Blogger no more but the blog continues

Alas, it seems like blogger will never return to China - I am using a vpn to access now and have decided to re-start my blog using another provider. It's a shame as I really liked the features offered by blogger but unfortunately there are a number of issues with Google apps in China so better to move to something that works - well hopefully that's the case. I will be starting another Shanghai School Library Slot with Edublogs, so the new address will be http://shanghaischoollibraryslot.edublogs.org/

May take me a day or two to get going so please bear with me.

New school year approaching, new school!

Went in to my new school today to meet the other "newbies" and the senior management. It is so good to be back in an IB environment again. There is just such a different feel, positivity every step of the way, open mindedness...I am feeling inspired again and can't wait to get started.

I will be working with Destiny for the first time and I love it already. The interface is easy to use and very visual for the kids. Our OPAC can be accessed from http://library.wiss.cn I have started to enter a couple of reviews and plan to get some of the upper Primary going on adding some more once term starts.

This will be the first time I have actually started with the other new members of staff, kind of scary to think this is my 4th school in almost as many years. Time to slow down and consolidate some learning in one place now. Previously I have started part-way through a year or slightly after the others like last year so this is a great opportunity to meet everyone at the start and not feel like I am playing catch up all the time.

Plus there is a new library to plan. The space is still being finished and the school director wants CiCi (the Asst Librarian) and I to start visualising how we want the final space to be. Exciting!!
There is to be one glass wall which will open on to a lawn space and I already have ideas about rugs, parasols and deck chairs for some outdoor reading fun.

It will also be a challenge working with Middle School and High School, especially as we are looking at pre-authorisation for the MYP programme later this year. Sure I will be calling on all my colleagues in HK for advice. Luckily the school is still small and one of the new IB English teachers is a Teacher Librarian so I should be able to ask her advice when I need it. We have already had a lively discussion about Graphic Novels, we are both very pro so this is good news.

All in all, a great start to the week. I am going back on Wednesday for the start of the formal orientation and will be immersing myself in the PYP again. Can't wait!!

End of the school year

Finally reached the end of term last Friday. Blogger is still blocked in China and looks likely to continue to be blocked for the foreseeable future. Yesterday we also lost Facebook and Twitter so it is getting increasingly difficult to know what will be available.

The last few days of term were spent tidying up and stock taking. It was the first time I have actually done a full stock take and it went surprisingly well. There were less than 40 titles missing in the Library and the staff losses were minimal too. I gave me a chance to really tidy up the database and get rid of all the secondary stock that was moved last year and anything else that I had not re-catalogued at the the start. The database is now in very good shape with everything there and allocated the correct status. If they ever manage to get Oliver up and running at least it will start off with accurate data.

Spent a couple of days doing handover with Emma, my replacement. Great to actually be able to meet the person who will take over for a change. I am sure she will make the Rego Library her own, she has some brilliant ideas.

Even received a couple of orders in the last week. These were ones I had prepared back in December and, of course, they contained some duplicates - things I had bought through Scholastic or at the Book Fair. Still, at least there will be some new stock for next year.

The Final Assemblies were lovely, great for the kids to reflect on the last year. Still one sour note, the acknowledgements for leaving staff were extremely impersonal and apparently I only left Key Stage 1 as I was not even mentioned at the Assembly for the older students in Key Stage 2. It was all a little embarassing as many of my parent helpers were at the second Assembly and were wondering what was going on - not to mention the staff.

It's been a definate learning experience the last 10 months at Rego but I am happy now to be moving back into the IB environment and am lookin forward to joining WISS, Western International School Shanghai.

I met with the PYP coordinator for coffee yesterday and bounced out inspired again. Can't wait to get back to caring, risk-taking and reflecting and being involved in life-long learning.

Blogger and the Chinese Firewall

Haven't been able to post for a while as Blogger seems to have been hit by the Great Chinese Firewall. Basically I haven't been able to read or post anything on my blog or any of the others that I follow. Took a couple of weeks but I have finally found a proxy server that will allow me to read and post. Let's hope this works.

Introducing wikis at Rego

A little while since I posted, time flies so quickly. I have been working on an Award Winning Books topic with my Year 5 students and decided to really liven things up. We are discussing what makes books good, why they win awards and trying to critically evaluate those that have won awards. The wonderful parents are in the process of creating another excellent display, (I'll add some pics when I get a chance), and I have separated out all the award winning books I can find on our shelves.

The last Scholastic order brought a great selection of Newbery Medal and Honor books so there should be enough for the 50 or so students in Year 5. I told them I was going to expect them to do a book review and sure enough there were a few groans...do we have to write it, etc etc.....I decided that a wiki would be the answer. Can't access PBwiki here in China as it is blocked but wikispaces works reasonably well so this week we are off.

So far all the students have done is create their own page using a template I made. For the next few weeks they will be expected to complete a review and start to comment of their class and year mates reviews. One of the Year 5 teachers has really got on board and has started another wiki for his class to record their work, spelling sentences etc..... The kids, of course, are having a ball, adding in profile pics, fancy fonts whatever takes their fancy. I have asked them to be as creative as possible so we'll see what transpires.

The Y5 wiki can be viewed at http://srisprimarylibrary.wikispaces.com/

As the Y5s were so enthusiastic, I decided to try another one with Y6. I have an old wiki that I set up when I was in Hong Kong and decided to adapt it for a Web Research exercise. I have shown the class a video form Answers.com call "Mission Impossible" a guide to safe online seraching. Whilst it is quite American and definately biased towards Answer.com, it does have some valid points, especially about different types of websites which students will encounter, e.g. subjective, commerical etc. There is an exercise where the students research a topic and try to find all the different types of websites so this seems ideal for incorporating into a wiki.

My Y6 class this afternoon were very enthusiastic and can't wait to get started. Like the 5s they have only added a page so far but next week we will look at an example page I have created and get them to choose topics to research. As they are coming up to SATs at the moment, the teacher and I have decided they can have free choice in their topic, less pressure and should make it more interesting. This wiki can be viewed at http://searchingexercise.wikispaces.com/

This is certainly the most fun I have had in the last few weeks. Getting the students interested in reading and research and actually having some new books to offer them makes all the difference.

New term...new Library system, maybe....

Back to school on Monday after two magical weeks off. Had a great trip to the Silk Road in North West China, saw some wonderful sights and visited great places.

Things are pretty much the same at school. Have quite a lot of new books at the moment thanks to the Scholastic Book Club delivery and credit from the Book Fair. Have managed to catalogue about half and luckily there are some student and parent helpers to stamp and cover and get them out as quickly as possible.

Told the parent helpers I had resigned and had a long discussion about the reasons. They are very supportive but understandably upset. Hard to walk away from such a wonderful group of helpers but I still feel liberated to have made the decision and know deep down it is the right thing to do.

The Shanghai Librarians' Group met on Wednesday and had a visit to a marvellous Jesuit Library in Xu Jia Hui. It was an excellent experience. The Library survived the Cultural Revolution with its' collection intact including texts from over 70 different languages and most dating back to the 17th or 18th Century. The collection is housed in a beautiful building with a lovely reading room, even got a "proper" Librarian who told us to "Shhhh!"

I am really excited about the way the group is devloping. We now have members from Suzhou who came in to Shanghai to buy books and stayed on for the Library trip. We are building up quite a strong community and there is a lot of good discussion starting on the Yahoo Listserv.

May also actually be some progress on the Oliver front. The Principal agreed to bring someone technical from Australia to do an on-site installation and some training. Forwarded this info to Softlink in Australia who are insistent they can fix the problems remotely. Today, another of their technical people did a clean installation using remote access and it seemed to make a difference. Managed to run overdues and export to Word.

The circulation data is, however, three months out of date now so we need to decide if we want to run the conversion programme again or to manually update the data. In Secondary that means around 200 records and for me in Primary over 400. It may be quite slow but might be more accurate than running the conversion again. The last time we ended up with incorrect circulation data anyway so at least this way we will know that every record is correct.

Tomorrow is my busiest day, 8 classes with only about half-an-hour free so I won't be able to really begin testing until next week. Hopefully as I now have Tuesday afternoons free, I will have time to update all the circulation data and we will be able to test out everything we need and see if it really does work this time!! It would be great to be able to go live and introduce the students to an OPAC and online searching but I'm not holding my breath.

Had a visit from the CEPIEC Rep today, they are the Government Import Dept. I had some quotations from them back in December and have prepared several orders but of course they haven't been placed. Interesting discussion, they can import from UK, USA and they also use Austrel Ed in Australia. As they are the Government Import Agency they have very few problems getting books in and are able to offer some significant discounts, plus prices in RMB. I know my new school uses them a lot and I can see a lot of benefits in maintaining the relationship. The use of Austrel Ed is particularly exciting as it is really difficult to find Australian book otherwise.

Sports Day today so I had half a day out of the Library supporting the students. I could have stayed to catalogue but I do like to support events like this and I think it's good for the students to see that I am not just someone who sits in the Library all day. Fun afternoon, gorgeous weather and the kids had lots of fun. There was even a teacher's race at the end, won by the EAL teacher from Scotland!

Another term ending

As the Easter vacation approaches, it is hard to believe two thirds of the school year is over already. So much has been achieved since I arrived at Rego but there is still so much more which could have, and should have, been possible.

I have taken an empty space with only boxes and turned it into a proper functioning Library with space for students of all ages to read, study and carry out activities. We have held a very successful Book Week which has involved the entire Primary School and resulted in a superb Creative Writing Competition by the Literacy Co-ordinator; our Book Dragon; a Dress-up parade; 2 day Book Fair and new books for the Library from the Book Fair.

Library skills are underway with all students in Years 3 and 4 completing a unit on organisation of Fiction books, and Year 5 exploring the Dewey Decimal System. Foundation and Y1 and 2 are fairly solid in their knowledge of how the Picture books are shelved and how to look after them and they are starting to enjoy selecting from the small Non-Fiction section in their area. Have done some limited research skills with Y6 but am continually frustrated that only half the Y6 classes come to Library on a regular basis.

There is a wonderful team of parent helpers who organise displays; stamp and cover books and generally appear when I most need them. They are now being supplemented by some enthusiastic Y6 students who come down at break and lunch to do some stamping and sticking date pages in.

On the other side there is an increasing list of areas which need to be addressed and are not.

Top of the list, as it has been since the start is purchasing - none of the orders I have raised have been placed with suppliers - they have all been approved by both the Primary and Whole School Principal but that doesn't seem to make any difference. We haven't had a newspaper in the Library since Dec last year and the whole school is waiting for printer cartridges. At the moment the Library has 2 of the only working printers in the entire Primary School, and they won't last the week.

This has meant that any new books are as result of parent donations, credit from the Scholastic Book Club and credit from the recent Book Fair. Basically our parents are paying out more money to fund the school library over and above the fees they have already paid.

The new Oliver Library system is still not up and running, it's been almost an entire term now. The head of IT comes to the Primary Library most weeks and spends a couple of hours talking to Softlink in Australia or disappearing to the server room to try other options but the situation remains the same - Oliver doesn't work at Rego. So no OPACs and a limit to the skills that can be shared with the students.

Soft furnishings are non-existent, we have 15 very shabby cushions that came over from the old building and some pieces of carpet but none of the bean bags we were promised or sofas or anything else to make the Library a comfortable, attractive place for the students to visit and relax.

I have decided that the frustration of not being able to provide the kind of Library servies required is too much and today I resigned from Rego. I will work my notice during the Summer term and start afresh at a different school in the next academic year. The staff, students and parents at Rego are a wonderful community of people, however the School Board are only interested in making as much profit as possible at the expense of the students' learning environment. This is a real shame as there is such potential for Rego to be a great school.

"The Gruffalo"

I continue to be impressed with the students at Shanghai Rego. Three weeks ago I asked my Library monitors group to perform a play version of "The Gruffalo" for our youngest students in Foundation and Key Stage 1. They willingly took on the challenge and were enthusiastic about performing for the rest of the school when I sprung that on them yesterday.

Today, our lead character, "Mouse" was sick and once again the others stepped up and agreed to swap roles around and enlist help from another student to make the play happen. They were magnificent! All they had was a quick run through and they performed twice today. Once for Y3 and 4 and once for the original audience. They will get one more chance next Monday for the oldest students in Y5 and 6 and I am sure this will be equally impressive.

Today was hectic in the extreme. As well as our two performances, there were book marks to laminate, Scholastic orders to distribute and all the vendors arrived at once for the Book Fair and all wanted more tables. We have already cleared both art rooms and half the Library so that may have to be enough!

The selection looks superb! Different types from each supplier, which is just what I hoped for. Prices are also lower than I expected so hopefully the kids will get more than they expected for their money.

Book Week is here!

Book Week started yesterday. Laid the groundwork last week with letters home about the Book Fair and the Dress up day as well as a full page in the School Newsletter including details of the writing competition.

The Deputy Principal started things off with a rousing rendition of Anne Fine's "Return of the Killer Cat" to a Year 4 class. The students are really getting into the Favourite Teachers' Books competition and the Book marks are coming in thick and fast.

Our production of "The Gruffalo" will now be performed 3 times - to Y3/4 tomorrow followed by Nursery, Foundation, Y1 & 2 and then again at the Y5/6 Assembly next Monday. There has also been agreement for a parade on Friday. This will be a little bit of a logistical nightmare but what's a bit of chaos with everything else that's going on.

Can't organise an Assembly as the competitions will not all be judged until next week or the week after plus we have moved stuff around to make our Gruffalo stage so difficult to set up in the Library. Latest plan is to start a parade though the school with Y6 then Y5, 4, 3 etc until they parade through the Library then head back upstairs to collect bags etc to go home.

We'll see how it goes. Book vendors should be delivering tomorrow. Tables were supposed to be moved today after school but they were still in the art rooms when I left. Will have to follow up on that tomorrow morning as the vendors want to try and set up in the afternoon.

Scholastic order was delivered today so that also caused a bit of a buzz. The Scholastic reps will come tomorrow to make sure everything is there and sort it all out so the kids should have new books to take home tomorrow night then the Book Fair on Thursday/Friday.

The Book Dragon looks incredible - there are still some scales coming in and lots of comments/discussions going on.

Staff morale is still low, pay finally arrived but there are rumours about staff having their contracts terminated due to low numbers returning next year. Tough times and little sign of things improving.

Wonderful parents

The wonderful parents have done it again! Last week they planned and sorted out scenery and a script for my Library monitors to perform "The Gruffalo" to the little ones as Assembly next week. They found two back drops they had made of forests from previous shows and produced some curtains. We now have a stage in the Library and 9 very keen Y5/6 students practicing to be the Mouse, Owl, Fox, Snake etc....

The Literacy coordinator has also got on board and organised a creative writing competition to take place during Book Week, so suddenly it's all coming together.

Missed a couple of days at the end of the week due to a horrible cold/flu virus but went back in today and started to give out Book mark templates for the kids to colour.

Morale is very low amongst the teaching staff. Numbers of students are not really on the increase and many teachers have not had contracts renewed yet. Add to this the fact that salaries were late this month and people are starting to get a little concerned.

No orders have been placed, work on the gym/auditorium has been stopped since before CNY, and now this pay thing. Not looking too good really.

Two weeks until Book Week

Starting to build up momentum towards Book Week now. The Dragon project has proved very popular..such a fun thing to do. Lots of teachers have joined in too, including the two lovely lady PE teachers which has been brilliant.



The Parents have started to decorate the entrance hall this week and caused some raised eyebrows! They took some old books which had not sold at the last Book Fair and made a mobile from them. This did involve lots of tearing, cutting and stapling which caused me a few palpitations until I saw the results. They have created a stunning piece of art work but it is quite provocative. A couple of the teachers complained about the message we were sending the students so I sent a damage control mail outlining the creativity and imagination used in this piece of artistic recycling and things seem to have gone quiet again.

Next week I will be giving the students bookmark templates to take home and colour so that they can have a lasting reminder of Book Week.

Library skills are going quite well, Yr 3 and 4 are now doing an online survey to test what they have learned about Fiction organisation and the 5s are really getting into Dewey! Games and competitions certainly make it more interesting for me and hopefully the kids, but it does make for a lot of news as different teams vie to be the first to get the correct answer. Hard to design a quiet game, I find.

Still no functioning Oliver - I presented to the SMT last week about what should be available and that it wasn't. Not sure if it will make a big difference, once again a waiting game.

Still no orders, still no refund of the money I paid for Daily 7/10. Haven't even been paid yet.....this financial crisis is no joke anymore.

Library skills and the same old problems!

Started to do some actual Library skills work with some year groups now and it's quite frightening how much there is to do. I've started with a very basic alphabetical sorting exercise to get the Yr3 and 4 students thinking about how Fiction is organised. The second step is having them solve some hieroglyphic puzzles to work out Author names and then find books by that Author.

The puzzles are very popular and it has been interesting to see how they make connections to the Fiction section, or how they don't! Year 3 are slightly ahead and are onto their second week of solving. The second week was much better - we had a short review session and this time they stopped and thought about where they were going to look before rushing off in a mad dash around the Library.

For Year 5 we have started to discuss Dewey - who was he, what is DDC all about etc. The plan is to split them up into teams next time and start an adapted version of the "Dewey Idol" game I used to run at Kowloon Junior School.

For Year 6 we have been talking about research and introduced the Big 6. Also had some very frank discussions with them about why they don't come to, or borrow from the Library. No real surprises - lack of variety; lack of new books; many series that aren't complete; they have a better selection of books at home etc etc......... It has provided some more ammunition to push again about purchasing.

None of the PRs raised in Dec/Jan have actually been placed with suppliers. I sent copies of everything to the whole school Principal this week and stated my case that it is impossible to offer the library services we should be able to offer without new books. Many of our students have reading levels below where they should be and this really isn't helped by a Library which can't offer attractive reading material; current authors, AV materials to support EAL students; graphic novels .....the list is growing all the time!

The only new books we have had since I came are those from the Scholastic Book order credits, and donations from parents. Without those there would be nothing new.

Also lost our chance this week to bring Nury Vittachi from Hong Kong. I had arranged with two other schools to bring him during my Book Week but they have had to withdraw. A shame but it would be too expensive to bring him just for Rego. Will need to focus on bringing Margaret Read MacDonald next year and hope that works out.

Oliver Plus is still not operational. Really getting beyond a joke now. We have had the system installed for 6 weeks and have not been able to do very much. I am experiencing continual time out errors so can't even get on to the system. Once I get on, every time I try to change something there is another time out. I was able to import some catalogue records from Athena and add some student photos but that has been it.

Frustration and de-motivation are the words of the week. I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep positive when there is so much that can't be done.

Parent helpers have been brilliant, coming in to help with a wonderful Dragon for Book Week and new displays. Staff and students are also fantastic, so supportive and interested in Book Week plans and competitions. It's just such a shame that the owners seem more interested in making money than honouring the budgets that are supposed to be available to develop the school properly.

Work seems to have stopped completely on the outdoor facilities and new auditorium/gym. If I am feeling frustrated, I can't imagine how the PE teachers feel, working in a tiny space, around the size of a classroom while looking out the window at an almost finished football field and running track!

One frustration after another!

It's a long time since I last posted, more than 2 weeks. Our 3 week, extremely short half-term is over and we are now on holiday again for Chinese New Year. It was quite a hard 3 weeks, students were very unsettled and several either did not come back at all or left early for the next vacation.

As well as launching the new website and starting my new Library monitor activity, I published the Library skills programme that I want to start after Chinese New Year. It is very clear that the students need help in understanding how the Library is organised, some basics on book selection criteria, introduction to Non-fiction and the Dewey Decimal System and some research skills.

I have also been preparing for Book Week in the middle of March and have quite a few activities lined up. Nury Vittachi has confirmed that he is available to visit - I just need definite confirmation from the school that they cash will be available to pay for his time, accommodation etc. This is an area of concern as most of my purchase orders have not been placed and seem to have disappeared somewhere in purchasing. The purchasing asst I have been working left just before Chinese New Year so I am not quite sure what will happen now.

The Oliver system is installed but still not running properly. From the feedback received from Softlink Australia, this seems to be caused by technical problems at the school's end. We have tried to get these resolved but without much success at the moment. It is highly frustrating as we need to have functioning OPACs to stand any chance to teaching our students how to search and research effectively.

Seems like many of the items on the "To Do" list just seem to sit there at the moment with no resolution. Hopefully a number of these issue will be resolved when we return to school after the break.

End of Week 1

Strange week this week, children were very fidgety and hard to settle. Always difficult after a 3 week vacation but the atmosphere generally was a little unsettled. Quite a few students have left over the holidays and there are several more leaving at Chinese New Year with only a few new students coming in. Added to this, there are only 3 weeks until the Chinese New Year holiday and it makes for an unusual atmosphere.

On a more positive note, the website is coming along nicely. Launched it at the Monday Staff meeting and have started to add in topic links and get feedback from the teaching staff. Also introduced it to my new Library monitors at our Tuesday afternoon activity and they seemed quite happy. I have 9 students who spent their time on Tuesday drawing maps of the Library layout. It was a very worthwhile exercise and they all agreed there was much more to the Library than they had thought at the start. Next week, we are going to look at alphabetical order.

Last thing on Friday the Oliver conversion data came back so the big task for the coming week will be to get the IT techs to install it and see what it looks like. Fingers crossed it will be okay and we can get going any hiccups sorted out before CNY. Then there will be some great opportunities to share the OPAC with the students...they've never used one here before!

Couple of great parent helpers this week motivated me to start covering the new books. Between us we must have covered around 50 so the pile on the work table doesn't look half so daunting now. If we can get Oliver up and running, I can catalogue the new books and let the students borrow them which would be excellent.

Other exciting event next week is the first official meeting of the Shanghai Librarians Group. We will meet Rego and hopefully there will be about 6 - 10 attending. It will be brilliant to get things off the ground and start a professional network.

New term, new website

Back to school yesterday. Thankfully all the displays had survived the cold weather - I had expected to come in and find much of the display work on the ground but thankfully not.

Have been playing around with netvibes.com and started a new website to promote the library, http://www.netvibes.com/sris#SRIS_Primary_Library After a couple of visits from the IT team I have managed to make this the home page for the Library computers. It involved downloading Firefox onto all the machines as the graphics wouldn't work with IE6.

Netvibes is really easy to use, got lots of handy little widgets to add in feeds, weblinks and other useful stuff. Only hiccup at the moment is the inability to add in data files like excel or work but I am sure there will be a way around that.

Predictably lots of students have forgotten books but it is still busy with kids popping in and out throughout the day.

I am plagued by an annoying dry cough which is making story telling a little hard, I have had to resort to Tumble books today but the kids seem to like it.

Starting my first Library Monitor acitivity this afternoon - should have 8 year 5/6s who want to learn more about the Library.