Tales from a Loud Librarian

Sign at airport welcomes the librarians to Chicago On Friday, June 28th I left New Orleans after  being home only 36 hours after ISTE to attend ALA (American Library Association) in Chicago. I have been to the last two Annual ALA conferences and really wanted to attend this year too. Attending conferences is an expensive proposition. I was very lucky to win a scholarship along with six other librarians from EBSCO to attend this conference. You can read my winning essay here . If you are a librarian and want to attend ALA Annual or Mid-winter, you should apply next year. EBSCO paid for my conference registration and $1000 towards my travel. Our pictures and names were listed in the lobby of the McCormick Place Convention Center along with all the other ALA award winners. Below is a picture of that poster. Click on the picture to enlarge It was a rush to see my name hanging on the wall  The only requirement for this scholarship was to attend a breakfast on...

I returned home from ISTE and San Antonio on Wednesday evening. Today I had to unpack do some laundry and repack for my trip to Chicago for ALA. Too much to do and not enough time.  All award winners walked on stage during the opening session Lisa Valence and I showing off our new plaques ISTE is made up of many SIGs or Special Interest Groups. The SIGMS is the group for Media Specialists. Open here for a description of our project on the SIGMS website. There was also an online article written about the winning projects in the School Library Journal newsletter Extra Helping . Open here to read the article .  SIGMS breakfast John Spencer on left and Donna MacDonald on right One of my fav sessions of ISTE was the Mobile Flipped and Curated presented by a bevy of rock star librarians including: Joyce Valenza, Brenda Boyer, Gwyneth Jones, Michelle Luhtala and Shannon Miller. This is my storify that gives you the highlights of that talk with links ...

In August, we will be opening the new school year in a shiny new building. I will have a shiny new award to put on my wall in my new office. I have never had a library with my very own office. I can't wait to decorate the walls with this new plaque. Thanks ISTE and SIGMS for selecting the  collaborative  project that Lisa Valence and I created as the winner for the 2013 Technology Innovation Award at the secondary level. 

  In February, on a whim, my colleague, Lisa Valence and I applied for an ISTE award . ISTE is the International Society for Technology in Education . This particular award is sponsored by the SIG MS or the Special Interest Group Media Specialists. The president-elect for this group is a fellow school librarian in Louisiana, Tiffany Whitehead , and she sent me an email encouraging me to apply. This particular award is given for a collaborative project between the librarian and a classroom teacher. Our project was called, "Traveling to the Ninth Ward," and it began with the 7th grade students reading Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes and ended with a field trip to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. There is a huge technology component to this project which is why the ISTE SIGMS awarded us their Technology Innovation Award. Part of the award involves money to attend the ISTE conference in San Antonio in a few weeks. I haven't attended ISTE since it was held in...

Below is my acceptance speech for the AASL Information Technology Pathfinder Award Secondary. I wanted to post the entire speech because some of the people that I thank were not able to attend the luncheon where I received the award. This was definitely one of the huge highlights of a 30 year teaching career, 21 years as a school librarian.  Let me tell you that running a school library is the best job on Earth! Winning this award makes me smile, big time. I am very excited to accept this award from AASL today. Winning this helps validate for me all the hard work that I have done over my 30 years of teaching.  In ‘91 I left the classroom to become a school librarian. I took over a library that had a Macintosh SE computer running a circulation program that no one else in my district was using. I had to back up the library on dozens of floppy disks, and we still used a card catalog. Now let’s fast forward 21 years later, my students can download an app on the...

Click here to open article with picture I could not decide what to write next, and then I heard some news that I have to share. Last week I received word from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), a division of the American Library Association, that I was selected to receive the Information Technology Pathfinder Award for 2012. In June I will receive the award at the AASL awards luncheon held during the annual ALA conference in Anaheim. I applied for this award at the beginning of the year. It was the most intense application that I have ever had to do. There were twelve sections, and each section required anywhere from 500 to 1000 words. I used our winter break to fine tune the application which was due February 1st. By mid-January, I had finished it and sent it off. I tried not to think about it. I really had no clue if what I do in my postage stamp-sized library in Jefferson, LA could compete at the national level. Now I know that I can compete. That is...

The polls have opened for the annual Edublog Awards. I was shortlisted again this year for best librarian blog. You can vote once a day until December 14th. Open here to enter the voting booth.

When Lisa Valence and I heard that we won the Gale TEAMS Award in September, we thought that we would receive $2500 and that would be it. Who knew this was an honor that would keep on giving and giving, even several months later. Gale Cengage sent us to the American Association of School Librarian's Conference in Minneapolis in October and held a reception there in our honor. We have a year's subscription to Library Media Connection magazine, and we are waiting to receive the cash award along with $500 in Gale products and some Linworth products, too. Library Media Connection asked us to write an article for their magazine describing the collaborative project that we submitted for the award.  The icing on the cake is this marvelous video that Gale had produced about Patrick Taylor Academy and the project that we designed to teach the social studies research paper. The video was shown at the Gale booth in the exhibit hall during the AASL conference (over and over ag...

Region I winners for LACUE I am standing on the far right On Tuesday, November 29th, I accepted an award from the Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators. They gave me the Region I Educator of the Year Award. There are 8 regions in the state of Louisiana. I applied for the Leader of the Year Award which is designed for non-classroom personnel who exhibit exemplary use of technology for teaching and learning. The best candidate overall is selected as each region's Educator of the Year. I was excited to win that, then one person from each category is selected as the state winner. Okay, I wanted to win state, but you can't win everything.  I won the lovely certificate that you see me holding in the picture below and bragging rights too. 

In May, one of our English teachers asked if I would work on a grant with her. She was looking to fund sets of books to use for teaching her 7th graders. The grant was sponsored by Gale and Library Media Connection. It was not a whole lot of money, but we thought that it was real doable. For the Gale Teams Award we had to highlight a collaborative project that was designed to address a problem or need, explain our goals and strategies and how we met these objectives. During the 2010-11 school year, Lisa Valence and I worked together to help the students write the research paper for the annual social studies fair. We broke down the research process in small bites for the students, and we felt that we had succeeded in achieving our goals. This was the program that we highlighted in the grant. Today we received the following email: (Click on the image to enlarge it)   There were a total of 3 winners in the whole country, and we won the middle school division!!!! Gale is send...