CPD+Notes

toc =NOTES FROM CPD DAY=

Some notes from our first ALESS Professional Development day last Friday, as a reminder for those of us who attended and also to serve as a sort of quick-start guide for those who were unable to attend. Our day started with a great welcome from the Head of the Canadian International School, Mr. Dave McMaster, who is obviously a strong supporter of Carolyn and her team in their fantastic Library.


 * Session 1:**

Wikis in school libraries
= = A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Many of us are already members of the ALESS Wikispace http://aless.wikispaces.com/ and during the first session, Dana introduced us to a training space http://sandboxforaless.wikispaces.com/ where we were able to have a go at editing our own page and inserting links, photos and embedding objects, such as video clips from “Youtube.”
 * Dana Dukic**

For those who are still to take these first steps, wikispaces have a great introductory tour which gives you a step by step guide to joining up and getting started, http://www.wikispaces.com/site/tour#introduction

A bit of time to play around seems to be the best way to get familiar with how things work. Perhaps for those who weren’t there, join the “sandboxforaless”, create a page and try things out.

There are some great features such as the //History// page which shows what has been added/deleted and by who; also the //Discussion// page where students/educators can comment on the pages. There is also a //Notification Feature// to allow you to receive updates when a page has been changed.

Dana has provided us with some examples of how wikis are being used in education http://sandboxforaless.wikispaces.com/Background+information, and she also demonstrated where she has used them successfully with students doing collaborative projects on Weather & Space. Dianne also gave examples of how wikis are being used at Renaissance College to create Library policy and procedure documents, as well as a Fun wiki used by her family.


 * Session 2:**

Using Skype

 * Bryant McEntire**

SKYPE is already in use by several members of ALESS, mainly as a communication tool to keep in touch with family members, but also for conference calls and calling from computer to landline as the call prices are relatively cheap. Free SKYPE software can be downloaded from [|www.skype.com] and installed quite easily. There are some great User Guides available at http://www.skype.com/help/guides/ which give step-by-step instructions on how to open an account and use all the different features, such as adding in friends and colleagues.

Privacy settings can be set to only accept calls/videos from people on your contact list and all contacts need to be accepted by the user, making this quite a secure system for use in education.

Whilst a microphone and webcam make it possible to see/hear the other person and enjoy a live video call, there is also a chat facility allowing up to 100 people to chat together at a time.

Bryant demonstrated how successful this could be for real time “Battle of the Books” friendly matches by inviting us all to chat with Angela Cleeton in Beijing and participate in a couple of friendly BOB questions. Using the Chat facility it is also possible to send quite large files to participants in a very short space of time. During the session, Bryant sent each of us an excel file containing the BOB titles/authors.

Each of us set up our monitor to show the SKYPE Chat on one side of the screen and the excel file on the other. Bryant copied a question from his master list of questions into the chat window and it was up to one of us to copy/paste or type the correct title/author into the window in the time allowed.

In this way, it could be possible for us to arrange friendly matches without having to take our students out of school. (A suggestion was made that we create a SKYPE page in our wiki with User Names for participating schools)

Other suggested uses could be to invite Guest Speakers such as Storytellers to use SKYPE to visit our schools.


 * Session 3:**

Using Web 2.0 Technologies

 * Minica Morscheck / Dianne McKenzie**

Monica introduced us to some research she has carried out at GSIS to assess her Library services. Using qualitative and quantitative methods she identified areas where she could improve her services. For the qualitative results she used questionnaires and interviews to establish her responses and for the quantitative results she used an online survey provided by [|www.zoomerang.com]. Zoomerang was chosen because it is quick and easy to use and provides results in statistical data format.

From the results of her research she has identified that she should let her students know about new books in the Library so she has created a blog to show which new books have arrived in the Library.

Dianne has also used Zoomerang with staff at AISHK to survey Library services there and she has created another survey on Author visits which we are all invited to complete as part of her ongoing research. Details of the surveys, and Monica’s blog are available on our ALESS wiki page, http://aless.wikispaces.com/Zoomerang+and+other+Web+2.0+applications

Dianne has also included some other Web 2.0 technologies that may be of use to us both for surveys and other collaborative projects.

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