Topic: Young People’s Book Awards

Activity: Create and Upload a Virtual Presentation for children or young adults.

In order to promote and learn more about book awards for children and young adults, I created and uploaded a presentation to Slideshare introducing this topic. While I have made a number of presentations prior to this exercise, I had never used an online program such as Slideshare to do so. When designing the presentation, I wanted to keep it simple and straightforward as my intended audience were children and young adults. A presentation of this kind would be useful during Book Week for example, to give students a brief overview of the various book awards that are presently running.

What did you learn?

Online presentations are a popular way of expressing information, sharing knowledge and teaching. Before I began making my presentation I started by viewing some of the many slide presentations available on Slideshare and was surprised by the enormous range of presentations available. I was also impressed by how professional the presentations appeared and intended to try making a similar presentation using the Slideshare software.

How was the activity relevant to your professional practice as a librarian for children and young adults?

In my role as a Children’s Librarian in a public library, I present to a wide range of groups and age ranges on a variety of topics. Presenting information, be it virtual or otherwise, is a useful method of engaging with children and young adults. Most groups that I have visiting in the library or that I visit during outreach sessions are under one hour, therefore presentations need to be succinct and precise. Often presentations can be followed up with further research or study under the guidance of the teacher, so a presentation usually does not require excessive information or detail. Learning to create and upload virtual presentations is a very useful activity as  such presentations can be embedded into the library website, shared through online media such as the library Facebook page and shared with schools and other community groups.

Were any gaps in your knowledge revealed?

Prior to this activity, I was unaware of how many presentations were available to view and use via such websites as Slideshare. With further investigation, I am sure that there are a number of presentations that I could use either for training purposes or for the same purpose as the presentation I created; for sharing information to children and youth. I found the Slideshare program to be rather difficult to use and edit, therefore I created the presentation in Office Powerpoint and uploaded it to the Slideshare website.

Reflection

Young People’s book awards are extremely important in acknowledging the quality and importance of literature for children and young adults. There is an amazing breadth of quality and talent in this category of author and illustrator and having this talent recognised nationally promotes the value and importance of literature for children. I decided to keep my presentation focused just on awards in Australia, as the presentation could become overwhelming for the intended audience if I started covering awards in other countries.

In Australia, the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) has one of the most highly recognised group of awards, including the Book of the Year Awards for Older Readers, Younger Readers, Early Childhood and Picture Book of the Year. The judges are selected from each state with panel criteria requiring them to be involved in the industry, but with no vested interests, such as a teacher or librarian (MacLeod, 2011, p. 29). The CBCA has maintained a standard of literary quality in their selection of short listed and winning books and as stated by MacLeod (2011, p. 33) leaves the promotion of popular children’s books to the state based choice awards. Both type of award is important in the overall promotion of literacy and the relevance of books and reading however the involvement of children’s popular choice awards allows young people the opportunity to make choices regarding their favourite books without the intervention of adults (Court, 2011, p.155).

To view the presentation: https://www.slideshare.net/secret/eioKau5h8tuprS

References

Court, J. (2011). Read to succeed: strategies to engage children and young people in reading for pleasure. Retrieved from http://www.eblib.com

Mcleod, M. (2011). The Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year and the image problem. Access. 25(1), 27-34. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au