#5 - Getting a LITTLE behind but reflecting on practice

From http://www.njlibraries.org/Resources/success.htm

So bloggers.  Here we are...thing 5. Where did the time go?! I love writing this blog but I am becoming increasingly aware that it's yet another professional thing that I feel guilty about not updating more (along with Twitter, Linked In etc etc etc) so I am going to try and find a regular time slot to assign to this.  I'm all about schedules and deadlines and lists, I'm one of those librarians. You know, the ones you thought only existed in 1950's films and early 20th Century novels.

I actually did all the reflective practice research and prep a couple of weeks ago but I've been really struggling to get something that doesn't sound completely idiotic down on screen. The first problem I had was actually learning what was meant by Reflective Practice.  I had a good look at the sites that the CPD23 blog recommended and really found the presentations useful (The Purpose of Reflective Practice and Journaling and Reflective Practice if you can't find them on the blog post). They helped me to establish both what the term means and how (and indeed if) I use reflective practice in my professional life. 

I think the thing that I have learned first and foremost is that I'm fairly adept at reflecting immediately how I can change a situation but not so good at analysing after the event and physically writing anything down.  I work in a school and so I am subject to a huge number of departmental, school and individual improvement plans but it's becoming more and more clear to me that I need to start writing down things that I do and actually analysing the event/project, not just waiting for the perfect time to do it. Like finding time to blog, I'm afraid the perfect moment is just never there! That way, my improvement plans and (eventual , I hope) chartership process will be a much smoother process!

For now, I am going to concentrate on writing.  I won't analyse what I'm writing too heavily and I'm going to try not to go back and delete everything just because I think I sound silly (I've gone some of the way to getting used to writing by doing this blog, it's still a rather odd experience but I'm definitely getting used to it!). The, I can concentrate on actually improving my professional practice and eventually, like the picture above, become SUPER LIBRARIAN!

Thing 4 - Current Awareness - Swings and Roundabouts

Howdy CPD23ers!

I'm very aware that its been quite a while since my last blog entry.  I would love to pretend that something super exciting/terrible had happened to me which would explain the lack of blogginess. Really, I'd love to. Unfortunately it is very much down to working lots and sleeping pretty much all of the rest of the time! Yes, my life is that boring (although I really don't hate having to spend some weeks working way harder than the others. Being a librarian in a school means coming to terms with the peaks and troughs of the school year).

Let me start with what I actually could achieve on Thing 4.  I have been on Twitter for 3 years, 2 months, 4 weeks, 1 day, 3 hours and 5 minutes according to how long have you been tweeting and it that time I have sent 2698 tweets.  In the grand scheme of things this is a tiny tiny drop in the enormous ocean of Twitter but considering I took a break from Twitter for about 2 years after I originally signed up I think I'm doing pretty well.  I use my twitter mostly to receive information and pass it along to my followers.  I follow an eclectic mix of friends, library professionals and people in the spotlight who tweet intelligent and articulated views.  I'm a huge fan of Twitter but this is because I found a way of using it that works best for me.  My usage increased a huge amount once I got an iPhone app to use it with and now I rarely, if ever, use it on my computer.  I also realised that I was never going to tweet anything that would become international news so I essentially stopped shouting into the wind and just started enjoying the fabulous network of people that I follow and find me interesting enough to follow me.

I am also a huge fan of RSS feeds.  I work with a VLE called Fronter in my school, and one of the simple yet awesome things that you can do is add RSS feeds into your Fronter homepage for others and you to see them. It means that I don't have to trawl through my favourite blogs every other day because frankly, I do not have time to do this.  I can scroll down my Fronter homepage, see what is new and decide what I'm going to read. Genius! I have also added the CPD23 feed onto my iGoogle homepage so it is there to greet me with tasks whenever I log in.  Geek perfection!

That is the good things that I managed to achieve for this task....Storify on the other hand is something that I could not get to grips with! I went to the site, I registered and unforunately I got really bored trying to make something.  To be honest, I probably didn't try quite as hard as I should have but I don't really see the point.  I'm a particularly uncreative person and making a Powerpoint is a little bit beyond me (don't even get me started on how difficult I'm finding it to learn how to use Prezi!) I promise, come the Summer holidays I shall try Storify again, but for the moment there are far more interesting and pressing things at hand!