Tales from a Loud Librarian

I returned home from ISTE and San Antonio on Wednesday evening. Today I had to unpack do some laundry and repack for my trip to Chicago for ALA. Too much to do and not enough time.  All award winners walked on stage during the opening session Lisa Valence and I showing off our new plaques ISTE is made up of many SIGs or Special Interest Groups. The SIGMS is the group for Media Specialists. Open here for a description of our project on the SIGMS website. There was also an online article written about the winning projects in the School Library Journal newsletter Extra Helping . Open here to read the article .  SIGMS breakfast John Spencer on left and Donna MacDonald on right One of my fav sessions of ISTE was the Mobile Flipped and Curated presented by a bevy of rock star librarians including: Joyce Valenza, Brenda Boyer, Gwyneth Jones, Michelle Luhtala and Shannon Miller. This is my storify that gives you the highlights of that talk with links ...

In August, we will be opening the new school year in a shiny new building. I will have a shiny new award to put on my wall in my new office. I have never had a library with my very own office. I can't wait to decorate the walls with this new plaque. Thanks ISTE and SIGMS for selecting the  collaborative  project that Lisa Valence and I created as the winner for the 2013 Technology Innovation Award at the secondary level. 

For Teacher Appreciation Week in May, our principal gave all the teachers at PFTSTA an iPad Mini. Very cool huh? I thought so. On Saturday, I head to San Antonio for ISTE. This will be my first conference with the Mini. I think that it is very freeing not to tote around a laptop, especially through the airport. Also, I have felt like a dinosaur with my bulky laptop and everyone else with an iPad in their hands. I would like to blog from the conference. I know that technology does not always cooperate, so I thought that I needed to try it out before leaving town. I think that it is working, though my fingers are getting tired typing on the mini keyboard. 

During the school year I don't get much time to choose what I want to read. If I have an author visit planned either face to face or virtual, I read that author's work in preparation of the visit. I have somewhere between 5 to 8 author visits every year. Once a month BRiMS, the middle school book group, reads a specific book, and I have to read that book to lead the discussion. I have been reviewing books for both School Library Journal and Library Media Connection for a year and a half. I am sent books to review, and sometimes I am reading two or three books a month to review. That doesn't happen often and when it does, it drives me crazy. I am also on the Louisiana Teen Reader's Choice committee and am helping to select the ten books for the next reader's choice award. There is a very long list of books with a 2012 copyright that I am suppose to read before the July 20th committee meeting. Not sure how I am gong to do that. I read approximately...

Find a new novel to read each month of the summer with this trio of titles reviewed by members of Bookmarked here in the June 5th edition of the online newsletter, SLJTeen . I was pleased to find out that Destiny B. was as big a fan of The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider as I was. I read and reviewed it for School Library Journal (SLJ). It was the very first book in over a year of reviewing for SLJ that I recommended for a star review. Most of what I am sent to read, I don't particular like. This one was different. I thought it was a great read. My review has not been published yet, so I can't share it with you here, but I sure hope that SLJ will star it like Kirkus did. That option is totally up to the editors.

  In February, on a whim, my colleague, Lisa Valence and I applied for an ISTE award . ISTE is the International Society for Technology in Education . This particular award is sponsored by the SIG MS or the Special Interest Group Media Specialists. The president-elect for this group is a fellow school librarian in Louisiana, Tiffany Whitehead , and she sent me an email encouraging me to apply. This particular award is given for a collaborative project between the librarian and a classroom teacher. Our project was called, "Traveling to the Ninth Ward," and it began with the 7th grade students reading Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes and ended with a field trip to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. There is a huge technology component to this project which is why the ISTE SIGMS awarded us their Technology Innovation Award. Part of the award involves money to attend the ISTE conference in San Antonio in a few weeks. I haven't attended ISTE since it was held in...

It took many days of heavy lifting and moving to get all 6700 volumes packed away as well as all the other equipment, computers and supplies. I had lots of assistance, and I hope that I can enlist some of that aid on the unpacking end, too.  The picture above shows you the old library as the books get packed for the move. At this point in the process, I didn't think that it would ever get done. I was doing my yearly inventory while I packed so it was slow going. Lucky for me, once I finished inventory, I could corral some alums who were finished with college for the semester and were willing to give me some time to help with the packing.  This is what the library looked like after everything was packed Once the boxes get sent to the new site, I don't think that I will be looking back with any fondness for the old place. The building was not suited well to the school, and the library was grossly inadequate in size. At the end, I literally had books pile...