Saturday saw a group of enthusiastic Teacher Librarians gather to attend the last major professional development activity for the 2008 year hosted by the Australian School Library Association of NSW.

It was a great day because though it was cloudy, the sun shone with all the smiles as we acknowledged the work of a fabulous teacher librarian from Delany College here in Sydney.

Jan Radford and Head Girl and Boy

Congratulations to Jan Radford for winning the Teacher Librarian of the Year Award from the Australian School Library Association.

I caught up with her Principal, and the Head Boy and Head Girl after the award ceremony. They were there to see Jan receive her award and join in the enthusiasm of the day. What they have not been part of is the many many years that Jan has devoted to keeping her school library at the forefront of learning through the years of change, adopting and promoting the best ways to encourage our young adults to become readers, writers, and young people of passion. Thanks Jan for all your work.

My workshop

I chipped into the day’s activities with a workshop on Social Bookmarking and RSS. I’ve run this type of workshop a number of different ways, but the focus today was not just on opening and getting into a tool, but more about what these two tools can offer us as professionals to manage our own information needs, as well as organise good learning opportunities for our students.

The usual handouts of course! But to to help the conversation along (and so people could go away and revisit the things we talked about ) I put together a demo site in Netvibes, which includes examples and some information for further reflection. We could have spent a day working on this!

Visit Heyjude’s Demo site to see what I mean.