Summer Learning - ISTE and Google Summit - (meant to post at the beginning of the year)

WOW!  My summer was busy learning more and more just for our teachers, students and their teachers.  I loved it.  Special thanks to Mrs. Kaye for her support and belief that we need to make digital citizenship and technical understanding part of our everyday teaching and PTA for sponsoring me at GAFE and believing that teacher professional development directly benefits students, parents and teachers.  YAY!

I attended the ISTE Conference - what is ISTE you may ask.  It is the largest and arguably the best tech conference for teachers (over 40,000 attendees for the week).  ISTE stands for International Society for Technical Education.  They are the standard makers - and they just revised their Student Standards for 2016.  These are the standards JeffCo follows for students.  As a community we need to take a look at how we are implementing and teaching students how to utilize technology in all aspects of not only their academic work but also how we use tech in our everyday.  We pioneers in teaching and parenting in a pervasive digital world.

First and most interesting is I was part of a team of teachers from JeffCo who played ISTE Family Feud and WE WON!!!!  Our school will now have some hardware we can utilize for student learning courtesy of ____. I cannot wait to share our new technology with the school.  I was also allowed a long term borrow of new "overhead projector" which is so much smaller and affordable for our school.   It also has the ability to change the way we view documents but more on that later.

So much learning and so many tools are on my mind and how to best utilize the hardware we have, the hardware we may need in the future and how to get our students in line with the best and brightest in the tech world.

One amazing product that we will introduce in the Spring Semester for 7th and 8th grade students will be a general course on coding.  We will utilize logic, a blockly language and a very basic intro to Java.  This will allow for our jr. high students to make informed decisions regarding their high school choices.  So many jobs need some type of understanding of basic coding.  We will use Sphero robots to play, learn and question.

I have so many ideas for different ways to utilize my learning - can't wait to see what happens....

Summer Learning - ISTE and Google Summit

WOW!  My summer was busy learning more and more just for our teachers, students and their teachers.  I loved it.  Special thanks to Mrs. Kaye for her support and belief that we need to make digital citizenship and technical understanding part of our everyday teaching and PTA for sponsoring me at GAFE and believing that teacher professional development directly benefits students, parents and teachers.  YAY!

I attended the ISTE Conference - what is ISTE you may ask.  It is the largest and arguably the best tech conference for teachers (over 40,000 attendees for the week).  ISTE stands for International Society for Technical Education.  They are the standard makers - and they just revised their Student Standards for 2016.  These are the standards JeffCo follows for students.  As a community we need to take a look at how we are implementing and teaching students how to utilize technology in all aspects of not only their academic work but also how we use tech in our everyday.  We pioneers in teaching and parenting in a pervasive digital world.

First and most interesting is I was part of a team of teachers from JeffCo who played ISTE Family Feud and WE WON!!!!  Our school will now have some hardware we can utilize for student learning courtesy of ____. I cannot wait to share our new technology with the school.  I was also allowed a long term borrow of new "overhead projector" which is so much smaller and affordable for our school.   It also has the ability to change the way we view documents but more on that later.

So much learning and so many tools are on my mind and how to best utilize the hardware we have, the hardware we may need in the future and how to get our students in line with the best and brightest in the tech world.

One amazing product that we will introduce in the Spring Semester for 7th and 8th grade students will be a general course on coding.  We will utilize logic, a blockly language and a very basic intro to Java.  This will allow for our jr. high students to make informed decisions regarding their high school choices.  So many jobs need some type of understanding of basic coding.  We will use Sphero robots to play, learn and question.

I have so many ideas for different ways

HERE ARE A FEW THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN ON MY MIND

OVERDUE BOOKS

You might not know this but we have about 25,000 books in our collection.  That is a lot of books!  Each day we circulate close to 500 books.  All of those books unfortunately do not make it back to the library.  We mark lost/stolen/missing books almost daily.  Please make sure that your student brings back all of their library books in a timely manner.

READERS ADVISORY
Each day I strive to help students find just the right book for them.  I often suggest books that can be different than what they normally read.  I ask them to take on the challenge of trying something new.  I also encourage them to stop reading a book if they are not really enjoying it.  There are so many books (see above) in the library that we can try and find a good fit.

I hope that your student has enjoyed any book recommendations and that they continue to ask for a book that is a good fit for them.  Knowing students depend on me helps me keep up on reading and ordering books students want to read.

.....and now it is over (at least until after break)

I can't believe how fast this year has gone.  I tried to explain to first graders how when you are young it seems like everyday is soooooo long but when you get to be teacher age the days go by so quickly.  And since I am soooooo old, this semester went by like a wink.  I have been looking back over the first semester and cannot believe how much I have learned and how much we have done in the library.  From cleaning out storage areas and weeding books to planning lessons and teaching classes there is always something interesting to do in the library.  

I am thankful that I get to be the teacher librarian at our school.  We have such a wonderful group of students, teachers, staff and administrators.  It has been great working with everyone and learning from them as well. Some of my highlights were in no particular order:

• A 3rd graders presentation on what she wants to be when she grows up - hint: it rhymes with smeacher smibrarian.
• The Go Girls reading the Colorado Book Award Nominees to kindergarten and videotaping their book read alouds.
• Creating the website and updating and renewing it for the library - Thanks to Alice
• Working with all the teacher librarians from our county to solve everyday issues - Schoology at its best.
• Collaborating with 1st grade on integrated lessons in patterns and technology.  I can't wait to do more!
• Teaching "Long Ago and Now" lessons with kindergarten.  
• Book Sale at the school carnival.  I enjoyed finding books new homes; some even came back!
• Working with my colleagues at every grade level to help our collection grow in ways that are beneficial to students.
• Having JCPL come in and introduce databases to kids
• Working with 5th grade on easybib - citation is important!
• JCPL Teen librarian doing "speed dating with a book" for our 7th graders (and a few 8th graders)
• Working with students to help them find books that are just the right fit.  I love readers advisory!

As we go into our holiday break I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season.  May the new year bring us all a lot of great new reads (and smiles - like Buddy the Elf - smiling is my favorite) 

Librarians....Serving you since 2600 BC

The burning of the Library at Alexandria

Librarians Serving You Since 2600 B.C.

This the quote on my DU Library and Information Science School t-shirt.  

I think that this is a super vague and somewhat silly quote.  How many people will really understand that reference? (It refers to the Library at Alexandria that was burned down - thought to contain much of the ancient world knowledge that had been written).  

Many times I find that smart people do smart things that make us feel not so smart in comparison.  I hate comparison - don't you.  The whole reason I decided to become a librarian was to help people, create connections and my dream of dreams is to make others as passionate about books as I am.  

As I work through this first year of being a teacher librarian here at Bear Creek K8, I hope to share some of what I dream of accomplishing and sharing with students and teachers.  To make us all feel smart and valued.  And it is true, I do love to read, but my real motivation comes from students. I love to help them get smart and with their curious minds they have no where to go but up. 

This year will be a whole new experience for me and although only 8 weeks have past, I feel like I have already done a lifetime of work (in a good way). The learning curve is super steep, but I feel truly blessed to be doing this work and being with your student.  I hope that they learn as much as I do this year and that we continue to grow smarter together.