Edubeacon

Today the School Library Assoc of Victoria held another of its conferences for library technicians and assistants. Over the last few years, they’ve been very successful and practical professional learning for library support staff and others.

As the conclusion to the day, I presented the plenary session entitled “Setting up your iGoogle desktop” which was a time to reflect on the day, encourage commitment to one project that can be implemented in the workplace this week and guide delegates through the process of setting up iGoogle as a personal portal. As promised, here are some of the resources mentioned during my presentation.

Getting your head around RSS is an essential skill for today’s library staff. Video links and other information explaining RSS and other tools are here.

Use of the social bookmarking and in particular Delicious is another effective means of sharing web resources with teachers.

Setting up your iGoogle homepage is useful in bringing all your web resources into the one place.  This can be a mixture of both professional and personal favourites and is a great tool for students.  Similar tools that may be preferred by some are Pageflakes and Netvibes.  They are all free and easily mastered with the investment of some ‘exploration time’.

Delegates were particularly encouraged to participate in the Create your Personal Learning Network  online course provided by SLAV and the State Library of Victoria that starts next week.  This is a 12 week online course with weekly support sessions conducted via Elluminate.  With so much to learn in our rapidly changing school library environments, it’s wonderful to see such a willing group of library staff sharing the learning.