Signing Off

Well, it's that time of the year again. The snow is melting, the flowers are blooming, and my allergies are going full blast. It's also the end of the semester, which is usually a time for reflection. This has been my last semester before I go to student teach, so I have been reflecting more than usual this semester. Have I learned everything I need to before I face an actual middle school? Have I done my best to get the grades I want? Are the projects I have been working on complete?

One of those projects has been this very blog. I hope to continue to add to it as I go into real-world libraries and classrooms, but for now this is goodbye. I have enjoyed the assignment to create and maintain the blogt. I learned about a lot of technology and online resources: some that I will definitely use, such as Skype and Twitter, and others that I wasn't so fond of, like Diigo.

The assignment to create a blog has been unique, but I think it worked very well. Instead of trying out various technologies and writing something about them for my professor, I was writing about them for the world! (Okay, so I only get about 6 page views a day, but that's not bad!) Knowing myself, in the future I am far more likely to look at old blog posts that I have written than old writing assignments.

I hope I will be able to continue to find new and interesting technologies to use, and I am certain that because of this assignment I will be better prepared to start from scratch and learn all about whatever it is that I come across!

Please take my poll!

Word Cloud

I've been doing a lot of research on media literacy lately. This word cloud pretty accurately represents some of the issues relating to the issue of media literacy. Enjoy!

Podcasts

When I got married, my life changed in a major way. I'm not talking about the usual changes that come with being married, like sharing a bank account or changing your last name. After I got married, I discovered the wonderful world of podcasts.

A year ago, all I really know about podcasts were that my grandma listened to them. I thought of them as something for people who didn't like music, but still wanted to listen to something. But I was pretty bored one day, and so I decided to download an episode of a podcast that my husband often talked about, called This American Life, and from that day on I've been hooked.

Podcasts are great, because they are so versatile. Some of them are informative, some are entertaining, some are just downright silly. (Hey, kind of like books!) Listening to podcasts is a great way to be a lifelong learner, because they are a practically endless source of new and interesting information, and they are so easy to access!

In 2013, NPR did a series on American libraries: Keys to the Whole World. The series covered a range of library-related topics, from lack of funding to technology in libraries to pop culture. The focus is on public libraries, but school librarians will find discussions of issues dear to their hearts.

My favorite story in the series is an "All Things Considered" piece called Beyond Books: Libraries Lend Fishing Poles, Pans and People. As they say in the podcast, libraries are places where you can find information, and information isn't always in the form of words. They visit libraries that are thinking outside of the box, and allowing patrons to check out tools, equipment, and even humans.

The library here at Utah State University has an annual event called the Human Library, where people become human books, and you can check them out and hear their stories. I think it would be fascinating to do something like this at a secondary school, perhaps in collaboration with an ELA or Social Studies teacher. 

Big6 Information Processing

Later in the semester, I will be presenting at the English symposium here on campus. I will be talking about the Big6, which is an information processing model that can help students do their research. The steps of the Big6 are:

1.Task Definition
2. Information Seeking Strategies
3. Location and Access
4. Use of Information
5. Synthesis
6. Evaluation

Here is a video that goes into the Big6 in more detail:

Just like the video says, anyone can use the Big6 method to do just about anything, from deciding which movie to see to writing a PhD dissertation. My presentation will go into more depth about how to teach each step of the process separately, so that students are guided through the process to their final product, a research paper, and then evaluate the process. When students are explicitly taught how to perform each step in the Big6, they will be able to replicate the process later in their education (or on any free afternoon), and be much more successful!

Tweet Tweet

I am a big fan of Twitter. I don't post a lot, but I usually open it up at least once a day to see what's going on in my neighborhood and the world. If it weren't for Twitter, how would I ever have known about The Dress?

I have always planned on using Twitter in my library. What better way to keep students updated on what's going on in the library? Most of your students will be on Twitter, and it's a great way to bring your library to the forefront of their minds, even if it's only for a few seconds a day. Librarians can use Twitter to announce events, promote the library itself, and even recommend books. Using hashtags creates an additional way for students to interact with the school library, and following others connects your library to a worldwide network of school libraries, teachers, and authors.

Here is a great article on how to use hashtags on your library's twitter account!

I recently set up a librarian-specific Twitter account. I followed a lot of authors, book review & news sources, and fellow librarians. Check out my page here!

No Blogger is an Island

So how many librarian blogs can there really be? I know there are at least 13 others, because there are 13 other people in the class for which I created this blog. Well, as it turns out, there are quite a lot. And some of them are really quite good.

When I first went about creating this blog, the first URL I tried was abbythelibrarian.com. I was sad to see it was already taken, but it forced be to be more creative, and I came up with a fun rhyme! Anyway, I was researching the best librarian blogs, and Abby the Librarian came up. Of course, I clicked on the link (librarians named Abby are my favorite kind of people) and the blog is actually really great! She is a librarian in Indiana, and she has a lot of really cool ideas. One of her ideas is called Reading Wildly. All of the staff at her library reads a different book from the month's specified genre, and they report on what they read. That way, all of the librarians get a much wider range of books from which to make recommendations to patrons!

Another blog that isn't library-related per se, but is educational in nature, is thenerdyteacher.com. I have been following this blog for a while, and I really enjoy it! It is run by a high school English teacher, with a strong emphasis on how to incorporate instructional technology in the classroom. This guy has so many ideas! Check out the experiment he did in his classroom with Evernote.

Do you have any librarian/educator blogs that you love? Share them in the comments!