Tour of Wellington Innovative Libraries

This week I had the privilege of being able tour three Wellington School libraries and challenge some of my thinking around how future focussed libraries might be.

We started the tour with the new Amesbury School– so new that Google Maps didn’t pick it up. Amesbury and it’s principal, Lesley Murrihy, impressed me with their openess and high trust model. Lesley had been in my ULearn pre-conference workshops last year and it was great to see the school’s QR codes in action.

Take a moment to view the photos I took on tour- made with Haiku Deck, a free, elegantly simple slideshow iPad app that emails you a Powerpoint of your slideshow should you wish!

 

Lesley explained that the library is like the living room of the school. I like that analogy. It’s where people come and talk, work, meet, share- it’s at the central core of the school. Amesbury  has a participatory model where the community – whanau, children, teachers- have a feeling of ownership.

As you step into the school you have to pretty much walk through the library. They don’t have specific times where children come and exchange their books, they’re not hung up on due dates to return books, eReaders are taken home with the books already downloaded. Children come to the library as they wish but with a timer as a necklace so that they don’t settle down on a comfy bean bag in the sun for too long and forget to return to the learning hub. High trust but with accountability.

Another idea I really liked was their development of 2 minute snippets of learning videos. As a new concept was learned short videos, made my children, were being developed and shared. Over time this will develop in to a rich record of learning and a resource for children to be able to revise and learn. The learning is becoming rewindable. Hat tip to Kevin Honeycutt for planting that idea in my head.

Amesbury had such a lovely feel to it. A great way to kick off our day. Thanks team.

 

4 thoughts on “Tour of Wellington Innovative Libraries

  1. Pingback: Life is not a race to be first finished » Blog Archive » Any Answers, Many Answers

  2. Hi Allanah,

    I’m the library based teacher at Amesbury but I must have been elsewhere when you came through. I’m sorry not to have met you as I’ve been following your blog for a while picking up handy hints. I read your posts on QR codes a while ago – thanks to your explanations and examples we now have QR codes on library books linked to book reviews written by students and published on the library blog.
    I’m glad you enjoyed your visit to Amesbury. We are fortunate to work in such a lovely environment with the library at the heart of the school.

    Regards,
    Carolyn

  3. Pingback: school libraries - Tour of Wellington Innovative Libraries | Libraries and Learning | Scoop.it

  4. Pingback: school libraries - Tour of Wellington Innovative Libraries | NZ School libraries | Scoop.it

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