No Shhing Here

Our January library displays are up. Our "Healthy Apps" Display for the month of January In our school, January is Wellness Month. To celebrate, the library hosts WiiFit Fridays, where students can play WiiSports or Just Dance! during study hall and lunch. (If you squint, you can just make out the Wii action in the background of the above photo.) (Imagine this is rotated 90 degrees) Fooducate pillar in the library.  In addition to our Wii activities, we have a display on Healthy Apps.   Fooducate , a fantastic app that helps you make healthier food choices, is totally worth checking out if you're unfamiliar with it. Above: Our "grocery store" in the library. We installed the app on our library iPads and iPods, and students used it to scan barcodes on all kinds of different food. We definitely feel like we're running a grocery store with all these items on our shelves! The app gives each food a letter grade and provides suggestions for he...

Have you heard about The 2012 Project? The Teen Librarian's Toolbox is spearheading this fantastic endeavor.  The goal is to promote the idea that teens LOVE libraries. To demonstrate this visually, TLT is going to collect 2012 photos of teens using libraries. Librarians and teens are asked to tweet their photos to @TLT16 or post them to the TLT Facebook wall.  To reach this goal, TLT needs six photos a day. Get snapping!

For all my problems with the Common Core standards, I'm loving their emphasis on nonfiction. My English teachers weren't originally feeling the romance, but now some of them are ready to flirt with the idea that nonfiction can be fantastic and engaging.  A nonfiction display for the unit Today, for the first time, we had classes in the library for a nonfiction book selection. Because these kids have never picked a nonfiction book "for fun," they needed a little instruction in what to look for. I invented arbitrary nonfiction categories for my collection: reference books, research books, coffee table books, biographies, and literary/narrative nonfiction, and provided examples from each category. The kids were asked to choose books that were either biographies or literary/narrative nonfiction. What nonfiction topics do 14-year-olds gravitate towards? Ghosts Sports stories (think the Blind Side ) Memoirs (esp. drug addiction stories) Nonfiction books def...

For the record: I love FICTION eBooks. We circulate Kindles in my library (check out our program here , here and here ) -- it's a popular offering that plays an integral role in meeting our students' reading needs. My beef is with non-fiction eBooks that provide simultaneous access to titles. In the next few hundred words, when I say "eBooks" I'm talking about this type of non-fiction. These are books provided by traditional database vendors or in collections directly from the publisher designed for research (not high interest texts that kids read "for fun"). Because my school library system is in the process of developing a regional collection of eBooks, I've been thinking a lot about the subject. In the past few days I've tried out eBook options from more than eight different vendors, and out of the whole mix, only one company provides anything worth getting excited about. My biggest complaint about the vast majority of non-fiction eBoo...

I'm not neat by nature. Is that weird for a librarian? Neatness is my Achilles heel, and if wasn't for my fabulous staff, the library would be in a constant case of disarray. Luckily, there are times when a little disorganization is a good thing.  I've noticed when you send a group of kids to the stacks to find a book, they just stare blankly at the shelves with their hands in their pockets. They don't have the motivation/drive/energy/ambition to actually pull books off and look at them.  The best way to address the issue? MAKE A MESS! When I have classes that need to select novels,  I spread piles of books out on our large work tables. Usually each table has a theme (maybe organized by subject matter or genre or whatever we're studying), and the kids spend 2 or 3 minutes at each table, quickly evaluating as many books as they can. When they see one they like, they add it to their list. At the end of the activity, they rank their top 5 finds, and then as we dis...

You know you're passionate about a topic when you're willing to share dorky graduation photos with teenagers to make a point. This is totally how I feel about Cornell Notes. To refresh your memory, I'm teaching study skills to a group of 9th grade pre-AP Global Studies students. So far I've brainstormed different note-taking strategies , and taught them how to make concept maps . For the second strategy, I taught students how to use Cornell notes. I'm personally indebted to Cornell notes, as the method definitely contributed to my success as a student. When I was a know-it-all 9th grader, my mom, a study skills teacher herself, showed me how to use the strategy. Even though I rolled my eyes, and did my best to ignore her, something clicked for me. Cornell notes got me through high school, and then undergrad, and eventually my Master's degree. Out of the 140 kids I met with this month, only 2 had ever heard of it before. Here's a quick graphic t...

To recap, we're teaching an entire research project , from soup to nuts, on the iPads. As teachers, we've had mixed feelings, though as the project continues, we're seeing more of the benefits and less of the frustration.  We recently asked our kids to rate their experiences using the iPad as a tool for research. Below are their answers, via DoodleBuddy. For the most part, you'll see that they're quite positive, but some students' responses mirror the frustration we occasionally experience as educators! :)