Tales from a Loud Librarian

Louisiana Library Association always holds its annual conference in mid-March. This year it was in Alexandria, LA. Not much going on there, but the hotels were very convenient to the conference center, and I did not have to move my car until I was ready to leave for home. When LLA made the call for conference proposals, I applied to talk about tech tools for formative assessment. This was a presentation that I did for teachers and librarians in my district, and I thought it would be a good one for this conference. Some of these tools you migh be familiar with, but I hope that there is something new for you there: One of the tools that I discussed in my presentation was Padlet, so I asked those attending to post on a Padlet different ways that they could utilize the various tools in their library. Below are the suggestions that they posted. Use the slider bar at the bottom to see all of the nine columns. Please feel free to add your ideas to the Padlet also....

When March rolls around, I better be prepared for the annual Louisiana Librarian Association Conference. This year, I will be heading to Lafayette on Wednesday. I am going to be presenting twice. The presentation that I planned is how to manage the research process for middle and high school students. I have given this presentation before in a bit different format to teachers but never to a group of librarians. I am sharing the slide show for this presentation with you below, and you can find links embedded in the slides to view all the tools that I have created for my students. Please note that many of the points that I make in the presentation may be something that we take for granted as librarians. My point in reiterating them in the presentation is that it is important to teach both your teachers and students the importance of following correct format, using varied sources, citing correctly, etc. If we know how to follow correct research practices, it is our job to teach i...

For the past several weeks, I have been using free time to prepare for the presentation that I plan to give at the Louisiana Library Association's annual conference on March 9th. In past presentations, I have just touched on all the digital tools that I use when I collaborate with the teachers at my school, but this time, I wanted to be a bit more specific. I wanted to give concrete examples of the types of collaborations that I do and exactly what kinds of resources I include in the various tools that I create to share with students. I am a blatant thief and love learning about new things when I attend conferences. Once I hear about something new and exciting, I figure out how I can incorporate it into my bag of tricks and make it my own. My hope with this presentation is that others will find uses beyond what I do to invigorate their own library program. I wanted to save you some time if you did not want to view the whole presentation.  When I make a presentation, I usually ...

I wasn't planning to present at LLA this year. After presenting at LACUE in December, I asked Kelly if she would make the same presentation with me for the school librarians at the LASL Mid-Winter one day conference to be held in Lafayette, LA on a Saturday in January. Kelly agreed, reluctantly, because she really didn't want to give up a Saturday, but I really did not have to twist her arm very hard. I picked her up on January 25th at 6AM. We took I-10 until we found it closed due to the thick fog. We didn't worry because we had wanted to take highway 90 anyway. When we reached Gray which is a very, very small town in the middle of southern Louisiana, we could not go any farther. The state police closed 90 because of the density of the fog. Now what? We went into the Waffle House to regroup. It was a bit surreal but, the waitresses and other diners tried to figure out a way for us to reach our destination. Until all the roads reopened, there really was no way to get t...

The beginning of my prezi Yesterday, I presented at the annual Louisiana Library Association Conference in Baton Rouge.The title of my presentation was: " Become a 21st Century School Librarian: Learn How to Harness Digital Resources" I wanted the visuals that I used to look really spiffy, so I asked a student to help me. Mark Parfait, a ninth grader, created a wonderful Prezi out of the text and images that I gave him. Open here to see that Prezi . Since collaboration is a big part of 21st century skills, I was modeling true collaboration between a student and a teacher. Smiling, presentation is done I know that I had over 48 attendees because that was the number of bookmarks that I created with a link to the handout for my presentation, and I ran out of them. I felt terrible about that because I always hate it when I don't get the resource packet that a presenter has created. I built a wiki for all of those  resources. Click below to open the wiki. This...

Today I got an email from the president of the Louisiana Library Association (LLA). Of course, I wasn't the only one to receive it. She sent it out to all members of LLA who are subscribed to the listserv. During our fight in December and early January to ask BESE not to change the language about libraries in the Louisiana handbook for school administrators, Bulletin 741 , I was working with the Louisiana Association of School Librarians (LASL). I am glad to see LLA on board with the movement to keep librarians in all schools. The president of LLA wrote a great letter imploring all librarians to begin a grass roots effort to write to local newspapers and state legislators about the importance of librarians in schools.  I am posting it in its entirely here. If you live in Louisiana, we need your help to spread the good word about school librarians.  February 4, 2013 My dear colleagues, In lieu of LDOE and BESE recent actions, we have much work to do to get Lou...