Tales from a Loud Librarian

Loaded down with swag from ALA I had been planning for the American Library Association's (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans for over a year. I was prepping the students in two of my book groups about what it would be like for them to spend a day with me at ALA, and if they wanted to attend, I made sure that they saved the date well in advance since many of them have camp, travel, or even work during the summer months. I was chair of the Young Adult Library Services Association's (YALSA) local area task force for this conference, so I had many duties throughout the week. I had not attended an ALA conference since Chicago in 2013, so I had booked myself solid from a pre-conference on Friday, June 22 until the afternoon of Monday, June 25. Then life happened. I had to put my 91 year old mother in the hospital on the Tuesday before the conference. We did not think she was seriously ill, but she had been feeling poorly for weeks. She knew about the conference, and ...

Read my blog post on YALSA's The Hub I strongly believe that belonging to professional organizations is crucial to my development to be a better librarian. Some of the organizations that I belong to include: JSLA, LASL , LLA , LACUE , ALA , AASL , and YALSA . Yes, it can get expensive because I have to pay for these memberships as my school does not, but through these organizations, I can network with my peers, get professional development, and find materials online that can help me do my job. Because I get so much out of both the state and national organizations to which I belong, I also like to give back. So when I was asked to chair the YALSA Local Area Task Force for ALA 2018 , I agreed. ALA is having its annual conference in New Orleans at the end of June. I am beyond excited because I have not attended since 2013. Though I belong to the school librarian's division of ALA, AASL, I have done most of my volunteering with the Young Adult division, YALSA.  Part of ...

With three lunches, it is no longer possible to plan activities during Teen Tech Week (TTW) that are very time consuming for the students or take lots of extra pairs of hands to pull off. That is okay, because I think that I have figured out ways to simplify our planned activities but still offer five fun activities in the library for each day of the week. Also, I had to move TTW to accommodate for the fact that I was at a library conference the week before. This meant that I had to have everything ready to go before I left town for the conference that included lots of advertising to the students so that they would be ready for TTW when I returned to school that Monday. Garden Party Students engrossed  I plan a different activity each day at lunch and usually have some other passive game that might be available all week in the library or online. We always start the week by showing animated shorts. This all began because TTW is scheduled near the Academy Awards, a...

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....

Teen Tech Week March 12 th – 16 th PFTSTA LIBRARY: All Reader’s Welcome Monday:                     Treat with a Movie Kick off Teen Tech Week and visit the library during your lunch period to watch a movie and have a sweet treat. Showing will be the Oscar winning animated short by Kobe Bryant,  Dear Basketball , as well as several other animated shorts including Lou and Garden Party which were both nominated for an Oscar. Tuesday:                     Mosaics with Rubik’s Cubes Using 100 Rubik’s Cubes , you and your friends will have a pattern to follow to create a mosaic picture using all of the cubes. The library is borrowing the cubes so they will only be available for a short time. Wednesday:           ...

When I  discovered that Skype was not a tool that we could count on, I was worried that it might be the end of our virtual visits with authors. Skype itself was not the problem but the district filtering. Sometimes it worked, and it worked best if we were on the receiving end of the call. However, I could not count on it. We are now using FaceTime for our virtual author visits. This works great on our end with an iPad and is sufficient if the author also has an Apple product. When I was planning our visit with Irish author Patricia Forde , we were not sure if FaceTime would work. Since I discovered that it uses data not phone minutes; it did not cost anything to make the connection. I made a test call with Patricia a few weeks ahead of time, and I knew after talking to her that the kids were in for a treat.  We always start our visits the same way with the author telling us about the book and their writing process. Patricia explained that until she was ten she live...

Find links to many of the presentations here On Saturday, I attended a one day professional development sponsored by the Louisiana Association of School Librarians . I really enjoyed it and got some great ideas to use in my library. For my presentation at this event, I chose to talk about an activity that is relatively low tech. Technology is exciting. I love learning new ways to use it in the library, but I also don't want to concentrate on tech and not spread the word about the merits of reading and finding great books. I have three book groups that I run in my library. The middle school group meets monthly, but the other two groups for older students meet every week. It can be exhausting but also exhilarating. We have had some amazing discussions. I want to tell you now that you don't have to run a book group where every student in the group reads the same book. It can be very freeing once you decide to break the mold of book groups. Another big aspect of all of my...