Tales from a Loud Librarian

Photo taken and shared on Flickr by SLJ I just had a very intense but wonderful weekend in St. Paul, MN with 200 other school librarians. Every year, for the last ten years, School Library Journal has sponsored a weekend where librarian leaders from across the US can convene and learn and talk and network and figure out how school librarians will save the world. We will you know, even if it is only one book or one kid at a time. It is called the SLJ Summit. The conference is free, and the many vendors help to provide meals and receptions where the librarians can spend time talking with their colleagues. It is very cool to be in a room with the many people that I follow on Twitter or through their blogs. It is impossible for me to process everything that I learned and talked about last weekend, but I thought that I would list some of the highlights here so that I can remember what the weekend meant to me. Slide from Dr. Mark Edwards' presentation The Summit opened...

This all began a couple of weeks before the holidays, but I have not had time to get it written down. It is such a wonderful example of 21st century learning that I wanted to share. A number of teachers have talked about asking students to create infographics to illustrate data. I was even helping 6th grade math students find websites to help them create graphs for an infographic project. The teacher just hadn't decided yet what the theme of the infographic would be, so curating sites on Sqworl was as far as they had gotten.  In the meantime, a class of juniors and seniors taking AP Environmental Science were using the start-up Infogr.am to create infographics illustrating various environmental land-use issues such as flooding, national parks, etc which they had previously researched. I heard that the students were not happy with the online software, so I visited the class to tweet out the students’ issues to the makers of Infogram. I was surprised at the speed within which I ...

During the last couple of weeks before the holidays, I participated in and watched two student activities that were engaging and demonstrated the 21st century skills of collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity at a level that made me proud to work at PFTSTA. I am going to tell the story of one of these examples in this post and save the other for another post.  All the Knowledge You Need to Survive College by Allie and Tiffany The top two students in the senior class were the only students taking Gifted Projects this past semester. In this course, they could design a project of interest to them that would carry them through the whole semester. Since they were both applying to a number of colleges, forefront in their minds was college and the process for taking the next step in their education. They seemed very confident about this process, but there was one aspect that both of them felt totally unprepared. They really thought their skills in clean...

I love being a school librarian. It is absolutely the best job in a school. I am going to date myself here, but I have been teaching for 31 years. I have been a librarian for two thirds of my career. For a little over half of that I worked in an elementary library, and now I have been in a 6th-12th grade setting since 2003. When I began in the library in 1991, I was lucky to have inherited an automated system. I never had to worry about those pesky cards in the back of the books. I did have a card catalog and for several years kept it up to date because I had no computers for the students. It was a great day when I could rid the library of that monster piece of furniture. http://quest.eb.com/images/300_1825105 Even with little technology, I loved the role that I played of finding the right book for the right kid and sharing stories in puppet and song form for the little ones. Finding information in the old days was hard because I never had a huge materials budget. I was always l...

This is Part II of a two part series about what I learned after attending the New Orleans unconference, Ed Camp on Saturday, July 7th at Trinity School. The day was divided into fourths, and I described the first two sessions in Part I . In this post, I will describe what I learned in the second two sessions. For session three, I began by having a long conversation with Valerie Burton . She teaches high school English in my district and is one of the organizers of Ed Camp. I really liked her energy and focus. I can imagine being a student in her class. I think that it would be amazing, though don't ask me to go back to being 17 again, that would be a nightmare. She told me a story of her principal walking into her classroom as the students were using their phones to post on their blogs. She was unable to get the mobile laptop lab for class that day, but she wanted to stick to her lesson plan. She knew that it was  against the school policy for the students to be using their p...

Yesterday, I attended Ed Camp in New Orleans . It is an unconference that educators have created around the United States to teach each other best practices for using technology tools in the classroom K-12. This was the second annual event in New Orleans. I could not attend last year and was excited to go this year. Okay, I am going to first vent here because I think this could be improved for next year. The beginning of the event in the morning was sooooo slow. I was getting restless and thought the day was going to be a waste because I arrived at 8:15, and the first session did not begin until 10AM. That is just too much time for sitting without a focus. If you ask me to come out on a Saturday in July, I want to be brought on board from the minute I walk in the door. I think that the two take-aways that we wrote to guide the sessions for the day should have been collected the minute that we walked in the door. The planning for the day could have been done much faster. I am just ...