The School Library Journal Summit in Atlanta this past weekend was an incredible opportunity for inspiration, collaboration, and growth! Library leaders from across the country converged to soak in new ideas, effective strategies, and passion for our profession. Some of my favorites talks were from Cicely Lewis, Tom Bober, and Amanda Jones. There was no shortage of wisdom and motivation. My mind is still buzzing from 2 days immersed in the energy of school librarians driving change. I’m returning home armed with fresh knowledge and restored purpose, ready to serve our school library leaders and students. This summit was a...
School Library Infographic
I saw a great question on a Facebook school library group. This person was wanting a template for an infographic similar to this one from the Framingham Public Library. I decided to refresh my memory on a few design tools so I recreated it in Canva, Genially, Adobe Express, Google Slides, PowerPoint, and Adobe Illustrator.
AI Issues
Hey everyone! If you aren’t aware of AI (artificial intelligence) applications, now is a good time to give them at least a cursory look. As information, media, and technology specialists in our schools, we need to be aware of how powerful these tools are becoming. We also need to be able to support our teachers, students, and administrators with the implications. Here are just a few examples. You probably have friends sharing similar selfies. These were from the Facetune app (which on further reading have some troubling copyright implications as it’s likely many of the source images for the AI are from...
Primary Sources
Tom Bober Tom Bober, school librarian in Missouri, is an expert on this topic. He has a podcast on this topic here. He also has written a book on it: Elementary Educator’s Guide to Primary Sources, Strategies for Teaching. He has a whole series of posts on this for AASL KnowledgeQuest: Picture Books and Primary Sources https://knowledgequest.aasl.org/author/tbober/ He also has a course on School Library Connection on audio/visual primary sources. (let me know if you need the username/password). He has a great presentation linked here too on the Library of Congress. Follow him on the Twitter, @CaptainLibrary. More Resources Article...
Reading & KAS for Library Media
The question about how reading is an important part of the standards is one that I feel strongly about, and I’ve had many conversations with folks on this recently. Please remember that every single indicator in the standards can be wrapped in the practice of reading. The standards-writing team of 30 Kentucky school librarians chose to base them on the national standards from AASL with good reason and reflection. We all love reading and want kids to love reading, but our library programs must be more than that singular and limited focus. Media literacy/fluency, intellectual freedom, digital citizenship, technologies, and...
KY Academic Standards for Library Media KET Presentation
This is a recording from KET Multimedia Days on July 14, 2021. It gives an overview of our new Kentucky Academic Standards for Library Media.
Library Media Updates
Good morning! I hope you are all doing well. Here are a few library media updates for you. #KyLChat Please join us TONIGHT for #KyLChat. We will be talking about ways to support nurture our readers. December 8, 7 PM Central, 8 PM Eastern. #KyLChat is super-easy to join. Here are some directions if you are brand new to Twitter chats. KyGoDigital KYGoDigital is a great resource for learning. I especially love the ones that feature school library leaders. This one is today! If you can’t catch the live version, please go back and visit their YouTube channel for this...
New year, new times…
Greetings! I hope you have had a great summer (or at least as great as possible in these weird times) and had some time to rest and recharge for this new 2020/2021 school year. First… as it is happening tonight, we are having our first #KyLChat of the school year! This one was organized in collaboration with KASL, and the questions were ones that you all sent in. THE Sam Northern, current KASL president, will be moderating. Please try to make it if you can. Here are the questions ahead of time so you can prepare a few awesome things...
Friday
Greetings everyone! I hope you are hanging in there and taking care of your students, teachers, and yourself during this bizarre time. I don’t want to overwhelm anyone, but I wanted to share a few of my favorite finds from the listserv and Twitter in the last few days. Please reach out to me if you have any questions or need to talk through a project. This crazy time we are faced with is also an opportunity for us to embed ourselves as resources in our schools’ mindsets and our teachers’ classes. Regardless of the content area and format, consider...
KY Library Leaders AASL19
Here is a list of Kentucky school librarians presenting at the American Association of School Librarians National Conference, here in Louisville! If I’m missing your session, please add it here. Your browser does not support iframes.
KyDigCit
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Genially Portfolio
These are some of the creations I’ve made for our school, the Kentucky Association of School Librarians, and others. (function (d) { var js, id = “genially-embed-js”, ref = d.getElementsByTagName(“script”)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) { return; } js = d.createElement(“script”); js.id = id; js.async = true; js.src = “https://view.genial.ly/static/embed/embed.js”; ref.parentNode.insertBefore(js, ref); }(document));
ISTElib Webinar
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Yesterday I had the pleasure of being part of an ISTE Librarians Network webinar. I presented an introduction to Google Geo tools. Thank you, Donnie Piercey, for your resources. The recorded webinar is below as well as slides. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/EWfmonQA-n0″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_raw_html]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[/vc_raw_html][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Google Sites and Drive Folders
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Although I love for students and teachers to improve their search and database skills, sometimes that is not the focus of a given lesson. For these cases, I’ve been experimenting with curating Kentucky Virtual Library and other web resources on our EDhub Hub (school library website). There are so many great publications that have full-text PDFs of articles. EBSCOhost offers a button that allows saving these directly to Google Drive for MasterFILE and MAS ultra (the databases where many of these can be found.) Google Sites, which is what we use for our library site, allows easy embeds of entire...
Reflect
I was going through some photos and videos this morning. It really got me thinking. It’s crazy how many things happen at school in just a few months. Sometimes it feels like not much is happening, but these videos help remind me. This hastily compiled compilation are only things that have happened since January, 2018, and I left a ton out. It also omits the regular cool stuff like book checkouts, random questions, and lots of laughing. It’s been a fun year.