SILC-Asia Update

Many of you are already members of SILC-Asia -- the School International Library Cooperative ASIA, an EARCOS (East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools) affiliate.

If not, you should join.... Read the update below......

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Dear SILCAsia members,

Sorry, this has been a bit late in coming, but it's been a busy month, to say the least! (I've also had problems sending emails to this group from my gmail account. Anyone else facing this problem?)

Welcome!

Firstly, I'd like to welcome the five new members who have joined SILCASia as a result of a great cohort group at the recent Learning 2.011 Asia Conference in Shanghai! As usual, the librarian cohort was one of the most productive and dynamic of the 14 cohorts at this conference, with 15+ librarians attending and lots of resources being shared. If you are interested in seeing who was there and what came out of our meetings, take a look at the wikispace that Ann Krembs, our cohort leader, put together for us to share what we've learned. http://l2librarians.wikispaces.com/

Learning 2.011 Asia

During this conference, not only did we all attend some great technology workshops on everything from GoogleApps, to Twitter, to Creative Commons and digital media, but we also had the chance to meet four times as a cohort to discuss technology in the library. We talked about e-books, the role of the librarian, the library program (curriculum) and shared great technology tools and ideas. In particular, we talked about Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) for librarians – how are we communicating with each other, sharing and learning from each other? Of course, SILCAsia came up as a great forum for doing just this! We hope to continue using this Yahoo! Group, as well as the SILCAsia wikispace http://silcasia.wikispaces.com/ to share good practice, including ideas on buying and using ebooks, authors coming to Asia, programs in place in libraries around Asia, consortium pricing,  and other topics of interest to us as librarians in international schools in Asia.

Sharing & Communicating

Looking at what we have in these two sites, I would see that we could use them as follows:

SILCAsia Wikispace – a great place to place links to local PLNs, to school library websites, etc (under country categories)

SILCAsia Yahoo! Group – not only a helpful mailing group where we  can ask questions of each other etc. but also a place where we can:

·         Check archived messages from the listserv
·         Upload files to share with others (booklists, lesson ideas, curriculum documents, articles etc)
·         Share photos (events, library facilities, etc)
·         Share links (great library resources, etc)
·         Create a poll to survey SILCasia members
·         Enter an event in the group's calendar which you'd like everyone to know about
·         New Apps:
o   Recommended Books – here's a place for us to continue sharing those great reads (to see our initial list from the conference, go to the wiki page above!)
o   People Map – put yourself on the map! It would be great to see where we all are in Asia!!
o   RSVP – create an event and invite SILCAsia members (e.g. EARCOS 2012)

Please share these links with other librarians in the region. The larger the group, the more resources we can tap into to make school libraries in Asia dynamic and cutting edge!

Have a good rest of the week,

Stephanie Wallis

Secondary Teacher-Librarian & Library Coordinator

New International School of Thailand