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[Imagined dialogue with staff and administrators.] Hello! My name is Erin Hanna. On behalf of Lexington Middle School, I'd like to welcome you all to LMS Library Guest Experience Services. Each year, we’re given approximately 180 opportunities to create a great school day. As your Guest Experiences Coordinator, I’d like to partner with you to make this year an exceptional one!
You are welcome. This space belongs to all of us. Please know that we welcome you and want you here. In addition to our shared space, we hope you’ll take advantage of the many services we offer. These include (but are not limited to) library orientation, research skills lessons, lunch book clubs, in-person and digital escape rooms, book fairs, Creation Lab makerspace activities, video recording equipment, and book checkout from our carefully curated print and digital collection. Interactions with the library and staff aim to equip students with learning opportunities and critical information evaluation tools. We have books in which you’ll see yourselves and your students reflected and books in which you and your students will learn about lives different from your own. The library provides tools to help us learn from others’ perspectives. We are available to serve you. Remember that we’re here to create and organize your optimal experience! If we don’t have a book that you or a student would like to read, let us know and we’ll do our best to accommodate these wishes. If you’d love to have a guest speaker support your classroom curriculum, we’ll set that up for you. If you need a new digital tool to use for content delivery or help troubleshooting one you’re currently using, we’ll work with you to find a solution. We will also share tissues, band-aids, pencils, and change the laminator film. We want this school year to be great and for the library to earn five-stars from each of you! We can offer recommendations. We love to find books, opportunities, and experiences that we hope will be of interest. Please ask us for book recommendations and share your suggestions with us. Peruse the library website for upcoming activities, interesting book news, and resources that will be helpful for projects in many curricular areas. We are willing to customize your experience. We want to get to know you and your individual needs (and dreams!) for this school year. We want to provide resources as well as help design and host special experiences to support classroom activities. We’d love to connect your initiatives with community partners to extend learning beyond the classroom. Let us know your expectations so we can assist you in meeting and even in exceeding them! Submitted by Erin Hanna August 2020--I am in my first year as a librarian. Besides transitioning districts, I am also trying to figure out how to support my teachers in their instruction, digital technology, and training them on new ed-tech. Then there are the logistics for my library space, the rules, displays, and passive engagement activities within the parameters of the current pandemic that are filling my brain. Inspiration was hard to drum up as I felt overwhelmed with the new additions of safety, sanitizing, and just becoming more vigilant in providing digital resources for students and staff to use during this time. I knew entering into this position, I would be an island and, maybe even more so, with the dynamics caused by COVID.
Inspiration is a necessity for me. If I lack inspiration, I struggle to encourage it in others, and wherever I searched Google for help in an area concerning the library, Pinterest tags would pop up. It evoked memories of when I first learned of Pinterest. Honestly, it was the TikTok in 2012-2015 for me. Countless hours were spent scrolling through pins and creating boards. Whether it was the perfect outfit or hairstyle, or the myriad recipes I dreamt of trying, Pinterest was where I constructed a fantastical image of who I wanted to be both personally. It wasn’t too long until I made teaching boards. When I got my first teaching job, I used Pinterest to help me brainstorm ideas for my lessons. I always pushed myself to make my lessons engaging and relevant to my students. When I was lesson planning, and I needed a boost, Pinterest was often my go-to answer. It then would lead me to countless educators’ blogs and specific education-minded websites that I saved and revisited. As the years passed, I still found myself revisiting these boards less and less as I grew in my teaching abilities. Fast-forward to this past school year. My first as a school librarian. When my inspiration was in short supply, Pinterest became the place to inspire the design of my new library, the displays, the lessons, and the many other things I would be doing in my day-to-day. This certainly was true. The sheer number of ideas I gained was overwhelming. Whether it was pins from public libraries, school libraries, or academic libraries, I found positivity and inspiration. Pinterest became the place where I was no longer on an island but in a land of like-minded professionals. Pinterest helped me continue to be a positive light in my school to innovate and create, despite all added pandemic and hybrid/remote learning stressors. And by extension, I saw an opportunity to provide support to my teachers. In December 2020, while working on my Smore newsletter layout, I stumbled upon Stephen Stewart’s 5 Tech Tips for Winter Break newsletter. One of his main tips was that teachers should take time to revisit ideas that had provided inspiration to help revitalize themselves for the upcoming second semester. This is where I had a lightbulb, “a-ha,” moment. I connected the idea proposed by Stewart’s newsletter and using Pinterest as the tool to constantly give teachers access to ideas that could cultivate inspiration, innovation, and creativity in their teaching. Isn’t it usually the case when we stumble on ideas that strike our teaching fancy, we often forget to save? This is why I thought Pinterest could be that curated holding-place for my teachers. Here is what I did. First, I created a separate board for each content area at my school. [For elementary, I could see you doing this by grade level and specials.] Next, I curated these boards with content-specific lesson ideas and activities; I only included those that addressed the established curriculum. But to be honest, inspiration often guided my pinning. After I began curating pins and had some for each board, I emailed the respective teachers to become collaborators. Later on, I created a board for the guidance counselor to help her brainstorm bulletin boards for the guidance office after she saw the curated Pinboards in my newsletter. She just recently came and asked to start a new board to help her find career-readiness unit ideas. While Pinterest boards do not have analytics provided to help you see how often they are accessed, it is a way that you can provide resources for your teachers, and they can access them 24/7. Currently, my guidance counselor, art teacher, and one math teacher have spoken to me about how I can help them implement some of the pins I have shared via these boards in their teaching next year. It has opened up avenues of conversation that I never imagined it would. One bit of advice I have is to encourage your teachers to add pins themselves. Truly make this a collaborative effort between you and your teachers. Though this is a “passive” form of engagement, it seems to achieve several of the AASL framework’s domains and shared foundations, and all it took was a little bit of scrolling, pinning, and sharing. Joy Clements School Librarian Gross Catholic High School Bellevue, NE The Nebraska School Librarians Day was held on October 17, 2020 via Zoom. We had over 100 registrants and a great turn out for a wonderful morning! We were fortunate enough to have a keynote speaker and two back-to-back sessions from school librarian presenters. We spent our lunch hour with the annual NSLA membership meeting and getting an update from Dorann Avey with NDE regarding Rule 10. K.C. Boyd started off our morning with an amazing presentation on advocacy. One of my favorite quotes from her session was, “Show your passion!” If district leaders are uninformed about your position as a librarian and what you can offer, how will you make yourself irreplaceable? You have to speak up, advocate, and show them how amazing school librarians are and how valuable they are to your district. Some of the ways she suggested you could accomplish this was to join committees, use your social media, and ask to present to stakeholders. Bottom line: “Get off the complain train” and show them how amazing you are! All of our registrants were given access to the recorded sessions from the day. Although we are making the most of our situation this year with many virtual professional development opportunities, we hope to see you all in person at NETA and next fall at Nebraska School Librarians Day! Thank you for joining us virtually this year and helping our organization continue to grow. Check the website professional development calendar for more awesome PD opportunities! Submitted by NSLA President, Angie Blankenship
Hey all! I am Angie Blankenship, School Librarian at Pershing Elementary in Lexington, Nebraska. I wanted to share a quick video with you for my blog post on how to use Facebook Collections and Groups for professional development! Please feel free to email me with any questions after watching the video! I have also listed a few of my favorite groups to follow. Please share with us if you have any you LOVE. Future Ready Librarians https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurereadylibrarians/ Learning Librarians https://www.facebook.com/groups/LearningLibrarians/ School Librarian Connection https://www.facebook.com/schlibcon/ AASL https://www.facebook.com/aaslala/ Elementary Librarian https://www.facebook.com/ElementaryLibrarian/ By Angie Blankenship
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AuthorThis blog is a joint effort by members of the NSLA Executive Board. We hope to provide relevant information, tips and tools to help you in your journey. Archives
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