NaNoWriMo 2011

The last few weeks have been a bit of a blur* but we're now seven days into November, and we all know what that means.  NaNoWriMo is GO!

This year we have a staggering 59 students signed up to take part with us, and some added extras too: the younger brothers and sisters of some of our students who are still in Primary school but who have signed up and are working with us in our virtual classroom and visiting the library for the after-school write-ins.  The down side f numbers like this is that we only have 21 computers in the library, and they're heavily over used even when there aren't nearly 60 novelists trying to bash out 50,000 words before the end of the month.  We've been saved though, by Mrs Wilkins in ICT who has allowed our writers to use one of the ICT rooms most lunchtimes, and by Ms Twomey in MFL who has offered us use of their IT room too.

Additional salvation has come in the form of a very generous investment from our dedicated PTA, who have funded the purchase of ten new netbooks for use in the library.  This is a move that we couldn't have hoped to make with our current budget and makes a very significant difference to what we can offer our students. Once lending agreements have been drawn up and signed, there will also be the opportunity for these machines to be loaned out to students who don't have computers of their own, which will be a huge help to them during coursework crunch times.

So far our novelist have written a staggering 264,314 words, and we're beating the US school who challenged us to a Word War by 19% to 17%, which may seem like a small margin, but their target wordcounts are significantly lower than ours!  The level of ambition shown by our students is truly remarkable.  Almost as remarkable as the sheer numbers of snacks they can get through...



*This is not an exaggeration, have been ill and everything has been distinctly fuzzy...

Technology Fail

The servers hosting our library software, the rather impressive Eclipse.net, are having communication problems today, so we’re slowly issuing everything manually and writing down every user who takes out every book. It’s a rather time consuming process but at least it means we can keep the whole library functioning as usual. It’s also an excellent test of whether I know where each and every subject can be found; so far today I have found cars, dinosaurs, psychology and vast numbers of fiction books. This confirmation that I know the collection so well is very comforting, as I’ve been here less than a year and I’m having to resist feeling slightly smug. Oh, I’m allowed to feel smug? Well, that’s alright then.

The Year 11 students who abandoned us two weeks ago (*sob!*) have been making good use of the library as a study space, and they’re quickly picking up the habit of maintaining peace and quiet and using the whole range of resources available, which will be great practise for them when they’re in sixth form.  Hopefully by mid-September we’ll be chock a block with people studying all the time. A full library is a happy library!

The Carnegie Shadowing scheme is going really well, and we’ve been able to get through an awful lot of reading already. Two of our students are rattling through the books at quite an alarming pace, but their enthusiasm is completely infectious and the reading habit and buzz about books in Year 7 is almost entirely down to their personal marketing techniques! The reservation queue for The Knife of Never Letting Go is getting ridiculous. Our Shadowing Site is looking good, and as you can see, they’re all being superb about posting their reviews, and the early discussions about a possible winner are already getting quite heated. We also made a video of their favourites so far. CILIP have announced a competition for the best use of the Shadowing Site, and we’re hoping hoping hoping that we’ll be in the running, as the prize is a chance to take 12 students to the Carnegie Awards ceremony, which would be amazing...