Tales from a Loud Librarian

Last week was exhausting. Every day there were more activities to celebrate Teen Read Week. Here are some photos: These 6th graders are visiting the library at lunch to play Believe It or Not. Every winner got a sweet treat. Two seniors dressed as characters from two sci fi movies to participate in photo ops with the middle schoolers. One of the most successful activities was the ALIEN -ate Yourself Wall. We took digital photos of the students, and they manipulated the images at picnik.com to create an alien version of themselves. See more of these here--> http://pftstalibrary.weebly.com/teen-read-week-2009.html .

Lunch in the library this week is a mob scene. The line to play Believe it or Not snakes around the circulation desk. The kids are enjoying it, so I think that I succeeded. Today I put a powerpoint of the winning books of Teen's Top Ten on a loop and played it throughout lunch. It was a success because several kids asked if they could check out one of the winners. I made the powerpoint last night. When I showed it to one of the seniors early in the day, she said it was boring. So she spent about 20 minutes and jazzed it up. Tomorrow we have special guests at lunch. I will post pics.

Tracey Couret is the technology coordinator at St. Scholastica in Covington, LA, and she is in the process of getting her Master's in library science. She did a practicum with me a couple of years ago. We both attended a workshop a few weeks ago on using Skype in the library for virtual author visits. We decided it would be fun to get our book groups talking together over Skype. Today the library book group at Taylor spent 25 minutes talking with the book group from St. Scholastica. It was a lot of fun. The girls from each school took turns sharing books that they enjoyed reading. There were a number of books that the members from both schools liked. I wrote down some titles that they suggested that are not on the shelves at Taylor. Shiver was a real hit with them-a love story with werewolves--finally no vampires. I am definitely going to get that one for our school. When I went to tell the principal, Jaime Zapico, about how much fun we had, she said that two of the...

I am almost ready to begin Teen Read Week. I have lots of fun activities planned in the library. Most of them will occur during the lunch period. Check it all out here at the new library website--> http://pftstalibrary.weebly.com/ . Let me know what you think of the new site. I hope that it will be a one stop shop for all things PFTSTA library related.

I am thoroughly enjoying the Gumbo Tales . Sara Roahen is a beautiful writer. I had to take a step away from Roahen before finishing it because my adult book group meets next week. I suggested the book, Olive Kitteridge , so I think that I really need to read it. It is a novel told in short stories from different character's perspectives. Olive is a middle school teacher in Maine, and her husband is a pharmacist. She is not the nicest of human beings, but I have only read one of the stories that focused more on her husband than on her. I downloaded this one on the Kindle. I plan to get it read by Saturday. I think it is doable. My school book group, Bookmarked, was charged with the task of reading a romance in any genre. We are to discuss the books tomorrow. I have to dig into my summer reading to see if I have one to share. I am sure that I can find a title that I can sell to the group. This group meets weekly, so I have to work hard to have something to discuss every week. We ...

I have been using web 2.0 tools for awhile but most of what I did was just for fun for me like librarything.com, facebook, and delicious.com. I have been to so many conferences with sessions on using the tools in the classroom, that I finally decided that it was time to climb on board. It has been a lot of fun. I gave a seminar last week to teachers and another to the seniors on how to use delicious. I have been using it for years but never shared. It is a social bookmarking site, and it makes it super easy to organize and manage all the websites that one saves and stores but can never find later. If you want to learn about delicious, watch this video--> http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english . I finally made my first screencast using jing. A screencast is a video where the picture is the computer screen and the audio is a recording of your voice describing what is happening on the computer screen. I now have made several of them...