Tales from a Loud Librarian

I am to report back to school on August 7th. It has been a great summer of travel, visiting with friends and family, reading, and getting projects completed around the house. Yet, all good things must come to an end, but on the other hand, I really do love my job especially working with so many wonderful pre-teens and teens. Being in the library is the best place to be in any school. There is always something happening and no day is like the previous one. This will be my twelfth year at Patrick Taylor. Over these years I have developed an incredibly strong program to service the students and teachers through the library. As new teachers arrive I have to get them on board with the school's expectations for conducting research and writing papers and how I can help support the curriculum in their classroom. With the addition of eight new teachers this year, I began thinking of how I will make sure they know what I can do for them and their students. I did some research and found t...

PFTSTA teacher Symbaloo I am an organizing freak. Though my desk may not always be neat as a pin (I run a very busy library), I usually can put my hands on exactly what I am looking for whether it is in print or in electronic format. My belief is that it is my job as a librarian to help everyone else in the school to be organized too. Which is why I love curation tools so much including Wikispaces, Livebinders, Diigo, Sqworl, Pinterest (unfortunately blocked at school), etc.  I learned about Symbaloo years ago at a librarians' conference but never really used it. Then at ISTE in 2014, I went to a poster session on Symbaloo. I was convinced that it would solve a huge problem at school. PFTSTA is a one to one laptop school, and the teachers try to teach with the least amount of paper as possible. As such, there are many, many on-lines google forms and responses, links, websites that are used on a daily basis by the faculty and staff. At the beginning of last ...

The students first day of school was August 8th. Last year we had moved into the new building, and the library wasn't ready for prime time. I didn't open until August 22nd, three weeks after the start of school. This year, I had students in the library on the first day.  It was a soft opening, so the library wasn't over run with kids, but it was nice to have a functioning library on the first day of school.   There are some changes in our district this year, and some of our schools are changing grade configurations.  That means librarians who are entrenched in elementary school now must serve middle school students in their libraries.  That is an issue because the library's resources were developed for grades K-5. It costs money to upgrade the resources for the additional grade levels. The other issue is how will these librarians serve the older students.  I got an email today asking me to share lessons that I teach to my middle school students. That is ...

Click here to open teacher resources page When the 2009-2010 school year began, I realized that it was time for the library to have its own website . I was using the library OPAC homepage which had one page where I could house resources and links for the school community, but it wasn't enough. The school district had a site where I could post pictures and document events, but I wanted one spot on the web where I could post everything library related. That was when pftstalibrary.com was born. I looked at school library websites around the country and found ones that I liked so I could model mine after one that I thought was excellent. I found one library that used weebly.com , and I decided it was easy enough for me to use too. I have been adding, editing and deleting elements on the website for the last three and a half years. I didn't begin the parent page until September 2012, so there is still lots more to add before that page is complete.  I am very pleased wit...