Friday, May 5th: ISLN Celebration Party at the NLB Pod.....

A reminder that we are finalizing the numbers for our End-of-Year ISLN Party on starting at 6:30pm, Friday, May 5, 2017, in The Pod at the top of the National Library Board (NLB) main building, 100 Victoria St.

This is a farewell to three key members -- Katie Day (UWCSEA East), Jacqui Makselon (Tanglin) and Ben Farr (Tanglin).

Two were on the first Hands on Literacy committee that was behind the substantial funds that we hold, and, all of whom were founding members of ISLN.

We also have several members who have or will turn 60 in the past year (Pam Males, Graham Grant, Jane Hayes, Katie Day, Pat Chandler, and Barb Reid).

These seem like great reasons to have a fabulous end-of-year event.

Member schools are invited to bring any or all of their current library staff for free and non-members are welcome to attend for the small amount of $10.   NB:  You must renew your membership before the AGM on April 20th in order to qualify for the free attendance of you and your library staff.

You are also welcome to invite other guests who you feel have been supporters of ISLN or supporters of those people whose contribution we are celebrating.   See the recent email to the ISS-LN Google Group with instructions about how to suggest people to be invited and to confirm you and your library staff's attendance.

Attendance will be limited to the first 150 people.

Red Dot Voting -- has begun!

Yes, it's time again for the winners to be determined.....

March 1 through May 1 is the voting season -- for each school to decide which book in each of the four Red Dot reader categories is the winner for them..... and then we tally all the votes to say which book wins for all of Singapore.

As the Red Dots are a "children's choice" award (after we librarians have come up with the shortlists), only students may vote.  And the rule is one vote per student per category (Early Years, Younger Readers, Older Readers, and Mature Readers). 

There is no minimum number of books that must be read (though we assume you have read at least two - as voting implies comparison between two or more things.)

Simply one vote per student per category.

There is an online Google Form for voting on the Red Dot website:  http://www.reddotawards.com/voting

Or you can direct your students to the voting form via this short URL:   bit.ly/reddotvoting2017

If you collect votes in your school in some other way, there is a form for librarians to tell us what your local votes are (so they can be included in the country-wide tally): https://goo.gl/forms/iiM97QPqgkOyjHlo1

One week later the Singapore-wide winners will be announced on the Red Dot website.

There is a Voting Poster you can use to advertise the event:

 To download a size suitable for A3 printouts, go to the Red Dot Voting webpage:  http://www.reddotawards.com/voting

News about EPIC!

https://www.getepic.com

After the discussions about EPIC at LKSW2017 I have been writing back and forth and finally, have some firm news to report.

My contacts are MaryAnn (Support) & Tahleen (Sales & Marketing), these are the issues we have resolved. 

1. Concerns over international schools signing up when they state that it is only available to educators in USA, Australia, Canada, Great Britain and NZ.

2. How to handle 1:1 devices

Regarding item 1 - I asked

“Can I tell my Network to write to Epic if they want to use the product and request an exception for access? That way you can track who wants it and why. My networks are International School Library Connection and International Schools Libraries Network.

If they wrote introducing themselves and requesting access you would know that they are genuine users who want to respect your terms and conditions and promote personal subscriptions- most of these people are American, Canadian, Australian or British teachers working in schools that serve students of those nationalities and delivering one of those countries curriculums.”

and MaryAnne replied

“We would be happy to review each request that is sent to Epic! directly and I’ll be sure to alert my team as well. “

So, they are aware and I believe that if you introduce yourselves theynwill answer favourably. If you have a problem please let me know and I will follow-up.

Regarding item 2 - the answer was

“When an educator signs out of the app, students will not have access to the app until their teacher signs back into the app. All the student profiles are contained within the educator account and students would need to access their profile through the educator account. Students have no way of accessing their profile unless the educator is already signed or logged into the Epic! app. If a student is at home attempting to log into their profile without the educator being signed in on their device, the student would not be able to access their student profile.”

Therefore, as long as the devices are signed out of the teachers account before leaving school, students can use EPIC on their 1:1 devices. This would mean that the teacher would need to sign everyone in (we do this - the kids put in the teacher’s email and we quickly scoot around putting in the password) or the teacher could change the password after they had signed out so that each time they use it they input a different password.

My feeling is that EPIC are very happy to work with us as long as we promote their product to parents. It is a great product, so personally, I don’t find this hard to do. I am building some answers to FAQ at our school at http://ask.uwcsea.edu.sg/search/?t=0&q=epic

- please feel free to submit any questions that you might have as to how we use EPIC there as it will help me to build my database.

Happy reading - Barb