Tales from a Loud Librarian

PODCAST found here 7th Graders on Field Trip in the Ninth Ward, February 2020 Every year over the last ten I have worked with the 7th grade English teachers on a project that encompasses literature, research, a written/digital product, a field trip, and service learning. In that time there have been five different teachers who have taught ELA to this grade level. One thing that has remained constant is me, and over the years, I have developed a tool to make the research super easy for the kids. Using  Livebinders  I have been able to curate resources and collate all the tools that the students need from the very beginning of the project when they read historical fiction about Hurricane Katrina's devastation in our area to the very end with the digital scrapbook. This is truly a collaborative project between the English teachers, myself, and our colleagues at Dr. King Charter school where we visit for service learning.  That's me receiving a thank you c...

Early this past week, one of our science teachers, who was suffering with a terrible case of laryngitis, talked to me about a presentation that she was suppose to make to the faculty at a local Catholic school on Monday, the 19th. She initially agreed because she thought that she was just talking to the science department about preparing students for the engineering and science fair, but then they asked her to talk to the whole faculty about the research process. She knew that I would be a better fit than she would for that. Also, she really did not have a voice to be able to speak to an entire faculty. With her help, I was able to put together this presentation in two days. That is a record for me because I always agonize over how to organize the information and what exactly needs to be included. When you go through the slides, you will find that I have inserted live links on the slides with screenshots, so you can see the actual resources that I created for the students. I hav...

Stem Cell Writing Assignment I have been writing a lot here about the different types of collaboration that I have been doing in all subject areas. I want to share an instance where I created the tool for a science class, but I didn't really do any teaching for this assignment. The biology teacher, Mrs., Higgins, came to me recently about beefing up an assignment that she has done in the past. She had created a writing assignment on the stem cell controversy that she has used before. Students had to take a stance on whether they believed embryonic stem cells should be used for research, or if they thought the use of adult stem cells was sufficient. She was happy with the idea of the product where students wrote a letter or a speech defending their stance. It was the research part that she felt needed some help. She was pleased with the pathfinders that I have created for her lessons, and she thought it would work well in this situation, too., Together we came up wit...

I have designed several tools for students in Mrs. Higgins' science classes to use for a specific project. When Mrs. Higgins and I sat down to talk about the balloon car project for her 9th grade physical science class, I knew that a Livebinder would be the best way to collate the tools for the students. Usually, there is a link to the library OPAC as the first tab in any tool used for research. This time I decided to create a bibliography of all the print material and just insert the bibliography in a tab. I also pulled the books and had them ready for the students on a cart, but with the bibliography I really didn't need to do that. I always thought of Livebinders as a take only resource, not a give and take. I happened upon a blog post from Livebinders with a link showing how to create interactive tab/s . I loved the idea of adding a padlet inside my binder. It is super easy to use an embed code in one of your tabs.  For the balloon car project, the students ...

I have been teaching for over 30 years. You would think that I would not get nervous about being observed by my principal. She has certainly popped in the library many times while I was teaching a class. However, having a formal teacher evaluation did make me a bit jumpy. If you would like to read the rubric used to evaluate school librarians in Louisiana, open here . To plan for this event, I knew that I had to do a collaborative lesson with one of my teachers. I selected the biology teacher because we have worked together before, and she was going out on maternity leave. I knew that having me work with her students for two 90 minute periods was not going to eat into her teaching time. Together we decided to do a project on human diseases. Last year, after her students completed the Louisiana end of course test (EOC), they told her there were some topics on the test that were not covered in class. How technology is used to diagnose and treat human diseases was one of those areas. ...

I have been having a lot of fun using the various curation tools that are available and trying to choose the best one for the job at hand. Last school year, I created a wiki for the school's annual social studies fair project . I spent so much time working with the middle school students that I felt that I was neglecting the high school students. The wiki allowed me to be in everyone's class at the same time. I even created some instructional videos that I embedded in the wiki so that the students could receive some direct teaching. The wiki was such a success that I used Livebinders to create a binder for the science classes as they navigated the independent research project (IRP) that was required in all high school science classes. Open here to read  Last week, I searched for a tool that would more visual and less dependent on text. The members of Bookmarked are writing reviews for SLJ Teen twice a month. I wanted to find a place online where I could save the links a...