Library Media Tech Talk

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...

Over the past few years, some of the most exciting activities we have held in the library have been Skype connections. From Mystery Skype to virtual tours of national parks , our teachers and learners never seem to get tired of connecting to distant places. One of the most recent connections was with a young author in another state! How We Connected I remember running across teen author, Ashley Royer (@RTFbook), on an Internet search last year as we were looking for potential connections for our students. After reading about her, I discovered she had accumulated lots of fans on Wattpad and later became a published author. Her book, Remember to Forget , has been in publication since 2016. I decided to connect with Ashley via Twitter during the spring of 2017 to get more information about her book. She actually signed the copies we purchased. Since the end of the school year was quickly approaching, we were never able to connect her with our students. This...

As the hectic pace of May continues to build, it is easy to get wrapped up in end-of-the-year procedures. During this time teacher librarians everywhere are making lists of overdue items, teaching classes, completing library inventory reports, and more. What if we also used these last few weeks as a time to invite students to give us feedback on how the year went for them in the library? This is exactly what we have done at Lakeside High School for the past few weeks, and the feedback has been informative. We wanted to know how our services impacted the students. We also want to know how students think we can improve. Read on for a brief description of how we have heard their voices. Google Form Survey We decided to create a Google Form to email out to all of the students. We asked only four questions (3 multiple choice and 1 optional short paragraph written answer). The library media center has a warm and inviting climate for the LHS learning community. (Strongly Agree...

Introduction Back in the fall of 2016, my friend Tracey Wong asked me to present a session with her at the Computers in Libraries Conference in Washington, D.C. Tracey is a school librarian in New York. I was very excited about this opportunity since I had never attended an out of state library conference. This was a chance to attend a national library/ technology conference and share our best practices! Preparation Tracey had her session, "Game Design as a Catalyst for Learning", accepted by the conference. We both applied for the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert (MIEExpert) travel program and were accepted. ( Read this earlier blog article I wrote about being an MIEExpert if you want to know more .) With the travel program, Microsoft would send us to the conference and provide for our travel and room accommodations. Now we were ready to start creating our content. Brainstorming Content Both of us had cool tools we wanted to share. Tracey had been using V...

I learned about Minecraft while attending the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert Forum in Denver this past summer. Earlier this year, I wrote about a few of our students that had shared their Minecraft skills in the library during the summer. We were all amazed at their passion and creativity during summer school classes. I. Jared and Shawn (Library Build) Lakeside Freshmen, Jared and Shawn, indicated they had an interest in Minecraft while I visited with them in summer school classes. I decided to let them use my Microsoft Surface to show me what they could do with Minecraft Education Edition. The two worked together and built the high school library in the digital environment. They enjoyed the process so much, they came to library during their off days from summer school. Over the days, they added electrical wiring and lighting in the library rooms. I made sure to show their work to teachers and administrators that visited the library. Everyone was amazed at the two summer sc...

Introduction This school year, we have already had four different Breakout EDU sessions for our learning community. The most recent was created for 8th grade library orientation. We also held a Breakout EDU session for our entire high school faculty. Prior to these sessions, we had a student led Breakout EDU session for our history department meeting. I haven't written about it because I wanted the student who created the Breakout EDU session to share this story through his own voice. I'm very excited to be joined in this article by an 11th grade student at Lakeside High School, Mr. Nathan Evans. Nathan and I are not related (in case you notice we share the same last name). He has been a regular in the LHS library since his 8th grade year. I should also mention that he has led book clubs in the library for the past two years. I am grateful that he continues to take leadership roles through library programming. I remember sharing with him that I had been charged wit...