#holdshelf Project

Have you participated in the hold shelf project? Blog, email or tweet a pic of your hold shelf so we can all see what kids are really reading.
Here is my hold shelf.
If you want to participate tweet a pic with the hash tag #holdshelf or email to scopesnotes at gmail dot com.

New Leaf in Learning Conference

I have finally rested and recovered from the New Leaf in Learning conference so I feel ready to reflect on the experience. This was one of the most well organized conferences I have ever attended. Every detail was addressed.
I was honored and excited to be invited to speak and thrilled to meet by buddy, Tiffany Whitehead. I believe the sessions we prepared were helpful and thought provoking.
On the first day we met up at the airport and had a great time chatting all the way to the hotel. We both enjoyed the keynote by Kevin Honeycutt, who reminded me of the impact a great teacher can have on students.
Thursday we enjoyed a delicious breakfast (just missing the grits) and shared a table with Eric Sheninger. You can't say that very often. Then after two morning sessions and another great meal Tiff and I shared our presentation, Be a Next Gen Librarian, Today. Slides and links for both sessions are here.

We had a packed house.

We made a great team sharing ideas from both of our libraries and showing off the spectacular slides that she created. The topic most discussed with us after the session was nontraditional shelving. Looks like we need to talk about this more.

Thursday night we ventured into Chicago for a little sightseeing, pizza and lots of laughs.

Friday we attended more sessions and presented our second sessions, The Embedded Librarian.

After a quick run to see The Hunger Games we headed to the airport towards home.

This conference was a great experience for me. Not only did I attend several sessions that inspired me and made me think, but I had a wonderful time presenting with Tiffany. We received loads of positive feedback and encouragement. And who doesn't need more of that? I also had the opportunity to meet people that I have followed online for a while like Eric Sheninger, Shannon Miller, Carl Harvey and David Loertscher. I hope that we have the opportunity to present again together in the future.

Sign up for information on the recordings from the conference at the New Leaf in Learning site.

Thank you Follett and all of the organizers of the conference.

SCASL 2012: Advocacy Starts With You @ Your Library

Our state conference was held a few days ago. It was wonderful to reconnect with librarians that I normally only see virtually and meet a few new ones face to face like the super sweet, Jennifer Tazerouti, my Twitter bud, Teresa Bunner, and Randye Polk. Thanks, Randye, for the encouraging words about blogging.

Here are a few other highlights for me:

1. Presenting with Carla Nash on ereaders. As you can see from our shirts it was a Kindle Vs Nook eReader Duel. At times things got a little heated.

You may wonder who won our duel. Check out our Prezis here and here and decide for yourself. We had a full room and lots of questions. It was fun for us and hopefully informative for those in attendance.

2. I had the pleasure of listening to Donalyn Miller deliver one of our keynote addresses. And best yet, I facilitated one of her book talk session and met her in person. It was wonderful. If you haven't read her book, The Book Whisperer, you should. Really, go now and buy it! Then buy one for every ELA teacher in your building. You can see her slides from the keynote here. If you are curious about her book recommendations you can see many of them on this list.

3. Presenting with Jen Chesney and Kelly Knight on blogging. Another full session, lots of sharing with those in attendance and I even learned about a few blogs that I added to my reader. I will put our list of recommended blogs on my wiki.

Chesney, Tamara Cox and Kelly Knight presenting on blogging.">

4. The SCASL Learning Commons organized by Cathy Jo Nelson. I love the Learning Commons idea and think that Cathy Jo Nelson pulled this off wonderfully. I pitched in a short talk about nontraditional shelving and Common Core. Great fun!

5. Spending time with my Anderson One librarians was rejuvenating. I am so proud of these ladies. We come from all backgrounds and experience levels yet we share, connect, and encourage each other.

Big thanks to all that helped make the conference happen, especially Heather Loy. Now I'm looking forward to leaving for Illinois in a few days for the Follett New Leaf in Learning Conference. Midwest, here we come. Can you handle two wacky, Southern librarians? Let's go, Tiff.

This Is What a Librarian Looks Like

You've probably heard about this really neat project. I decided to submit a pic to add to the blog. There were so many pictures of interesting people and places so I tried to choose a picture that might be a little unique. For my birthday a few years ago my hubbie bought me tickets to the Myrtle Beach safari. I'm a little obsessed with apes of all kinds, gorillas, chimps, orangutans and the lesser apes too so I was in heaven there. I was able to hold an orangutan, gibbon, baby tigers, baby leopards, and feed an elephant. It was amazing. Have you submitted a picture yet?

Librarians Role in Common Core

If your state is adopting Common Core then you may be hearing conversations or even beginning training on these standards. Our district recently started training by grade and subject. Where did that leave librarians? Well, I invited myself to one of the ELA training sessions and I'm so glad that I did. I knew from reading about Common Core that this was a good opportunity for librarians to build collaborations and play a role in training our content area teachers on literacy.

If you are unfamiliar with the standards I urge you to visit the site. I believe you will find that in regards to literacy skills these standards are closely aligned with our AASL standards. Just like with all standards there are pros and cons. I do appreciate the literacy components in science and social studies as well as the variety of texts pushed including works from other cultures and diversity in genres. I am a little nervous that recreational reading will take a back seat to the focus on informational text.

Regardless of our personal opinions of the standards we need to be knowledgeable and seek out ways to assist our students, teachers and administrators as we make the change. In an effort to be proactive I emailed our district librarian ally and asked her if we could be included in the training. She was happy to schedule time for us to meet. I invited all 15 librarians and 2/3rds were willing and able to attend. I am fortunate enough to have Jennifer LaGarde in my reader and read this post about her recent meeting with her district. I urge you to read her post and look at her presentation. There are lots of great ideas there.

• At our meeting we were able to share our ideas about how we can assist in training our teachers and lend our expertise in literacy. First on our agenda is sessions we can lead for spring professional development and our annual summer institute training after school ends. Each area (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12) is creating a presentation to share with teachers that highlights new and noteworthy books, fiction and nonfiction. Our hope is that we can replace some of our traditional choices for novel studies with more modern titles. A local book vendor will be in attendance so that teachers can purchase the titles if they are interested in reading them over the summer or adding to their classroom libraries. There are other sessions in the works that I will share in another post are not related to Common Core.
• Another way we hope to assist in this shift is seeking out collaborations with content area teachers. Now that many are panicked about the literacy components it is a good time to strike.
• Many of our teachers will be looking for nonfiction articles and texts for cold reads so I plan to find resources for them. One excellent example is this project from the NY Times.
• Ensure that our nonfiction books are up to date and easy to search and browse. Don't forget nonfiction when we create book displays, share booktalks, choose books for book clubs or author visits. Pair fiction books with nonfiction books. My middle school buds, Monique German and Kristen Hearne, and I are working on a list for our SC Junior Book Award nominees for next year. Our list includes a nonfiction pairing, website of interest, and book trailers. I shared the document on our state listserv so that anyone can contribute so hopefully this will be a resource for all of us.
• I created a nonfiction text features poster that I'll share on Flickr. I plan to use our poster maker and create a large print copy of this for our science and social studies teachers.
• Collect and share Common Core resources with each other. I've started a Pinterest board just for this. It includes websites, link to the Common Core app and lots more resources.

Another idea I copied from Jennifer LaGarde is updating books with QR Codes. I plan to do this project with 7th grade after our state testing this year. I created a mock up to take to the meeting and luckily our superintendent came in to check on us and saw the book. He thought it was very creative and expressed concern over the age of our books. He said he would try to find funding so that we could update our collections. Score!

Common Core has been causing a stir on our listserv the last few days. Some librarians voiced their disappointment over the outdated recommended book lists shared at state standards training. I created another Google Doc so that we could all create a list by grade (tabs at bottom). Our collective brain should be able to create a list that fits our student and teacher needs. Feel free to add to and use if you need this.

What are you doing to prepare for Common Core? I hope you'll take this opportunity to show off your skills as librarians.

2012 Fascination Awards

I received an email that notified me of a nomination for the 2012 Fascination Awards in the library category. The nomination was for the post Mr. Dewey, I Bid You Adieu. I'm honored to receive this recognition. Blog posts are nominated for inspiring the audience and creating conversation. That blog post has received the most traffic and comments (positive and negative). If you would like to vote click the image below. Voting begins on February 27th.

Promoting State Book Awards

The South Carolina Association of School Librarians sponsors a book award program. The program consists of Children's Books, Picture Books, Junior Books and Young Adult Book categories. While we often have titles on the Children's and YA book list in our collection we focus on the Junior Books at the middle school level.

The past two years we have asked our county voting commission to bring voting booths in for our students to cast the vote for their favorite. The students really enjoy voting this way and we even got a little media attention. They are always happy to come because it promotes their mission as well as making a fun event for our students.

Our book award committees put together an activity guide and brochure each year that is shared with SCASL members only (a perk of membership). Last year they created booktalks for each title. I put them on our school iPods and used with my students. I visited our feeder schools and allowed the 5th graders to listen to the booktalks and we talked about the titles and our book club. They were really excited about library events and even though it was a year ago those kids still talk about that visit. One of our members created a Prezi of the titles, another created a Powerpoint that included the book covers and a short description of the books, I created a Glog of the titles including the booktalks, and Kristen Hearne and I created QR codes to be placed on each book that led to the author site or another related page.

This year I hope to duplicate these activities, but in addition Kristen Hearne, Monique German and I are working on two new projects. One project is to pair each book with a nonfiction title, website and book trailer if available. We shared the link to the Google Doc on our listserv in the hopes that others will contribute to the list. The second project is a total rip off from Cathy Jo Nelson. We are using Wordle and Powerpoint to create slides for each title that we can advertise on our digital frames or on a bulletin board.

I created the image above and a series of collages that I use to put into my picture frame mousepads (just $1.50). Feel free to snag those from Flickr and use as you wish. I'm going to really miss Picnik.

What types of activities or promotions do you use for your state book awards? I would love to add to my list.