It's Official!

Well, registration at AHS is nearly over and there is someone new there to be in charge of it all. There is a half day of make up registration on Monday, and school starts on Thurs.; then I really will feel retired! I hope to chronicle on this blog my new adventures and challenges as Teacher, Librarian and Retired! Watch here for news.

VTS_01_1.VOB

Christmas Greeting from the Library via Animoto.com

Here's a little brag for the holidays. I sent it out in the district, to the Supt., the tech guys, and everyone I could think of. All of the responses have been great.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!

Back to School!

It's hard to believe it, but registration starts next Tuesday, part of which is in the AHS Library, so this is the week school starts for me. We just got the word that the water will still be shut down next from the construction going on for the 2 new buildings on campus and that will be difficult. It will be great when the buildings are completed and they get to the renovation of the library, but it will be several years before that happens. It's going be an interesting year as we all, students, teachers, staff, parents and community learn to have school with so much disruption and so many budget cuts, but I have to say that we have a wonderful spirit of making sure the students succeed. That's an encouraging atmosphere for us all to work in. Here's to a great new school year!

No reading? Not exactly

This seems like a very strange image for any librarian to post, but today I was inspired to do this by an article in the latest issue of LMC, Library Media Connection (March/April 2009, 27:5). It's entitled "Why We Need to Stop Promoting Reading," by Mindy Miner Holland. We all have "READ" posters and bookmarks. The author asks if these promotions are effective. What really makes kids want to read? She decided to ask her students what would motivate them to read. Guess what they said? More books! Better books! I recommend this article to you for her suggestions for going beyond our READ posters and buttons.

Top 10 Web 2.0

From T.H.E. Journal News Update for 2-4-09

Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners

Gail Lovely is adamant about the nature and potential of Web-based learning tools. "Web 2.0 is about trust," she said at a recent talk. "It's about sharing and collaborating." And, she insisted, it's about putting the power to learn and create in the hands of the students. More

This a great list that includes several tools that we all learned to use while completing School Library Learning 2.0, plus some great new ones. Here's to a great 2.0 new year!

How About Hosting a Technology Fair for Teen Tech Week?

From the latest School Library Journal online:
"Looking for a way to integrate your school’s technology program with Teen Tech Week? St. Vrain Valley School District (SVVSD), Longmont, Colorado has put together an award-winning Student Technology Fair project, and since Teen Tech Week 2009 is just around the corner (March 8-14), now is time to start planning." Read the article here.

New Reason to Use Google Reader

Interesting thing I just discovered with my Google Reader here at school - You can read the pop-up blog posts in Google Reader, even if the home site is one that is blocked at your school site. This is something new to me, at least.

I started following Sarah Dessen's blog (Just Listen, Lock and Key) on LiveJournal, which is blocked here at school. However, when I checked my Google Reader blog roll, I could still read her posts in Google Reader. What a concept! I think it's just great that a web 2.0 tool is helping me to get around the block my district puts on this kind of site. Who knew! Try it for yourself.

CSLA Conference Day 3

Well, so much for finishing my blog posting from the conference. My 24 hours ran out on the Hyatt network and as I was leaving on Sat. in the early evening, I didn't bother to pay for another day. It's truly my hope that wifi will become ubiquitous at conference venues and as an organization we won't be required to pay high fees to give the conference attendees access.

The conference was a great success and hats off once again to all of the planners and organizers. We don't say thank you enough, but we truly appreciate you!

P.S. I highly recommend volunteering to work at the registration desk. You get to see everyone arriving, find friends and make a lot of new ones. It was great fun.

News from the Conference Day 2

Greetings on day 2. Today I began the day with a very early breakfast and then got over to the convention center to work at the registration desk at 7:00 am. What was I thinking? It was great, though. I can highly recommend it as a place to volunteer to see people as they arrive and make new friends too. George Pilling was there and brought us some of the CALIBK12 stickers for those of us who forgot to print them out. We pasted them on any badge holders we got our hands on. Thanks, George, even if we don't win a prize.

Those of us at registration didn't make it to all of the opening session, but I did get to go hear the featured speaker, Joe McHugh, present Slaying the Gorgon - Storytelling and Media in the Electronic Age. He was fantastic! A great story teller and very creative in bringing together images from advertising and the web to illustrate his points. I wish we had video so everyone in CSLA could see and hear his talk. Kudos once again to the conference committee for finding an amazing, entertaining and inspiring keynote speaker.

After the opening session, attendees had a chance to visit the exhibits for an hour or so before the first concurrent session. I still haven't gotten in there except for a brief tour last night. There's always tomorrow.

1st concurrent session: ABC's of Leadership - Barbara Jeefus, Jim Duke, Chela Cortez, Claudette McLinn, Jeanne Nelson shared their road to leadership in our organization. Sandy Schuckett facilitated this interesting peek at what brought them all to CSLA. It was the conclusion of the attendees that this needs to be presented in a larger forum to inspire more people to participate in CSLA as officers and chairs, and it's a job for all of us.

Next on to the Legislative Lunch with informative words from our own Jeff Frost. The word is not good on the budget situation, even for this current school year. We all need to continue to contact our legislators, especially the 30 newbies in the Senate and Assembly. If you have a supportive legislator, why don't you encourage he or she to mentor a new person on the importance of school libraries to student achievement? We need to watch for the dates to be announced by CSLA for legi days in the district, etc.

2nd. session: I attended the session on Textbook Management, with Rob Darrow, Gene Menicucci, and online with us, Paula Ford. I got lots of great ideas to pass on to my district to upgrade our textbook software. We do a pretty good job of retrieval of textbooks at my HS, but the district as a whole, needs to get better control, so I can go home with some good info.

3rd. session: I attended "Is the Google Generation Information Literate?" Zorana Ercegovac presnted her findings from a case study with secondary school students. I think we all related to her findings and she will share her presentation and pretest with all of us to use at our schools. She has a new edition of her book just published based on this study as well. It would probably be great for my teachers to read.

Well, I'm off to the President's Reception with a live radio show, refreshments and goodies to take home. Don't you wish you were here? I do!

News from the Conference Day 1

Well, the first day is over. I've seen some old friends, made some new ones and spent time in 2 interesting workshops. So far, the only disappointing thing is that the convention center doesn't have wifi for us, so we can't really be as green as we all anticipated. Here at the Hyatt one has to pay by the day to get online, so I probably won't be able to write as much as I wanted to.

Sometimes, when I spend my days with so many connected high school kids, it seems like the entire world is connected, and maybe it really isn't.

Ah well, off to bed. In a weak moment I actually volunteered to work in registration at 7:oo am! What was I thinking?

Librarymum in Sacramento

Blogging at the CSLA Conference

Hi all!
I just added this blog to the CSLA Conference wiki at http://csla2008conference.pbwiki.com/Blogging-at-Conference - Come join us! Librarymum wants to see you there too.

The Unattended - found on Flickr

The Unattended,
originally uploaded by gatorgalpics.

This reminded me of Dan Pink's comments at AASL07 in Reno last fall when he talked about making signs more “empathetic.”

Freepath--a new 2.0 tool

"Freepath--a tool a librarian (and a teacher and a presenter and a student) can love - Every once in a while a new tool makes me almost want to be a PC user. Take Freepath, launched yesterday in public beta." From Joyce Valenza on her blog, Neverendingsearch - read about it here

This looks like a fantastic tool to bring a lot of our web 2.0 tools together and use them easily. I hope I can open it at school! I'll let you know

Turning the Pages at the British Library

Turning Pages into Classroom Gold: Ancient Texts Shine on the Web - In Turning the Pages, the British Library puts some of the world's oldest, most beautiful, and culturally significant books online. Read about it in an article by Douglas Cruickshank in the latest issue of Edutopia at: http://www.edutopia.org/british-library-ancient-texts-online

If you haven't seen this before, you are in for a treat. This looks like a great resource for finding access to magnificent texts and primary sources.

In the words of the author, "The past has a brilliant future."

My First Library

This is a picture of the Arcadia Public Library in the 1950s. It's the first library my parents took me to, and the first I remember. I'm sure I still have my first library card, one of those small cardboard ones, with the little metal insert with my number on it. I'm sharing this piece of my personal history with you because I retrieved this picture from Calisphere, that great resource for pictures and pieces of California history. I use the site with students and teachers here at the high school, and we have found some amazing primary sources. This is such a wonderful example of what is available to us now in this digital age.

Recently I heard that our public library had contributed a lot of digitized pictures to the collection, so today I just searched Arcadia on the site. The very first picture was this one of the public library from my childhood. Have you tried searching the name of your city on the site? If you haven't tried Calisphere, I highly recommend it. There is usually a Calisphere workshop and booth at the annual CSLA conference, so you can catch up with the latest info about it there too.

Picture link:
(http://content.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt7v19r287/;jsessionid=cEEx63mk7j6z4YeZ?query=arcadia&brand=calisphere)

NBC News Launches Free Online Learning Community for Teenagers

From eSchool News this week:

Current Site of the Week ...

NBC News launches free online learning community for teenagers
Immerse, Connect, Understand, and Excel. Its learning platform uses a patented technology, based on research from the MIT Education Arcade, called the CueCard; it's a combination media player, flash card, note-taking tool, and trading card. This "flip-card" technology allows users to watch streaming videos from NBC News and then "flip" the CueCard over for additional information. | eSchool News">Full Story

A Great Teen Library Page

I was doing my usual weekend trolling and reading through my blog roll on Google Reader, catching up with some of you and Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson, when I saw a link to the YALSA blog and a post about Teen Second Life. That lead me to a link to this teen library page, Library Loft PLCMC, from the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, home to the original 23 Things tutorial, the basis for our own SLL2.0.

This page is amazing and I want my library page to be like this. Of course, public libraries get to have a presence on Teen Second Life and we can't even look at it at school, but here's hoping. What I think is so important about completing the 23 things in School Library Learning 2.0 is that we are learning what these tools are, how they can be used and discovering new and inspiring ways to use them. It's a whole new world to some of us, but it's a real, current world for all of us right now.

The Rand McNally Globe

Today I received for the first time the free Rand McNally eNewsletter - A monthly newsletter with tips on integrating geography and social studies across the curriculum. Each newsletter includes a FREE map!

I know, we all get way too much email, but this has so many "geo" related activities for all grade levels that I had to pass it along. This month focuses on geography and language arts and includes a list of famous authors born in May. It seemed to include a lot of things a teacher librarian could use. Enjoy!

Google Book Search

I had an interesting experience this week. I was trying to catalog a book published by one of our retired teachers. It was published by a small local publisher (do we still call them vanity presses?), and it was lacking information that we usually include in the catalog record. It didn't include the publication or copyright date or the place of publication. I know, we can deal with that in the record, but I decided to do some research, as it did have the publisher's name, an ISBN, and a URL for the publisher.

I'll try to get the point here. The publisher's website had no mailing address, so I Googled them and got the address, and I found one date in the author's dedication. Finally, I decided to look it up in Google Books. Well, that was interesting because it turns out that Google Books had "mashed up" our teacher's book with another book published by the same publisher many years ago. The ISBN for our teacher's book was there along with the one for the other book. On the Google Book page, you can send in questions or suggestions for entries. I did this and they answered that they will check into it and thanked me for the information.

Social cataloging! What fun.