Library Media Tech Talk

My wife is a library media specialist at Hot Springs Intermediate and Park Magnet School in the Hot Springs School District (Hot Springs, Arkansas). She always plans wonderful themes for her Accelerated Reader (AR) program. I have been trying to get her to write a few blog posts for teacher librarians in grades Kindergarten through 6th grade since she works with this age range. I simply had to share her theme this year. It is near and dear to my heart, because it involves super heroes! Super heroes are huge right now. They are in the movies and on television. They are also in comics! Cindy decided to make a big display of super heroes right outside her library entryway. It is the first thing you see as you come up the stairs to the second floor where the library is located. AR displays on library windows At open house, she had several parents excited about the theme---especially the dads. They actually asked to purchase her decorations. Open house was a huge success! When...

We all have tasks within our jobs that fall into the category of "tedious". I can think of unpleasant but necessary tasks I have had to endure in my 20 years as a public school educator: taking daily attendance, standardized testing, and inventory to name a few. For the school librarian, there are still jobs that are not as enjoyable as others. Probably one of the most demanding jobs we are tasked with at Lakeside High School is textbook distribution. One of our 3 textbook storage rooms. At a school of over 1300 learners, one can imagine the size of the required textbook inventory. We keep these textbooks in three different storage rooms in the school. During the first full week of school, we schedule all English classes in each grade to come checkout their textbooks. It is an all day event for each grade that generally takes at least four days to complete. There have been years I have dreaded this event, mostly because it occurs during the initial days of school. Durin...

Summer is quickly winding down, and more teachers are starting to show up in the building. It gets more challenging to sleep at least seven hours a night because I keep thinking of things I need to do to prepare for the first days of school. I had a 3 hour meeting with the social studies/ history department last week. Did I remember to order all the novels the teachers requested? We have a 30 minute time slot with the teachers during building professional development, what should I share first? There is a library renovation currently in progress, have I planned everything correctly for my learning community? I had to help train new teachers with technology for 6 hours 2 weeks ago. Does the paragraph above sound familiar? I want to take a few moments to share about the things that concern me most this time of year. I want to confess that I worry too much about things I cannot control as school begins. I hope that when I "fess up" to these items, it will make you realize you ...

My librarian co-worker (Mrs. Misti Bell) and I had the privilege of attending the Arkansas Association of School Librarians (ArASL) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas on July 27th. This was a special occasion for a few reasons. The first being that the ArASL Chair-Elect, Mrs. Sloan Powell, extended an invitation for us to present at the conference back in May when she read the blog post on our "Makerspace Day" in the library. (The link to this page is at the bottom of this article.) The second reason is that the keynote presenter was Mrs. Leslie Preddy, the current President of the American Association of School Librarians. Leslie did a wonderful job sharing about the many resources that AASL offers! It was also great to hear her talk about the Makerspaces she has established in her own middle school library. I came away with five important points that Leslie shared about starting a Makerspace: 1. Begin with what you know 2. Start small 3. Think hands on creativ...