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....

The other day I received news that I was nominated for an Outstanding Educator Award from the University of Chicago. Every year, the university asks freshman to nominate a teacher from their high school who have made a direct impact on them. Patrick Taylor alumnus, Thomas Sostarics, nominated me. After receiving the letter, I texted Thomas a big thank you, and he responded by telling me that it was the least that he could do for all the support that I gave him and all of his classmates over the years that they attended Taylor. I feel so honored that he thought so much of me. Thomas was always an outstanding student, and when I wrote recommendations for him for college, I ended this way, (Thomas) "is going to be a real asset on any campus where he lands, and he will take advantage of every opportunity that you offer him. This is one of the students whom I will miss most of all when school starts up in the fall of 2014." It is so true. I miss him each and every day, but I k...

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.

  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...

Open here for the Follett Challenge website I worked so hard on the application and getting votes. I am really sad that we did not win, but I always knew that it was a possibility. Congrats to the six schools who won the Challenge. They seemed to have some awesome programs at their schools. 

Last year, I had such a good time attending the ALA Annual conference away from home that I knew I wanted to go again. I just didn't know how I was going to fund the conference and a summer vacation. So when EBSCO and ALA announced in the fall about a scholarship to attend ALA Annual, I wrote 250 words on how attending ALA would contribute to my professional development. I found out a couple of weeks ago that I had won. I didn't want to post here until ALA announced it. Which they did yesterday. Open this link to read the press release about the seven winners. I am the only school librarian. The only stipulation for this scholarship is that we attend the EBSCO breakfast on Sunday, otherwise I can schedule my time at the conference any way that I want. I have never been to Chicago so I am not only thrilled about the conference but also thrilled about seeing Chicago. My husband is going with me, and we are going to stay an extra day so that I can actually visit a museum or tak...

a happy student votes for the very last time the whole school voted together on the very last day to watch our numbers go UP a parent created these posters to promote the Follett Challenge Last night the voting portion of the Follett Challenge ended. Whew! It could not come soon enough. When I left school yesterday, we were in the 6th spot, but only a handful of votes away from 5th. I kept thinking that I could get us more votes. So when I got home, I put on my exercise clothes, leashed up the dog and hit the streets of my neighborhood. I only encountered one person who was ugly to me. I talked to a lot of people that I know, but many that I did not know. Almost everyone was pleased that they could help a school library. I really have no clue how many votes my canvassing did, but I felt better about it. By the time that I went to sleep last night, we had moved back to the 5th spot with a little over 50 votes ahead of 6th. I was exhausted and could not stay up until midnigh...

Only two more days to vote for the Follett Challenge . PFTSTA is holding steady in the 6th spot. Here are pics showing our votes so far as of early Saturday evening.  16,168 Votes as of Friday the 15th for PFTSTA Click the above picture to enlarge Please keep voting to support PFTSTA and help us be one of the winners of the Follett Challenge! Click here to vote and show your support for innovation in education. As you can see below, we received over 600 votes in less than 24 hours. Whoo hoo!!!!!  16,769 votes as of Saturday afternoon Click the above picture to enlarge

PFTSTA still in 6th place with 15,298 votes Click the image above to enlarge We are almost done with the voting portion of the Follett Challenge. Once complete, we wait to hear if we win. The weekend could slow us down with students not voting. Please make sure you vote every day. On Monday, the whole school is going to vote at the same time for the last time. Remember, every vote counts:  http://bit.ly/Ya3Pyv

PFTSTA has 14,354 votes in 6th place Click on the picture above to enlarge I am ecstatic there are less than six days left to vote in the Follett Challenge. Six weeks of voting has been exhausting. I thought that we would lose momentum at the end, but today we gathered steam and moved into the 6th position. It is really true that every vote counts. Please keep supporting Patrick Taylor Academy and vote for us here:  http://bit.ly/Ya3Pyv . We can win this thing!!!!

The end of voting for the Follett Challenge is coming soon. Six weeks of voting has been very challenging. I feel that I have been very pushy with people to remind them to vote. However, it is easy to get single votes, but much harder to get people to remember to vote daily. It is the daily votes that will keep us in the top ten. This morning we moved into the 7th position. I hope that we can keep up our numbers until Monday the 18th when voting is over. Please start voting for us or keep voting, the students at PFTSTA want the new library filled with books when we move next year. Vote here:  http://bit.ly/Ya3Pyv . PFTSTA has 13,338 in 7th place Click on this picture to make it bigger

The Follett Challenge continues, and you can vote daily until March 18th. Today we moved from 8th place to 7th, but as you can see below, early this evening we moved back to 8th. We are less than a hundred votes away from 7th place. PLEASE help us out and vote for Patrick Taylor in the Follett Challenge every day for the next week. Every vote counts! Click here to vote . PFTSTA has 12,024 in 8th place Click on this picture to make it bigger

Vote here:  http://bit.ly/Ya3Pyv We are counting down the last week of voting in the annual Follett Challenge. Follett, a leading educational company, has challenged schools and school libraries to illustrate how they are integrating 21st Century Skills into their programs.  Patrick Taylor has applied to the Follett Challenge , a program run by Follett to recognize and reward schools for their work applying technology, content and creativity in ways that engage students, foster literacy and promote critical thinking.    PFTSTA has 11,574 votes in 8th place Click on this picture to make it bigger To enter this challenge we had to write a very intense application of 5,500 words describing our program. Then a group of students created a 5 minute video showing how the library encourages collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking at our school. This is the last week of a 6 week run asking the community to vote for their favorite video....

This blog, Tales from a Loud Librarian, was nominated again for the annual edublog awards, also known as the eddies. I love this award because there are so many categories of edtech nominated, and I always find some gems that I had never seen before.  Anyway, you need to vote daily until December 9th. The awards will be announced on December 12th. Open here to find the link to vote.  You can vote for this blog under the category, library/librarian blog. Check out all the other categories for some awesome resources. 

Open Here to Make your Nominations It is nearing the end of another year, and so the time has arrived to make nominations for the annual Edublog Awards . I love these awards, not because I like getting nominated (who doesn't like to get recognized), but because I always find some new electronic tool or new person to follow. I guess that I like these awards because I can count on all the nominations to be quality sources, and I love enlarging my professional learning network. Here are some of my favs of the moment: EdTech Blog: I know that he will get lots of nominations, but my favorite go to EdTech site is Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers . I know that if I am looking for a tool for a particular purpose that Richard will have several for me to choose. I am a faithful reader of his column in School Library Journal. Twitter Hashtag: I am a school librarian, and though I am interested in a lot of issues, my first interest is in what other librarians have to s...

Click here to download the entire program I have already blogged about the awesome award that I won from the American Association of School Librarians, a division of the American Library Association. The official photographs were released last week, so I want to post them here as I like to use this blog as my professional portfolio. On June 25, 2012, I was given the 2012 Information Technology Pathfinder Award at the secondary level. The picture above shows the cover of the program from the event. The picture below is the program page from the IT Pathfinder award. I won the secondary division of the program. This amazing librarian from Minnesota, Sally Mays, won the elementary division. It was an honor to win with Sally. She is so dynamic. I love meeting librarians with energy like hers.  Click on the picture to enlarge it for easy reading Each award presented at the ceremony was sponsored by a different vendor. Follett Software Company sponsored the IT Pathfinde...

I have lots more to share about the 2012 ALA annual conference. One of the ultimate highlights for me was winning the Information Technology Pathfinder Award from the American Association of School Librarians (AASL). This award is given to two librarians, one at the elementary level and the other at  the secondary level for their innovative approaches to information technology in the school library. On the first night that I arrived in Anaheim, I am walking through the exhibit hall and see a familiar name, Sally Mays , on the name tag of the person walking by me. Sally was the elementary division winner of the IT Pathfinder Award. We jumped up and down together a bit and shared what winning this award has done for us and our libraries. Both of us were blown away when we received the news that we had won. Unfortunately, we didn't meet up again until the award ceremony on Monday morning, but through social media we should be able to keep in touch. This is the first award ceremo...

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...

Laura Bush visited the New Orleans area today to give the last twelve grants for the Gulf Coast School Recovery Initiative . All 116 schools that received awards since 2006 were invited to participate in this event and representatives from 77 of those schools were there. I attended along with my principal, Jaime Zapico. It was held at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish because that is where Mrs. Bush presented the first round of awards in 2006.  It was a beautiful affair. When we arrived, we got to visit with all the librarians and eat muffins and drink coffee. Since I have worked in both Orleans Parish and now Jefferson Parish schools, I knew a lot of the librarians attending the event. There was a wonderful student jazz band playing. After about an hour, we went into this amazing auditorium. A facility that we at Patrick Taylor only dream about. The chorus sang, and we heard more music from the band. Then a video was shown with librarians, students, and princip...