Tales from a Loud Librarian

Lisa and I won our awards from ISTE in June, but we were just recently acknowledged on the website for the Jefferson Parish Public Schools. You can read all about it here. All the 2013 ISTE award winners are pictured here with the president, Kecia Ray, standing in front. You can find me standing on the second row, second from the right.

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. 

For Teacher Appreciation Week in May, our principal gave all the teachers at PFTSTA an iPad Mini. Very cool huh? I thought so. On Saturday, I head to San Antonio for ISTE. This will be my first conference with the Mini. I think that it is very freeing not to tote around a laptop, especially through the airport. Also, I have felt like a dinosaur with my bulky laptop and everyone else with an iPad in their hands. I would like to blog from the conference. I know that technology does not always cooperate, so I thought that I needed to try it out before leaving town. I think that it is working, though my fingers are getting tired typing on the mini keyboard. 

  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...