knitting librarian

I started my day off at 4am when AJ woke me up because there were bugs in his room. (I got up to inspect, no bugs!) Fortunately I did manage to convince him that it was a dream. I put him back to bed, covered him up and crawled back in bed.

I got up again at normal time and scurried around so I could go vote in the PA primary today. I spent most of that time discussing with AJ that he could not stay home and he had to go to school and we had to go to work. I negotiated with John to go vote before work if I would take AJ to school (so we were able to go out to dinner with friends tonight without holding off until after we voted).

The line at my polling place wasn’t long—there were maybe 12 people there, but it still took probably 10 minutes—five in line to get checked in and five waiting for an available voting booth. Then we got stuck in construction traffic on the way to AJ’s school. At least he didn’t fight me when we got there and there were no tears or gnashing of teeth.

I was off and running for work—which is also a polling place so parking is at a premium (no parking lot, on-street parking only). I was running late as it was from voting..and the traffic…and running AJ into school. I was about 5 minutes from work and hit additional construction traffic that made me about 10 minutes late for work. My usual parking place was taken but I still got a spot pretty close-by.

I’ve been talking with some co-workers about how behind our kids are technologically and yesterday afternoon I managed to convince one of them that one of his annual projects should be a wiki from now on. Last night, I did some checking and found pbwiki has an ad-free educational version. Today, I got one started, added a list of potential resources, offered to post a copy of the assignment on the wiki, and generally did a bunch of back-work that will make this teacher look good.

After several years of trying to get a new teacher to use the library and me, she’s finally scheduled me to come to the computer lab with her early next month—great—except that she’s leaving teaching to go to seminary at the end of the school year so I haven’t actually built a new partnership. Oh well, maybe her replacement will work with me!

Our music teacher is having vocal chord surgery in a few weeks and will not be able to speak for over a month. She’s working on reviewing and adding to her three year old’s sign language vocabulary. She also asked me if I knew of any good text-to-speech software and/or if there’s a plugin for MSOffice. BUT it has to be available for Apple/Mac, not PC. I found a few suggestions before I knew of the Apple limitation…so we’ll see if what I found will work for her. (I think she still wants to be able to yell at her husband but she’ll never admit it! Okay, maybe she will!)

We had that dinner tonight ($3.50 for wings—can’t beat it!) with a friend who was asking us about a Dave Ramsey book she’d read over the weekend (we took his Financial Peace class last fall). It sounds like the book’s been helpful for her to see some things she can do to work with her budget and make some plans/changes. I hope it helps her as much as it’s helped us! I also did some straight talking with her about some verbal abuse that her daughter is dealing with and suggested that she take some action to protect her. I hope she finds the courage to file for divorce and court-ordered child support. If she’d applied for it three years ago, she might not be worrying so much about money now.

AJ went to bed without much hassle tonight AND promised me he’d wake daddy up if the bugs show up again!

Three Steps to Eliminating Teacher Technophobia | 21st Century Connections

This article really got me thinking about what else I can do to help my faculty meet student needs in their classrooms. There was a time when I did collect weblinks and dutifully put them on webpages divided by subject area. Recently I’ve been in the habit of cutting and pasting useful links to the appropriate teachers and discarding my list. Perhaps I need to revise/revisit that thinking.

I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way we can work this into the library grant proposal we’re working on. We missed a meeting last week because of a snow day—but at this point I think it’s a good thing. I’ve been a brainstorming fool since that missed meeting: thinking of all of the things I’d do with that money if I were the king queen of the grant budget!

Some of the things I’ve sent off to be added to the list:

I personally would love to see adoption of and training district-wide on the Big6 problem solving (and research) model. There is a Little3 version for elementary level. Many districts and states have adopted the Big6 and connected it to their information literacy and technology curriculum. (from the Big6 website)
” What is the Big6™?
Developed by educators Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz, the Big6 is the most widely-known and widely-used approach to teaching information and technology skills in the world. The Big6 is an information and technology literacy model and curriculum, implemented in thousands of schools – K through higher education. Some people call the Big6 an information problem-solving strategy because with the Big6, students are able to handle any problem, assignment, decision or task.”

I’d also like to see an integrated information literacy curriculum and standards adopted by the Board so that teachers are compelled to work with librarians rather than using only the computer lab for research. West Chester School District was recognized by the state recently for their program. There may be other programs closer that are exemplary as well, but this is one I read about this fall.

Reading Renaissance training for any teacher where Accelerated Reader is used would probably be beneficial so that the program is implemented uniformly across the district.

Toni Buzzeo does workshops on Collaborating to Meet Standards and has written books for both primary and secondary level teachers.

For me personally, I’d like more detailed training on how I can assist with assessments and help to identify skills that I can work with teachers and students to ensure that students are meeting assessment anchors and achieving. PSLA (PA School Librarians Association) has developed a multi-year training on assessment and the librarian’s role in assessment. I’ve attended two presentations and I expect this topic will be addressed at the PSLA conference in the spring.

One of our language arts teachers has been requesting that all teachers in our building learn about the various resources in PowerLibrary (already on the list below) so that they know what is available to them to support the curriculum and to their students. In the middle of typing this email, I spent 20 minutes with a student who was having problems finding high-quality photos for a project for music class. We used the AP Multimedia Photo Archive and he was really pleased with the resulting photos. “Man, that is awesome! What was the name of that site again? I’m gonna keep using it.” It’s great when kids realize that the Deep Web is better than the free web!

Those are my thoughts at this point. I’ll keep thinking.

These are some of my fiction stacks. (H-Z to be exact.) Yes, they are dreadfully empty. Both the top and bottom shelves are always empty. The last two sections of shelving are completely empty. I’ve spoken with someone about creating some decorative banners to go above the fiction, non-fiction, and reference stacks as well as ones for the circulation desk and book return cart.

We had a meeting yesterday about the library budget and I’m optimistic that we’ll get some additional funding. We were armed with statistics about the number of books per student and the average age of the collection. I hope that the board will be receptive to expanding the per student expenditure—which is currently $7.24. I’ve been somewhat fortunate because of my aggressive weeding, it’s been clear to the superintendent and business manager that the library needed some added funds, so they’ve been working with me and adding some extra money to my budget to help recoup some of the loss to the size of my collection.

I’ve been using Flickr for personal photos for about two years now, I think. In September, I upgraded to a paid account so that I can upload an unlimited amount of pictures and have an unlimited number of photo sets. One really neat thing that you can do with Flickr is to make notes about a photo right on it. I’ve joined a few groups: a “swaparooni” group (color-based gift swaps), a free knitting patterns group, and with this Flickr exercise, I learned about the libraries and librarians group and added my library pictures to that group.

This post is kind of silly, since I have been blogging for about 2 1/2 years, but here’s my blog! I’ve added an avatar which is new (to the blog) but has been a part of my Yahoo! Messenger for a while now.

I can’t seem to register with SLL2.0 because of a server error. Have any of the rest of my SLL2.0 buddies had luck with this? I think it might be because the summer is over and that’s when it was originally scheduled for registration.

Helene Blower’s Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners:

• Habit 1: Begin with the end in mind


• Habit 2: Accept responsibility for your own learning


• Habit 3: View problems as challenges


• Habit 4: Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner


• Habit 5: Create your own learning toolbox


• Habit 6: Use technology to your advantage


• Habit 7: Teach/mentor others


• Habit 7 ½: Play

Being responsible for my own learning probably comes easiest to me—I suspect this is true for many of my school librarian colleagues. Because we work in isolation, it’s easy to get lost in the faculty professional development shuffle. Our district tries hard to provide development activities for all employees. Because there are so many of us and we have such diverse needs, my professional learning opportunities are limited to what’s offered to others. Frequently, I attend trainings on how to use applications that I don’t have access to (such as SASI, our student management system). Last year we had a training on reading in the content areas—much to the chagrin of some of my co-workers who attended the same training in three different locations. To learn the things I need to know to do my job effectively, I must be responsible. I’m a member of several listservs, attend trainings provided by my state organization, and someday I hope to be permitted to attend our state school librarian’s conference—our district limits the number of people in a department who are permitted to attend any one conference. I won’t permit these types of limitations from helping me to engage professionally, so I seek other avenues of learning. SLL2.0 is a perfect ProD activity for me because I’m able to do it on my own time and to learn as much as I choose. I’ll be glad to share my learning with colleagues when we have the opportunity.

The most difficult of these habits for me is viewing problems as challenges and learning opportunities. Particularly if challenges are technology-related, it is easy to become frustrated. As we continue through the 23 things, there will be more that I will have to do at home and less I can work on during my time at school. I know that some 2.0 tools like YouTube are blocked by our district’s filter. (Ironically, students can still stream video on sites like NFL.com because that’s not the site’s lone purpose.) I understand that some people in my building have been given access to override the filter and I hope I’m able to secure a username and password to do the same.

I love that Habit 7.5 is Play: each day when I pick up my son from daycare/preschool, I ask him what he did. His answer never varies, “Just play all the time.” My aunt was the education coordinator for the Head Start side of this agency. They use the Creative Curriculum. I complained to her (not that I thought that AJ wasn’t learning, but that he didn’t think he was learning anything) and she reassured me that it was important for him to think that he is playing and that learning isn’t necessarily work. So, everyday when I ask him what he did at school, I’m glad to hear his “played all the time” response, even though John and I habitually mouth the answer to one another as he’s saying it. Play is important—and he is learning!