Tales from a Loud Librarian

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...

When I go to a conference, I hate when someone hands me a sheet of paper with a list of links. What do I do with that paper? Usually, during the presentation, I will mark the sites on the paper that might be useful to me, my teachers, or my students. Then I have to bring the sheet of paper back home or to school and sit and type out all the URLs so that I can see if the sites really do interest me as something that I want to save. If I like what I see, then I save them in  Diigo   and add lots of tags to each site so that I can find them again  at a later date. This is time consuming, and I have found that it may take me months to find the time to sit and go through all the websites. What a waste of time for me. I appreciate when you walk in to a conference session and are handed a paper or card with a link or QR code that points you to a website with all the resources that the presenter will discuss during their talk. I can open the resource site on my iPad during...

I presented twice This past Saturday I traveled to Lafayette, LA to present at the first ever LASL Fall Summit. In the past, the Louisiana school librarians had a mid-winter conference. It was always scheduled in late January or February every other year, but even in Louisiana, the weather could get in the way during the winter. Fog and ice could make it difficult for people to travel the state to attend a one day conference. In 2014, I got half-way to Lafayette and had to turn around because the fog made it impossible to cross the Atchafalaya Basin that lay between me and my destination.  Why did Susan cut off my hand? I do have another one. The attendees in the first session My presentation was entitled, "Where Reading and the Web Collide." My focus was to give websites and apps that librarians, teachers, parents, and students could use to enhance the reading experience. Even though I only serve students in grades 6th-12th, I tailored this talk to K-12 ...

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...

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...

I am not going to bore you with the stress that I have had over the last three weeks. Just suffice it to say that life can hit you with some very difficult curve balls. What makes it nice is to have a collaborator who watches your back. In September when I decided to present at the annual conference for the Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators (LACUE), I had no clue that time would get away from me. Kelly Maher and I have presented together before, and we planned to do it again this year. I like working with Kelly because we are very different and each of us are able to make unique contributions to our presentations. So I am writing this and offering a HUGE shout out to Kelly for probably pulling way more weight on this presentation than I did. I really appreciate it because I think that we nailed it.  This time around we wanted to inspire, share some of what we have done by telling stories and introduce some new web tools. We wanted to emphasize that mos...

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 ...

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...

Houston school children decorated these boots on display On April 2nd, I did something that I have never done before. I got on a plane at 6:30AM to go to Houston, and by 7PM that night I was back home in New Orleans and getting ready to walk my dog. Back in October, I received a call from the Catholic Librarian Association (CLA) asking if I would speak at their national conference about using digital resources in the library. I was hesitant at first because I have had to be away from school a number of days this year when I spoke at different conferences around the state of Louisiana. When my principal offered her support, I agreed to speak. As I was making my plans to attend, it just seemed too easy to go up for the day because the flight to Houston is less than an hour.  There was no where to stand in that room without having shadows on my face The title of my talk was, "Become a 21st Century School Librarian by Harnessing the Internet." In the talk I gave a ru...

If you are reading this, then I already arrived in California. This is my first time attending an ALA conference away from home. Living in New Orleans, I have been lucky to attend several conferences over the years just a few minutes from my house. Last year I had so much fun at ALA that I wanted to go this year. Without school funds to attend this conference, I decided to apply for an award that would pay for the airfare and flight to California. I didn't think that I had a chance to win, but I found out in April that I did in fact win. On Monday, June 25th, I will be receiving the American Association of School Librarians Information Technology Pathfinder Award for High School. There is a special luncheon being held, and I will write more on the award later. First stop when I arrive in Anaheim is to meet up with one of my former students for lunch. She was in first grade when I became a school librarian. I can't wait to see her and find out all about her life as an adult...

On Wednesday, November 30th, Kelly Maher, Lisa Valence and I were scheduled to present at the LACUE conference. We titled our presentation: Preparing Students for the Future: Tools for Teachers and for Teaching Teens. We were to begin at 1PM which was the last hour of the conference. When we walked into the room for the noon session right before ours, there was one person sitting at the presentation. UGH! We really didn't want to present in front of a party of one. When I began to hook up the computer and get ready for our marvelous multi-media powerpoint that we created, people started to walk in. Whew! We were going to have an audience after all. About 20 people attended our session. Kelly began the session by thanking them for joining us for the very last hour. We got several compliments when we were done. We put together  a wiki with all the sites that we mention in our talk and more . Open it up and check it out, you might find something new to try with your stud...

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. 

 So much has happened in the last week. I don't know where to start. Attending the AASL conference in Minneapolis was a great experience. I have lots of ideas running through my head. I hope to implement some of them over the next couple of months. I need to make some decisions in my library on how to spend money on electronic books. I have a collection of over 350 reference in electronic format, but I want to start purchasing non-fiction titles that the students would use as supplemental material to their textbooks. During the conference I talked to Rosen Publishing about their ePoint Books and Follett about their Follett Shelf, and of course I can always add to to our existing Gale Virtual Reference Library.  There are some super-star librarians out there who are doing amazing things. Listening to them talk about all that they do means that some of them must never sleep. I got to meet a few of them during the conference, and I was really inspired by the information that the...

Can't wait until tomorrow. I will be heading to the AASL conference to enjoy the wisdom of all the other school librarians whom I will meet. I am also going to receive the Gale TEAMS Award for Middle School. Hope to have lots of pics and video to show you afterwards. This conference is one of the best because it is the only national conference that is geared towards school librarians. The only sessions that really don't interest me are the ones for the elementary level. Years ago those were the only sessions that I attended. Can't wait, and I will be ready for the cold weather.