Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Using the Living Dead To Teach Information Literacy


The staff at McPherson College's Miller Library in Kansas has come up with a unique information literacy tool: zombie attack.

The library has just released an online 23-page library guide in graphic novel format called Library of the Living Dead that features students taking cover in the library from zombies run amok on campus, and the flight to safety becomes a point of departure for a blood-stained lesson, replete with decapitations, in the Dewey Decimal system and other library tools.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

BC Library History

http://bclibraries.org/thelibrarybook/index.html

THE LIBRARY BOOK

BOOK LAUNCH

April 7, 2011

St Andrew's Presbyterian
Victoria, BC

7:00pm

Courier letters

Big Brother bureaucrats target school libraries

Teacher-librarians enjoy autonomy

Diversity Team saves lives

'Diversity Team' dictates morality in schools


Vancouver’s teacher-librarians keep books in student hands


Ironically, exactly as Mark Hasiuk was working himself up into a lather over the deplorable conditions in Vancouver schools where strict compliance with the forcible removal and banning of classical literature and other worthwhile books is overseen by The Group of 6 Bureaucrats (“Vancouver school bureaucrats target children’s literature,” Feb. 28), Canadians celebrated Freedom to Read Week, Feb. 20-26.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

LA Unified School District to EliminateAll CertifiedLibrarians


All certified school librarians in the Los Angeles Unified School District will lose their positions next school year if efforts to close the district’s $640 million budget shortfall fail.

Monday, March 14, 2011

HarperCollins sets checkout limits on library e-books


As of March 7, HarperCollins e-book titles licensed to Canadian schools and public libraries come with a new restriction: after 26 checkouts, they self-destruct.

Young hockey players hit the ice, then the books


His skills as a defenceman catapulted him to the major juniors, but by age 19 the dream of an NHL career had faded. He enrolled in university. That’s where, while trying to read a biology text for class, he realized his reading skills were too weak for him to keep up. “Here I was and I only knew one thing in life: hockey, and nothing else.”

Teacher-librarians refute notion of book-banning in Vancouver schools


Two weeks ago, I wrote about a book-banning effort in Vancouver public schools led by the district’s so-called Diversity Team, a six-member troop of bureaucrats operating out of the school board building on West Broadway.

Friday, March 11, 2011

2010–11 BC Education Facts



Staffing: Learning Specialist Teachers 
  • The number of FTE learning specialist teacher positions fell significantly over the last decade, decreasing from 7,185.67 FTE positions in 2001–02 to 5,970.35 in 2009–10. 
  • Learning specialist teaching positions decreased by a further -197.38 FTE positions in 2010-11, based on the most recent budget estimates*. 
  • There are now 1,412.70 fewer FTE learning specialist teacher positions in 2010–11 than in 2001–02. 
  • Library Services (-28.5%) and English as a Second Language (-28.6%) programs lost the highest proportion of learning specialist teachers over the decade.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

BC Book Prizes 2011


The West Coast Book Prize Society is thrilled to announce the finalists for the 2011 BC Book Prizes. Congratulations to the authors and their publishers!

Thursday, March 3, 2011

World Read Aloud Day: March 9, 2011

World Read Aloud Day: March 9, 2011

Celebrate the Power of Words and Stories and Take Action for Global Literacy

Nearly 1 billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their name. What would you miss most if you could not read or write? Imagine your world without words.