in the areas of -respect for intellectual property, internet searching skills, evaluation of internet information and online safety skills.



However I take issue with her survey of what students currently do as she reports the views of teacher-librarians rather than the students themselves. How do we know the anecdotal evidence of the librarians is robust?. She makes the sweeping statement that, when searching the Internet, students “bounce” from one site to another without close examination or reflection of any site. she says that 90% of teacher-librarians taking her survey “agree” this is the case. I have to say I’ve observed much more sophisticated searching and great peer collaboration in enquiry based learning. I think we need to survey students directly to find out more and I intend to do so. I’ll report my findings later in the year!

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The edtechcc “course” that started in January has come to an end and the final assignment is to reflect on what we have learnt from the experience. #edtechcca8

I found participating in an informal learning and sharing environment like this fantastic. It’s what all this social media stuff is made for! Thank you so much Colin Maxwell for organising it, setting the assignments and arranging for a couple of online meetings about it.

Two of the tools we used for creating stuff have already become integrated into my online life – pixton (cartoonmaker) is such fun. Here’s my latest offering:

I also mastered mixing sound clips in Audacity (a tool I already knew about but hadn’t found time to learn to use) and have since created a soundscape for a storytelling assembly using it.

I don’t think I made the most of the opportunity to comment and share on other participants blogs. By the middle of February I was finding school busy, demanding and tiring and seemed to be chasing my tail with the assignments. But I can’t see any way round this for me – working in an Independent boarding school is an all-consuming business.

However the most valuable thing I learnt from edtechcc was how good this model of learning is for busy practitioners in education. So much so I’m hoping to adapt it to share and learn from other school librarians in the UK.

At the same time as participating in edtechcc I’ve also been sharing my experiences setting up an e- book lending service for my school. Part of this involved speaking at a regional School Library Association networking meeting where I was asked by at least 6 people if I could come and spend a day at their school and help them get to grips with social media, digital publishing and mobile technology! At the end of the meeting I agreed to organise a day’s course for local school librarians about starting a blog. Thanks to the generosity of the headmaster and Kingswood School this is going ahead on the 12th July. There are already 11 takers which is very exciting.

And the next step is where the edtechcc model comes in. I’m setting up a site for those who have created their own blogs on that day to join and continue learning together! It’s going to be called scllt – “School Librarian’s Learning Together”. Here’s to the future

Despite disagreeing with the title (suggesting we are in an adversorial role “fighting” technology) I had an enjoyable afternoon at the networking meeting of the South West Region of the School Library Association. Everyone was very friendly!

I’d been asked to share Kingswood School’s experience of developing a library e-collection through Overdrive which I did and the lively discussion that followed was really informative. The were two main questions that we considered:

Should we loan e-book readers?
There were about 20 school librarians present and I discovered 3 of them had bought multiple Kindles which they were loaning out to students using the ability to archive one title on 6 Kindles. I am personally unsure about the legality of this see Buffy Hamilton’s post from last July : Why we won’t purchase more Kindles at the Unquiet Library Also research into young peoples mobile reading habits suggests they choose to use their own multifunctional devices (ipads, ipads, android phones ) rather than a dedicated e-reader.

Should we be managing digital textbooks?
Some of the librarians asked me about information titles/textbooks available through Overdrive. I have discovered Raintree KS3 titles but these are available in pdf format only which I believe is more suitable for desktop PC viewing rather than on a mobile device. There are also a number of academic publishers like Elsevier (with 11,000 titles available) but these are more suitable for third level organisations.

From the discussion it seemed to me that some librarians are trying to validate their existence by attempting to take on the role of managing digital textbooks for their school. Although someone needs to co-ordinate textbook provision I personally would be wary of pursuing this direction. I think school libraries should be there to support the curriculum, provide resources that enable students  to  go “off piste” and pursue their independent passsions and most important of all encourage reading for pleasure.  These activities have been shown to raise attainment levels in education and we don’t need to justify our existence by venturing into the world of textbooks.

Please feel free to agree or disagree with my strong opinions by adding your comments to this post!

View My walk to Tesco in a larger map

For assignment 6 in #edtechcc we were asked to create a customised map and include photographs of places. I’ve tried to tell the story of my 10 minute walk to the local shops passing places where people have lived and worked for over 200 years in the world heritage city of Bath where I am lucky enough to live.

I started the assignment slowly as I found google maps quite unresponsive as I clicked on the various map tools. I still haven’t drawn a line joining the places I located on my walk as I just couldn’t do it accurately enough! It also took me a little while to discover the “rich text” option on a place holder where I could add photographs and then when I did I had a hiccup with the album in Picasaweb to which I was trying to link. I had set my default in Picasa to allowing only those to whom I sent the link to see the photos so they didn’t display on the map – this was rectified by making the album “public”.

However despite the “nitpicking” I can see how teachers could use google maps effectively for storytelling purposes. #edtechcca6

Today we completed our first order for e-books. 37 Young Adult interest fiction titles mostly from Walker, Bloomsbury and Random House publishers. Here they are:

We were pleased with the range of genres we were able to find considering no Penguin, HarperCollins, Hodder or Macmillan titles were available to select. See earlier posts for details why this is the case.

It was hard to know where to begin with series titles like Rachel Caine’s hugely popular Morganville Vampires which has reached volume 11! Should we start at the beginning or go for the latest one? After much mulling over between myself and my library assitant we decided to start with number 1. This will allow us to save our budget for student requests which is the way we normally acquire new titles in a series. If a series is popular students know when the next one is coming out and that I will order it from Amazon for them as soon as it is published. As Overdrive release newly purchased titles quickly it will be easy to buy the next title in a series, as and when, a student wants it. Well that’s the theory -we shall see how it works in practice.

With this order we have spent nearly 30% of our content budget (set by Overdrive) for the year so it will be interesting to see how big the demand is and whether we can keep our customers happy!

I’ve been getting behind with my edtechcc assignments. I sort of lost track over half term holiday and haven’t got back into the groove. So this is a catch-up for #edtechcca4 and #edtechcca5. Both assignments were connected to visual technology and ran concurrently. Every other day for two weeks we were given a theme for a photograph which we posted on our Facebook group page and where shared comments about our uploads. Here’s a resume of my pictures using Animoto.

I use Animoto a lot and have a free educators account. I used it recently to enable 90 students to create “adverts” about safe drinking for a research project. It’s a great tool for teaching and learning provided you have the filtering and access through proxy servers sorted!

The second edtech assignment was to create a video clip of ourselves hitting a yellow tennis ball with something other than a tennis racket The aim was to edit the clips together and produce a video of edtechcc participants. I just didn’t manage it but here’s the result of what others achieved as posted on Colin Maxwell’s blog: Tennis video