2019 November

• Google Training for multiple campuses
• Reallocation of science education materials
• Assist administration with organizational historical documents
• Assist new Title I reading teacher with locating educational resources 
• BrainPop “districtization” communication 

This month the main focus was the Google TA training 45 day plan. I revamped all the Google documentation and prepped to provide school based support to all TA’s in utilizing Google in the classroom. 

This month also marked my last trip to our closed campus! In all over 2,500 books, 97 textbook sets, 5 cabinets of science equipment and 146 pieces of general educational equipment were inventoried and redistributed to other campuses. It was a huge project and I was proud we were able to redistribute materials to where they were needed. 

Old school dicot/monocot display

A building on campus went through a renovation this year to house additional students. I worked with the marketing department to provide some historical context to the building. The building was originally created as a boys cottage in the early 1900’s and was converted to a cottage for Deaf students in the later 1900’s. I cannot wait to bring some of these historical documents to the classroom! Yay for primary sources. 

2019 October

• District author presentation by G. Neri
• Brighton Memorial Library Book Sale set up
• IFC (Information Fluency Continuum) training at BOCES
• Growth Mindset PD
• Graphic Novel PD coordination with City librarians
• Open House at AT
• SICD TA Google Training 
• Overdrive PD for teachers

What a busy month! We finally go to meet G. Neri, the author of Ghetto Cowboy, a historical fiction story of the horses and people of Urban Philadelphia. The day started with G. Neri presenting to two groups of students. Over the summer, students has read his book Tru & Nell. This presentation was the culmination of their school wide book club. We then moved the presentation to a second campus where more students heard his presentation on Yummy, the true story of the murder of Robert Sandifer and Shavon Dean. Students really enjoyed hearing about Neri’s journeys as a writer and learning that famous authors are really just normal people. I hope that students left the presentations understanding that anyone can become a writer. 

Author G. Neri speaking to students

In partnership with the Central Library, I was able to host a talk by a wonderful librarian about the importance of Graphic Novels in the classroom. Teachers attended this talk and had the opportunity to explore an alternative resource for teaching both subject areas and human connection. 

I started my library journey pouring through an almost two inch think document called the Information Fluency Continuum. It is a document that was adopted by New York Library Association in 2012. It is a roadmap for developing information literacy skills for students in grades K-12. This month an update was released. The update expanded on technology usage in the classroom, diverse student populations and most important to be more focus on digital citizenship.  I attended a BOCES presentation with Dr. Barbara Stripling to learn about the most recent updates. It was a wonderful collaborative day spent with librarians from around the area. 

This month was Superintendent’s Conference day. I partnered with the director of Technology to present the Google platform to our group of dedicated Teaching Assistants. It was a difficult task to teach what should be a hands on workshop to a crowd of 110 people without devices to practice on. In an effort to make the best of the situation, I structured the lesson to cover the theory of the platform and provide basic guidance on engaging students and keeping student information secure and safe. 

Finally, I continued my commitment to providing quality PD to staff by researching and developing a small workshop to highlight Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset usage in the classroom.

2019 September

• SICD Planning
• Finalize curriculum booklist update
• Residential Book club with G. Neri books
• Campus library class organization 
• Campus library lessons
• Educational Resources presentation 
• Meeting with Scholastic rep
• Teach Google training virtually
• Tech meeting with educational leaders

This year I am officially expanding my direct teaching services to one of our remote campuses. For the past year I have been teaching library class at one of our campuses. This fall I will start offering weekly classes at a second campus. So this month, I did a meet and greet with the teachers at that campus to better understand their student needs.

Since becoming involved with the Educational Technology Advisory Board, I have noticed that many staff would benefit from participating in technology focused professional development. Since I am the only librarian for five schools, I have decided that one of my goals is to empower teachers to become their own “junior librarians”.  I hope to continue to develop and present on topics such as technology use in the classroom, intimation literacy and other topics to arm teachers with their own set of library tools. This month, I developed a presentation to outline the use of technology in the classroom and shared literacy resources during teacher orientation. 

In preparation for next month’s author visit, I coordinated with residential staff to host a book club for students. I was not able to participate in the book club, but the reports from residential staff were very positive. I think students are really looking forward to meeting the Ghetto Cowboy author, G. Neri! 

August 2019 Accomplishments

• Curriculum booklist update 
• Professional Leadership Committees development
• Campus Closure inventory expansion to include equipment and textbooks
• Create district Overdrive
• Technology meetings
• Author visit planning: G. Neri

In an effort to continue ‘districtizing’ our schools, our educational leader set up groups of professional leadership committees. Each committee consists of staff with similar roles at each school. For example, all the CSE chairs at each school form one committee. Each committee is tasked with standardizing their operations and sharing both knowledge and resources. I am very optimistic about this new initiative. Over the past five years I have seen many redundancies across our campuses. One example is book sets. Each school lacks full sets of all the books called for in the curriculum. If we could work together as a district, we could share books across campuses, giving our teachers full access to the books they need. I started my lonely Professional Leadership Committee with ‘districtizing’ our Overdrive account. I worked with the principals to identify a dollar amount each campus could contribute to the Overdrive ‘pot’. We now have complete buy in from each school and accounts for students at each campus. 

With fall coming soon, I started working with principals to plan for our author visit in October. Earlier this summer I helped each school set up a summer reading program. Each school read books by G. Neri in preparation for his visit in October. Back in the spring, I was contacted by a librarian at the central library who wanted to partner with us in expanding our G. Neri author talk. They were able to provide us with additional time with G. Neri, books for students and professional development opportunities. I am looking forward to this event! 

This month I also participated in the Educational Technology Advisory Board meeting. We focused redistributing technology from the closing campus, confirming new devices for one campus, following up on the Google Classroom pilot, and planning a technology and education partnership information session for superintendent’s conference day in October. 

July 2019

Accomplishment Summary for the month

• Support Team Workshop
• Literacy Group Meeting
• Campus closure inventory 
• Curriculum update planning meetings

Two large projects occupied my time this July. First was helping our Curriculum Coordinator with the curriculum update project. This is the second time I have assisted with the curriculum update project. Previously, I simply helped with the formatting of the documents. For this project, I helped in the project set up and even presented essential curriculum resources to the team. The Curriculum Coordinator and I make a pretty good team. I believe all librarians should insert themselves into their district’s curriculum committees. Having a close relationship with the curriculum team facilitates meaningful library support to the entire school.  

Secondly, I dove into assisting with the closure of one our campuses. It was announced last month that one of our campuses would be closing. I had visited the campus a few times over the past year to train staff on Google Classroom, so I was familiar with some the school staff. I reached out the Title I teacher and asked about starting an inventory project. I then took the hour drive down to the school with my trusty book scanner, and started inventorying all the books (over 2,000). It was a fun project. I created a report of all the book sets and set to work redistributing the books to our other five schools. 

This month I also attended a literacy group meeting with teachers at one of our day treatment schools. It was a vibrant group of teachers and support staff who are creating a school-wide literacy program. I was very impressed with their organization and drive. I am looking forward to collaborating with them this coming year. 

2019 June

Closing this out year involved closing a campus. I was tasked with inventorying two buildings worth of educational materials and redistributing it to our other five campuses. It is a huge task that I envision lasting into the fall. It was nice to drive down to Finger Lakes. I am going to enjoy this redistribution project for not only the nerdiness of collecting educational materials, but also for the scenic drives! This summer I also will be redoing the a campus library. I will be transitioning it from a 1960’s medical library to a student centered collection. 

A sampling of the materials being donated to UR from the historical medical library.

2019 May

• Label 200 Tru & Nelle books for summer reading program
• Coordinate delivery of Ellen Hopkins books for author visit 
• Coordinate with RCSD on technology PD for teachers
• Student volunteers library assisting with organization
• Kick off Google Classroom pilot with pilot teacher 
• Sora and Overdrive training

This month I kicked off the official partnership with University of Rochester. I will be working over the next few months in digitizing parts of the organizational archive collection and creating an information literacy unit that focuses on analyzing primary resources. I am very excited about this project and look forward to piloting it with a class in the fall. 

Partnering with various school staff is an important responsibility of any school librarian. I worked with a school councilor this month to develop a career unit that focuses on the Japanese term Ikigai. It's a fascinating concept, and I am enjoying the unit development. 

2019 April

This month I finally reinstated the Reading and Storytelling festival. In the past, I had partnered with St. John Fisher in getting volunteers to help run the event. This year we were no able to bring in volunteers, but we were able to find a group of student who were willing to create genre themed displays for the event. I was able to bring in a few local public librarians and members of the organizational community to volunteer for the event. It was a wonderful opportunity for youth to interact with members of the community. Together we created many vivid stories and explored multiple book genres. Youth were able to leave with community connections, a free book and literary inspiration. 

I was lucky enough to present details of the library program to the board this month. It was a valuable opportunity to educate the board and administration about the good work of the education department. 

Finally, this month I was able to wrap up the 'districtization' of OverDrive. I am so excited to get SORA into the hands of all our teachers and students. It will be a powerful tool moving forward as we get more devices into the hands of our students. 

2019 March

• Train staff on utilizing music in the classroom
• SafeSide training
• Donation coordination with Pencils and Paper 
• Assistive Technology research

This month I took advantage of a self-contained service project and utilized several student volunteers in the library. Together as a team we worked to re-organize and label library books to increase usability. 

This month I also completed the Google Classroom pilot expectations and outcomes document. This was a collaboration with the educational technology team. 

I presented digital resources to educational staff. This presentation focused on high-quality free educational resources available in New York State. I also worked with educational staff to set up a protocol for utilizing music in the classroom. This project required collaboration with the technology team and educational staff. When the project was complete, I tested the system and trained key staff in its usage. 

2019 February

• Research the usefulness of software on the Educational Software Catalog
• Productive Conflict training
• UR Historical Research 

After weeks of work, the technology team finalized the Educational Technology Plan. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of this team. I was able to learn much about the administration side of education. This will serve as a guide in moving our schools forward into 21st century education. 

Recognizing that technology addiction will become an important issue as our schools adopt more and more devices into everyday instruction, I developed a short workshop for teachers to address some concerns with managing student technology use. I am also working with the educational technology team to implement digital classroom management tools that will allow teachers to closely monitor student device use. 

I continued utilizing Checkology with classes in teaching skills in identifying misinformation. Students are working to test their skills on real-world social media posts. 

2019 January

• BOCES II overview of educational databases
• Tech sign out sheet development on Drive
• Book Festival planning & Meeting with Residential

This month I started utilizing SORA in a primary class. Since we are expanding our OverDrive contract to cover all schools, I thought it would be a good idea to start to pilot it’s use in a classroom. The platform worked really well. I highlighted important vocabulary words in the book prior to reading the book in the classroom. I found this very helpful in reminding me to stop at certain areas and check for understanding and reinforce vocabulary. 

This month I also finalized the educational resource list and distributed it to all staff. This list provides educational staff with an annotated list of high quality, freely available educational resources. This list was necessary as we are dropping our subscription of Discovery Ed. 

2018 December

• First Educational Technology Board meeting
• DiscoveryEd evaluation
• Assist teachers with Information Literacy resources
• Revive kindles
• OverDrive & SORA research and testing

Library class this month was focused on an amazing resource called Checkology. This platform breaks the art of evaluating information into six categories. Each of these categories is presented, practiced and reviewed using clips, articles and images from current events & happenings. Students are doing really well with the content and I see their evaluation skills improving. 

I decided to test a purpose lesson on the elementary students. They did fairly well, but I didn’t have a chance to continue the lesson throughout the month. I hope to revisit the topic at a later time. 

The Educational Technology Board is tasked with writing a comprehensive technology plan for all schools. We are so far behind, and so disconnected from ‘typical’ schools it has been difficult to find a starting place. I decided to contact other 853 schools to see what they are doing with technology. So far, no luck with anything helpful. There is one school, Green Chimneys, that I hope to contact, as their website seems to show technology fully integrated into their programs.