Popular Blog Posts of 2026

                                        


June was an extraordinary month for this blog reaching nearly 25,000 views, our best month in twelve years. I'm grateful and honestly a little stunned. Here are the posts that resonated most with readers since January 2026:



#1 What They Remember (1532 views)- One question written on a piece of bulletin board paper resulted in quantifiable evidence that the school library is important to students. It made me realize how important our jobs are in public schools. This piece was picked up and linked on ALA's American Libraries "Latest Library Links" back in May of this year. If you need a reminder of how important your work 
is, give this a read.



#2 Two Ways We Built Community in the School Library (607 views)- When I started working at MMS, I decided to make the library available to students before school. This resulted in a core group of students that made the library their sanctuary every day. I share this outcome and how we used the weekly RTI program to provide a variety of programming to make the library a vibrant space for these 7th and 8th graders.




#3 Four Ways to Lead From the School Library (196 views)- I originally wrote this in 2016, but it reads differently to me now after years of Army leadership. The core concepts of building relationships, listening, taking action, and collaborating, are as true in a library as they are in an Army Band formation. I'm rereading this myself before August.



#4 Stay Gold: Using AI Character Emulation (183 views)- This is one of my most recent articles, and it is about using AI to create a literary character emulation (Ponyboy Curtis from The Outsiders). It was our first attempt at such an activity to go along with our Outsiders Collaboration. This includes a rubric for student evaluation of the AI.


#5 Our Annual Report for 2025-2026 (158 views)- This is my first annual report in 5 years. I used Canva as the platform. If you don't create annual reports, I urge you to reconsider. Find a template that works for you, create it, and share it with your stakeholders. The numbers don't lie. This activity has been one of the most important ways to show library functions through statistics. Every administrator I've worked for has been interested in this report since 2008!




I will continue contributing to the blog as we go into the 2026-2027 school year. Year two is already taking shape, and I think the best posts are still ahead. I'm greatly encouraged by the number of views. Thank you for reading about my continuing library adventures and reflections.
My table of contents for the blog is here!



Other links that may interest you:
What They Remember
AI Basic Training in the Library
Our Annual Report for 2025-2026


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Popular posts from this blog

What They Remember

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Complete transparency: my first year back in a school library was a challenge. After five years balancing roles as an Army National Guard Company Commander and a public library administrator, I had forgotten the sheer pace of the K-12 world. I traded administrative meetings for constant foot traffic and a 30-minute lunch crammed somewhere between checkout lines. But as the final weeks of the year arrived and the shelves began to fill back up for summer, I decided to try something new. I wanted to see the year through the lens of a student. How did the library impact them? What would they remember? The best way to find out is to ask! Field Day provided all-day traffic to the school library The Simple Prompt During Field Day, I rolled out a long sheet of bulletin board paper and wrote one simple question: "What will you remember most about the library from this school year?" I left out markers and let the students respond—some signed their names, others stayed anonymous. The f...
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Library Orientation Breakout EDU

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📌 Updated May 2026: This session was originally designed in 2016. Breakout EDU has expanded considerably — see the bottom of this post for current platform notes and tool updates. I was first introduced to Breakout EDU while attending the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert Forum in Denver, Colorado this summer. After experiencing a session at the conference, I knew it had lots of potential for library programming. I shared it with Kaitlyn Price, my new partner teacher librarian at Lakeside High School. We couldn’t wait to try it out for 8th grade library orientation! I am grateful she is joining me for this blog post. P lanning (Kaitlyn & Stony) We actually started talking about this potential early in August. Tiffany Whitehead even brainstormed with us in a webcam session prior to school starting. She gave us many good pointers (she had done several last year with her students). Then school started, and things got very busy. Brainstorming session with Tiffany...
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Our First Mystery Skype! (#mysteryskype)

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📌 Updated May 2026: Skype was discontinued in May 2025. The activity described below works equally well with Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or Zoom. See the note at the bottom for current platform recommendations. I have heard of Mystery Skype sessions and Mystery Hangouts for many months while trolling social media. A few weeks ago, Heidi Harris (@heidibobeidi), a teacher in Lincoln, Maine contacted me on Twitter to see if we were available for a Mystery Skype session. I checked with our 8th grade social studies teacher, Mr. Brooks Lee, to see if he would be interested in allowing one of his classes to participate in the event. He was very intrigued by the idea, so I set out to investigate exactly how one of these sessions needed to work. Mrs. Harris was very helpful and shared with me a typical way to setup the library (or classroom) for the activity. We decided to set up these station areas in the library: Inquirers/ Responders (all at the webcam), Atlas Checkers, Google Map C...
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