One wonderful side effect of COVID is the infusion of technology onto our campuses. With increase access to devices and platforms, I am assisting our educational technology coaches in providing guidance and training to teachers in utilizing these educational tools.
I have begun to collect data from our Overdrive/SORA platform. I love seeing the numbers of users increasing and the overall time read soaring (ha). I will continue to advocate for use of this tool in our classrooms.
A wonderful staff member approached me this month to start a library club at one of our campuses. I am ecstatic to have a partner willing to help with a campus library. Managing five building collections alone has proven a true challenge. I am excited to work with the club in reinvigorating the library space.
This month I worked with our curriculum coordinator to develop a unit learning contract for middle school library lessons. The process was a wonderful test of my newly developed library curriculum. I was able to strengthen weaknesses and highlight strengths in the document. During the development process, I took careful notes and transformed my experience into a professional development workshop and co-presented with the curriculum coordinator at our in service day.
It's time to focus on collection development! With a very small budget for the past few years, I have learned creative ways to grow our collection. With our expanded access to SORA and more devices per campus, I spent the month surveying teachers and students for book titles to purchase in SORA. I have taken full advantage of the title assignments in SORA to distribute books to students for teachers. In order to increase physical books, I have coordinated donations from both Brighton Memorial Library and two private donors.
A long term goal of mine has been to develop a robust library curriculum. After wrapping up the curriculum project for ELA, Science, Math, and SS, I am inspired to make it a reality for library. I started gathering materials and inspiration to make it happen.
In order to prep for the start of our 'regular' year, I have been working with campuses on a weekly basis. We are working together to identify best practices for our new digital tools. Up until this year, educational technology had been limited to a few laptops, ipads and Smartboards. Now, thanks to the educational technology team we have access to more devices and a suite of educational software:
This summer the leadership team decided to replace Scantron with another assessment tool. I volunteered to be on the assessment assessment team. (Haha - slapstick comedy is keeping us going!) We each evaluated four solutions and made our recommendations to the leadership team this month. During the evaluation process, we learned about Edmentum, a suite of products that would nicely complement our organizations goals. I hope to explore these products in the future, when we have more bandwidth to explore the possibilities of moving more of our education offerings online.
With the new curriculum maps completed by the team, it became my job to review and edit for quality and consistency. The maps were updated this year to include the New Generation standards and CARE concepts. CARE is the framework that our organization utilizes in all their client interactions. The integration of CARE into the curriculum reinforces our commitment to the overall treatment of our clients. During the final read-through of the maps, I reviewed the educational resources, making sure they were of the highest quality and universally accessible to all our schools.
I had applied for the Library of Congress Primary source camp for the third time this year. I had a good feeling I would be accepted, but because of COVID, the program was cancelled. I will keep applying until I get accepted. Utilizing primary sources in the classroom is such an underutilized tool. I made up for the program being cancelled by attending several LOC webinars of primary sources. They were very interesting, but not quite the same as being walking distance from the actual LOC!
Getting into the swing of things!
Recognizing that we need more access to digital resources, I submitted a proposal to implement IXL for all our schools. A few teachers had been utilizing the tool individually over the past few years, but I felt it was time to 'districtize' its usage. I evaluated the various modules and made the proposal this month. It looks as if we are moving forward with my suggestions. I couldn't be happier! This simple tool will increase engagement and learning for our students.
I was also able to distributed over $900 worth of books from Scholastic this month. I decided to pivot from my original goal of purchasing books for the library to purchasing books for individual students to read at home. I partnered with campus teachers to select books the students would most enjoy. Using the money for this purpose is more fulfilling than simply stocking library shelves...especially, not knowing when we will be back in the building.
In keeping with the tone of all thing Zoom, I was able to present my information literacy workshop at Henrietta Public Library. After learning so much from the News Literacy Project and their Checkology tool, I revamped my information literacy lesson and added it to my repertoire of workshop offerings.
Another crazy month. We were lucky to have recently implemented a technology advisory board. This made the rapid implementation of Zoom and WebEx successful. After administrative approval of utilizing Zoom with our clients, we quickly pivoted to a more robust online learning environment. My responsibilities included creating documentation on how to best utilize Zoom with students, training teachers on Zoom basics and general technology support for our educators and creating guidance documents for our unit staff to utilize curriculum laptops in residential settings. To be honest, this was a really exciting time where I felt in my element. I love rapid response situations where I can assist in a wide range of areas.
During this month, I also continued my support of the curriculum team. We had started a full re-write of the curriculum before school closures. We continued our work online using Google Classroom & Drive as our basic communication tools. I was able to offer support by presenting valuable educational resources to be embed within the curriculum. I focused on sharing the valuable Gale databases supplied by NovelNY with members of the team.
Yay! I've finally got an office! I enjoyed the nomad library life for six years, but it is nice to now have a permanent district librarian base.
This month the leadership team attended an organizational discussion on white fragility. I thoroughly appreciated the open and honest conversation about White fragility. It is a vast and complicated topic, that deserves continued discussions.
This fall, a campus principal contacted me about starting a work based hours program with students. I was excited to do this project, as I have been implementing similar initiatives at other campuses. It is a long term goal of mine to create a self-sustaining lending library at each campus. Being the only librarian, I can’t manage all campuses, but I could support a self-run program at each school. I worked to gather the necessary resources and partners and started with my first group of students this month. The buy-in wasn’t what I had hoped for, but I am optimistic that with time, the program will grow.
This month, I also ran the home stretch in distributing new student laptops to classrooms. I worked with the principal to create an application system for teaching teams to ‘apply’ for devices in their rooms. The goal of the application process was to ensure teaching teams were prepared for efficient and responsible use of the devices in their classrooms. I asked teachers to review documentation, provide student contracts and write a device management plan for their classroom. Additionally, I requested each teacher to create and submit an example lesson plan outlining how they will infuse the device into their everyday instruction. It is nice to finally be getting technology into our classrooms.
This month I focused on teaching middle school students about the deep web and powerful resources not accessible via Google. I used bird strike data sets from the FAA to illustrate valuable information found behind the Google curtain. I used firsthand stories from a personal connection I have to an airport manager to illustrate the overall bird strike issue and what we can learn from datasets.
We are moving forward with implementing instructional technology coaches at teach campus. I worked with the leadership team to develop the job descriptions and plan for their training. Exciting times for technology at our schools!
