School Libraries and Pinterest

Pinterest is a great tool for the school library here are some idea on how you can make this social media tool work for you.

If you haven't already discovered it, Pinterest is an online bulletin board for your favourite images. You do need an to set up an account but you don’t need to use your real name and it’s perfectly possible to set up an account just for the school library (though it does need an email, Facebook or twitter account).

You ‘pin’ images onto ‘boards’ and you can have as many of these ‘boards’ as you want i.e. recommended reads, dark romance, homework help… Like any social media you can see and ‘follow’ what others have ‘pinned’ to their ‘boards’ and add comments. You can search the site by subject, topic or theme and look at ‘pins’, ‘boards’ and people.

Copyright issues have been flagged but Pinterest encourages ‘pinners’ to link directly to the source of their images and adhere to best practice. The main problems with copyright come from ‘repinning’ an option to ‘pin’ an image someone else has already ‘pinned’. It is worth double checking where they pulled the image from and making sure you link to the original source (you can also comment on their pin and add the right URL so they can fix their link).

I’m sure for those not technically minded that all seems like gobble-de-gook but it’s actually a very easy site to use and because it’s image based, very visual. So here are some ideas on how you can use Pinterest in the school library:

1.    Collect inspiration – for displays, programs, classes, costumes...

2.    Share reading lists.

3.    Share links to sites for classes/topics/ homework/ eBooks/ etc.

4.    Collaborate with other librarians, teachers, pupils and share ideas, recommendations. (You can add ‘contributors’ to the ‘boards’ so lots of people can add to that ‘board’)

Want more ideas? Take a look at Lee Loftland's list of 20 Great Ways Libraries are Using Pinterest for more suggestions and links to other library pinners.

SLA Posters

As a member of SLA you can access a range of materials including posters like this one, specially created for Scottish School Libraries.

Staging an Interschool Spelling Competition

For the past four years my school, St David’s High School in Dalkeith, has entered a team of S1 pupils into “The Times” Spelling Bee Championship: this has involved them practicing together at lunchtimes with the help of “The Times” Spelling Bee website (http://www.timesspellingbee.co.uk) and then competing against other schools from around Scotland. 

All the pupils who took part said that the experience had helped them improve their vocabularies as they often looked up words which they did not know.  The pupils also commented that their teamwork and communications skills had improved and they had enjoyed the opportunity to meet pupils from other school areas.

During a Midlothian School Librarians Network meeting, we discussed “The Times” Spelling Bee Championship and the positive impact it had had on my pupils.  As a result, we decided it would be a good idea to try and stage our own interschool spelling competition. There are six secondary schools in Midlothian: Beeslack Community High School, Dalkeith High School, Lasswade Community High School, Newbattle High School, Penicuik High School and St David’s High School.  It was agreed that the event would be organised by the School Librarians, in conjunction with the English Departments of all the schools and that the first competition would be held at Dalkeith Campus, which is shared by two of the schools (one of which is mine). As I had the most experience of this type of competition, I volunteered to make the arrangements for a pilot event.

When I looked at how the competition would be staged, it became clear that it would be necessary to obtain sponsorship in order to fund both the transport for competing teams to travel to Dalkeith (even with the use of our school minibus!) and suitable prizes - £10 Amazon vouchers for each of the winning team and a Shield for their school. I approached the local Co-operative store in Newtongrange and was lucky enough to be awarded £100 from their charity/community fund.

As we intended to follow the same format as “The Times” Spelling Bee, I felt it was important to contact them for permission, which was duly granted.   It was also vital that the competition had a strong identity and so we asked pupils from the various schools’ book clubs to suggest a name and a logo which could be used for advertising and award certificates for all the participants. Finally, I booked the school’s assembly hall and arranged to borrow a P.A. system from the Music Department. 

The first Midlothian “Spell Masters” competition was held in September 2012 and saw teams of three S2 pupils from each school compete in two rounds, one individual round and one team round.  To ensure impartiality, Philip Wark, Midlothian’s Public Library Services Manager was the judge and Elaine Robertson, Library Supervisor at Dalkeith Public Library was the quizmaster. After much excitement, with the two top teams literally neck and neck throughout and extra rounds required, the competition went to a (quickly improvised) “sudden death” round to declare Beeslack Community High School, the Midlothian Spell Masters for 2012.

The pupils loved it and can’t wait until this year’s competition, which will be hosted at the defending champions’ school.

  
Colin Orr is the School Librarian at St. David's High School in Dalkeith.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2013 SLA(S) newsletter.

‘A Book a Day Keeps the Blues Away’

Miles Kelly Publishers are running ‘A Book a Day Keeps the Blues Away’ campaign they want to help spread the joy of reading to children who may be stuck indoors over the February half term period.

From 8 February, they will be giving away books on their social media for 14 days. To enter to win, all you have to do is follow the instructions of each post and either ‘like’ and share giveaways on Facebook, or ‘like’ and retweet giveaways on Twitter.

Elmer Day - May 2016

On Saturday 28th May 2016 Andersen Press are launching the first ever Elmer Day and we want YOU to be part of it!

It will be an annual celebration with hundreds of events taking place up and down the country.

Join in the fun by holding your own Elmer Day event in your library.

Sign up at www.elmer.co.uk/elmerday to receive an Elmer Day event pack.

JYHS Library presents Comic Con

Comics have always been something I’ve loved, perhaps because of my dyspraxia, I adore illustrations that tell stories.  As a kid I devoured Asterix (though I missed a lot of the word jokes) and my Grandad would keep the daily comics from his newspaper for me – Calvin and Hobbes still makes me laugh.  

Over my time at the school I’ve found pupils are increasingly asking for comics – usually DC or Marvel. In response I decided to run a comic club this year (shadowing the Stan Lee Excelsior Award as part of it) and the pupils were keen to have a comic con as one of their activities.

Comic Cons cover far more than just comic books often taking in wider geek culture including anything from The Muppets to Marvel but we decided that for this first year Scottish comics was to be our focus. A team of three pupils, Stephen Toman (English teacher) and myself hatched a plan - 42 pupils for a full day of comic fun in the library. As this type of thing hadn’t been done before there were lots of things we didn’t know – like would anyone want to come except us?

It turns out that pupils did indeed want to come but as usual for teenagers they were worryingly slow signing up. In the end I could have sold another dozen tickets but I didn’t know that until the day before! On the day itself  every pupil was given a pass (colour coded to match photo permissions) and I issued a wee information pack beforehand which included the programme, cosplay and general rules - after all rules still apply even if you are dressed as god.

The pupils organising felt a big part of comic con experience was cosplay so the opportunity was given for dressing up and prizes awarded for the best costume. This proved to be very popular and nearly all of the pupils attending dressed up.  We also ran a comic book stall at lunch (shopping was also felt to be key) that gave them a chance to pick up some cheap back issue comics (ordered from ebay and checked for appropriateness before selling).

Staffing was much easier Stephen and I were there all day and I pulled in teacher comic book fans to help with various bits including cosplay checks at the start and a Q&A panel. I also got the library monitors to help with set up and staging along with the three comic club members.

Finding speakers wasn’t as hard as I feared as Stephen has a couple of friends working within the comic industry – James McCulloch who writes the comic ‘City of Lost Souls’ (it’s very adult so he talked about the history of Scottish comics and how he got into it) and Jess Byrne who is an illustrator with her own webcomic, ‘The God Stone’ (who did live a drawing based on pupil suggestions and shared her experiences). I was also lucky enough to get funding from Scottish Book Trust to get Metaphrog (John Chalmers and Sandra Marrs) who shared their process, influences and got the pupils creating their own characters. The afternoon session then took this further as pupils tried writing their own comic book with Stephen’s help.

The day was a huge success words like epic, fantabulous and inspired were all over our evaluation sheets, as were calls to do it again. One of the S6 helpers even got paid work from the contacts she made. Though I think my favourite bit of feedback was a pupil bemoaning the fact they’d missed it saying ‘they didn’t think it was going to be so good’.

Kateri Wilson-Whalley is the school librarian at The James Young High School, Livingston.

This article originally appeared on the Scottish Book Trust blog.