Hello?! Hello!? Anyone there?!?
I know, I know. It's been ages. I've pretty much given up blogging during the school year, as you may have noticed...There's a reason the Buffy's and Doug's and Cathy's and Joyce's of the world are the superstars they are: they have more stamina than I do, and probably a stronger work-ethic(well, among other things, of course!)
While I am certainly aspirational, I find the insane busy-ness of my current school just doesn't leave me more energy (once I get home at the end of the day) than I need to plop myself in front of the latest episode of Grimm!
While I seriously considered just stopping the blog altogether, it's too important a place for me, personally, to think out issues, ideas, and practices. Also, my current school being what it is, there are too many big things going on that I believe are well worth sharing and that I hope will be useful to others as we forge ahead into the challenges of 21st century librarianship.
Hence, a reboot. I decided to turn this into a summer blog, where I a) document/evaluate the past years' projects and b) ponder/discuss ideas for the upcoming year. In some ways I think that will be more useful for you, dear reader, as it has the advantage of a full year's thinking and work, rather than the "as I go" nature of past posts. What it loses in spontaneity, it makes up for in thoroughness!
So, what's up for Bib 2.0, 2014?
Collaborative Action Research: The role of the library in empowering teachers and improving learning through long-term PD. We're wrapping up a two year iPad Trial, and this is the how we did it and what we found series of posts.
Evaluating Your Tech Mission: Last spring, we did a school-wide study of our tech mission statement (that no-one knew we had), which also evolved into a study of the perception of technology use at our school. We have a reputation (somewhat underserved, I feel) as being a very tech forward school, and we wanted to "test the waters" as it were to see a) what teachers' perceptions were, where we were meeting the mission and what the barriers are to achieving that. It turned into a huge deal, with lots of response coding, and I'll detail what we did and why it's important that we did it.
MakerSpace update--a big hit, but also a snag.
That's the past stuff. As to the "thinking online," stuff-for-next-year part:
Visual Notetaking/Visual Thinking--I've been really taken by this concept (ironically, as I always got the "well, you tried" C-/D+ in my art classes); I think it will make a big impact on student learning. I'm exploring ways to embed it into my TOK (Theory of Knowledge) class, but it's also a good tool for the library to promote as we work to support multiple literacies and learning styles.
Library Services Infographic--In some ways, this year was something of a failure, as teachers used me even less than they did last year. Seriously, I had two collaborative lessons and that was it. My annual report is really embarrassing. The MS Librarian and I spent the year bemoaning our mutual fate and cursing the teachers, when we realized we could gripe and moan, but it was up to us to be more proactive. We have some ideas (including the infographic to have in every classroom) so I'll do some posts on those. I'm really getting kind of disheartened by this. It's been an issue at every school, but it's getting worse and I'm wondering if I'm just really bad at advocacy, or ineffectual and teachers don't want me in their classrooms!
That Library State of Mind: As long-time readers know, I was totally on board on that "put the library where the students are" mindset--of having resources all over the place online. I still think that's important, but after a few pathfinder debacles this year (Teacher: "But I put the link in the Moodle course! What else did they need?") I'm rethinking that whole idea. While we need a virtual presence, the more I do this, the more I realize virtual me isn't nearly as good as me in the flesh.
If those are ideas you're interested in, keep checking back over the next month or two!
