Curtis Students Showcase our School!

I am so very proud of our school and students, specifically the students that were brave enough to stand up in front of our school board and share the great things about Curtis! I was given the task to work with students to prepare a "student created, student presented" presentation for our school board about the great things happening at our school! You see, we try to do school "differently" at our school, and it was our turn to share what we do with our school board.

I looked to my Digital Bookworms for help! This is our media club from last year, and although we haven't started meeting yet, a couple of students jumped in to help!

Reagan & Sierra worked during lunch & came in after school to create the presentation. Kaitlyn joined the group after she showed an interest in our new Sphero robotics ball. It was decided that she would drive the ball into the meeting! We talked about the things that make our school unique, like our "makerspace", after school clubs, and our global connections. The students made a list and then we created a Google presentation to work off of for the project. The link to the presentation was emailed to each of them and the students kept adding their thoughts. This was going to be the way we presented the information to the school board until I remembered a tweet I saw about Emaze.com.

Emaze is an easy to use presentation tool that is visually appealing. We decided to switch to this! The templates are great and it is easy to add video, images and text. The basic edition is free, and more templates are available for a fee. An added bonus was when I saw this tweet:

So we tweeted this picture and received a free EDU account!

The students did a wonderful job preparing for the presentation, writing out their thoughts on notecards (which they did not end up needing!) They stood in front of the school board and spoke confidently about our school. It was wonderful to hear them share their perceptions of our school!

Kaitlyn, Sierra & Reagan getting ready to present

Gavin & Connor waiting to lead the audience in the Pledge

The presentation went well, and during the section on our makerspace, Kaitlyn drove in Roo, our new Sphero robotics ball that was received through Donors Choose funding. You can see the whole presentation Here.

Kaitlyn shows off "Roo" our robotics ball

Everyone enjoyed Roo and the students' presentation. We were all very proud of our students! It is a great thing when students are given a voice and are able to share the student perspective of their school! 

Mrs. P's Writing Contest & Skype Visit

Today was our first connection of the year, and we all had such a great time! Last week, I saw these tweets and jumped at the opportunity to connect some of our students with Mrs. P! Thanks to my friend, Shannon Miller, I have had the opportunity to Skype with Mrs. P before, and knew our students would love connecting with her again!

I sent an email to our teachers and had immediate responses from multiple grade levels! Our teachers are used to connecting and jump at the chance when it is presented! We settled on first grade & third grade. Both grades wanted to come as a grade level, which was easy thanks to our new library set up!                                                                                                            

Mrs. P wanted to talk with our students about reading & writing. She has an annual writing contest and we were hoping some of our classes might enter the contest this year. 

The theme for this year is Time Travel! When I walked by classes before the Skype visit I could hear all of the excitement as classes talked about possible topics! What I think is so fun about this writing contest is that it is a class contest. Only one entry per class is accepted, so a class can collaborate on one story or vote for the story they want to enter. There are so many options, and it makes it easy for a teacher to choose what fits best for her classroom environment!

Mrs. P was very entertaining and shared with our students how important it is to read. She even gave the students her secret about writing a story: If you can tell a story, you can write a story! Sounds easy, right!?

Mrs. P told the students that she has over 1,000 pets! She talked about polar bears and wolves! They weren't quite sure if she was "telling a story" or not, but they She then asked our students about their pets, and even about brothers or sisters.

 

She used their answers to create a story right in front of them! Our students enjoyed listening to Mrs. P create a story with characters they gave her!

It was a wonderful visit and I know our students left excited about writing a time travel story to enter into Mrs. P's writing contest! You can find more information about her contest HERE.

FINALLY! Curtis Learners in the Library!!

Today was the first day students came to the library and it was wonderful! Thanks to inspiration by other librarians, I had created a video QR code tour of the library. With our recent renovation, sections had been moved around for better flow, and I wanted students to get the feel of the new space. In previous years, I had led classes around the library & talked about each section, but this year older students are using iPads and scanning QR codes to become familiar with the sections.

Sixth graders were first to arrive and they did a great job navigating the new space!

Third graders came next, and they enjoyed the tour and trying out the new stools in the makerspace!

With our 2nd graders, we read Goldie Socks & the Three Libearians and talked about choosing just right books! Students were then able to select two books for check-out and try out our new  "Read & Meet" areas in the library!

It was a great day in the library!

Library Make-Over

Our school was freshened up over the summer. This meant that EVERYTHING had to be packed up and moved to the gym at the end of last school year. The library is upstairs and the gym is downstairs. You can imagine that this was quite the ordeal. Eventually, EVERYTHING would have to be moved back upstairs! Books, equipment, technology, and more books! May was a hard month, and August was going to be just as hard! The only difference was that in August, I would be moving everything in to a brighter space with new carpet & fresh paint! Honestly, NOW I am so excited about our new library learning space, I just smile whenever I walk around in it! I can't say that I was as excited when I first saw our library on August 15th. It looked like this:

We have over 20 different shelving units in the library, 9 heavy wooden tables, 60 heavy wooden chairs, and all of this was stacked in the middle of the library! I was overwhelmed to say the least! I couldn't even reach the top chair to begin taking apart our mountain of furniture. So I did what any normal person would: I left and went to buy fabric to cover some old benches! 

They turned out really cute, and I was able to stay sane while our district maintenance department pulled some of the furniture mountain down. On Monday, I had a few librarians come over to help and we moved all of the shelves into place. Thank goodness for those handy moving pads! I can't even begin to thank Debbie for all of her help on this day!! It was a long, hard day!  When I left that day, the library looked like this:

Keep in mind that at this point, no boxes or books had been brought up from the gym. We had packed a lot of the books on library book carts, so Monday night we started bringing those up. Thankfully, on Tuesday, my dear librarian colleagues from the district came to my rescue! By the end of the day, all the Everybody & Non-Fiction sections were put on shelves! They were also instrumental in helping with the flow of the library! We rearranged shelves & sections until it felt right! I could not have done this without them!!   Tuesday night, all of the boxes were brought up by our maintenance department and some volunteers. 

By Wednesday, the library was again a complete disaster! And again, I had some wonderful volunteers, including one of our sweet 5th graders and some previous Curtis students, come to my rescue! At one point, I even had a school board member knocking off items on my to-do list! It takes a village to put a library back together! Thank you to Denise, Kari Ann, Jaylee, Kelly, Emily & Dalyn for all of your help!

Thanks to WISD school board member, Jeff Geyer, my desk was fixed, as well as my new mobile checkout station!

There is no need to give you day by day pictures from this point because it was a slow process. Since I had requested my huge circulation desk be removed, I had to figure out where to put all of the things I stored in there! I also had removed part of my office desk, so I again lost storage. What I was trying to do was create more usable space for our students. By removing the circulation desk, I was able to free up some space which allowed us to set up our green screen permanently. Teachers & students are already dreaming of ways to use this new tool! 

With our redesigned space, we also now have some reading & meeting areas for student use.

There is a whole group story area for our young readers and a whole group instructional area for our older students. Both of these areas have a large screen with a computer for Skypes, GHOs and project shares.

And the makerspace is still there! We are making some improvements in there also, with some Donors Choose projects that were funded recently, but I'll post that later. 

My hope for this year is that this new and improved environment is constantly in use by teachers, classes, small groups, and individual visitors to our library & learning center! I want students to come in to collaborate, create & connect with others as often as possible! With this in mind, we will offer green screen and makerspace orientation for classes, so that students are able to come to the library when there is a project to complete or time for exploration, and know exactly how to use these spaces. 

Stay tuned for how our students use their new space! And please share if you are a librarian and have a great space for your students! I searched many blogs, websites, etc to try to find ideas and would love to see what others have done, with limited funds & older furniture. :)

International Dot Day 2014- Planning

Many of my educator friends have gone back to school, and alas, here I sit. Our school has undergone  some renovations this summer and the building is not quite ready. A positive to this is it is giving me time to get a head start on planning. 

One of my most favorite celebrations in the library happens very early in the school year.  It is International Dot Day on September 15thish. The "ish" because you can celebrate it at anytime around that day. The celebration centers around the book, THE DOT by Peter Reynolds and shares the idea that we should  be brave and make our mark! Thanks to my friends, Matthew Winner (The Busy Librarian) and Shannon Miller (The Library Voice) I have had the opportunity to connect my students before and can't wait for this year! 

Our students have celebrated Dot Day for the past couple of years and look forward to the opportunity to create & connect with others. You can read about how we celebrated Dot Day 2013, which always ends up being a week long celebration. We have colored dots, Skyped, shared our ideas of how we could make our mark, used technology to create & share dots, and much more! It is always a crazy, busy week but one that sets the tone for the whole year. A year that is full of creating, collaborating, and connecting!

There are great ideas for ways to celebrate on the International Dot Day website and on Pinterest, of course! But truly, no Dot Day is complete with out connections. This is a wonderful opportunity to connect your students with other students around the country and possibly the world. Matthew Winner has a Skype in the Classroom International Dot Day lesson that will help you get connected. There is also a Dot Day Google Doc to help you make connections with other educators. Many teachers and librarians have already listed their information on the Google doc, so be sure to add yours! You might not know your schedule yet, but you can always add that later!

So go ahead! What are you waiting for? Go make your mark and get your students connected this school year!

Modeling Life Long Learning

You know how we encourage our students to be life long learners? How we worry about our students experiencing summer slide? This made me start thinking about whether we, the adults in the process, are walking the walk, or just talking the talk. How often do we as educators practice what we preach? Do we "take the summer off" from learning and growing as a professional, or do we seek opportunities to learn, beyond our required hours of staff development?

I would say that if you are a connected educator, active on Twitter and/or Google+, and participate in chats and webinars, then you are certainly modeling what we want for our students. Every single time I log on to Twitter, I learn something or am inspired to try something. Because of this, I share the power of Twitter as often as possible.

This summer I have had the opportunity to share about the impact Twitter can make on someone's professional life on several different occasions. During our district summer professional development, I taught four different sessions. Each time, I would see a few people who really got it! They could see what Twitter had to offer, and then they would begin to get excited about the potential. As I was walking out at the end of one of the sessions, I thought about this part of a song from my childhood...

It really does just take a spark. I've seen it happen just this summer with our school counselor. Lindsay Fuller followed a conference hashtag and saw what you can learn without ever leaving your home. She now has a professional Twitter account, follows hashtags specific to school counselors and is working on her online presence through her blog post at Curtis Counselor. Lindsay had to experience it to "get it" and is now learning each time she gets on Twitter or reads a blog. Being a connected educator = life long learning.

Last week, during one of my sessions, a high school biology teacher started to get it. We got her all signed up and the beginnings of a PLN formed. As we were going through all of this, the wheels started turning, and you could see that spark. During our conversation, she said, "You know, we always end the year with dissecting in biology and the kids love it. Then we send them home for the summer. Why can't I START the year with dissecting and get them all fired up?" I had an extra copy of Dave Burgess's Teach Like a Pirate in my bag, and quickly grabbed it and handed it to her. Being willing to change your thinking = life long learning.

Later that night, I saw this same teacher had posed a question on Twitter and was waiting for someone to offer help. I shared her tweet with people I thought would be able to help her, and boy did they help! Thanks to Charles Cooper and others, she saw the true benefit of Twitter, a support network ready to help out. 

During the summer, my assistant principal, Lorie Bratcher talked with me about started a blog. I shared with her two books I had read this summer by Austin Kleon. These books were recommended to me by a teacher-librarian friend, Andy Plemmons.   We talked about how a blog can be an ongoing resume, and that we should share our stories with others. Lorie was Teacher of the Year for our campus, district and even our region several years ago... She is passionate about what she does and has a lot that she can share about teaching and continuous improvement. With all that she has to offer, it is still scary to put that first blog post out there for others to read, but she did it! You can read her post here. Being a risk-taker = life long learning.



This week, I also had the opportunity to speak to our district administrators about the power of Twitter and developing a personal learning network (PLN). To say I was nervous would be an understatement. It felt like I was preparing closing arguments for a big trial... that I had one hour to convince them to try Twitter as a way to grow professionally. I have Twitter presentations for teacher-librarians and teachers, but I knew this one would have to be different. Thanks to insight and resources from my own PLN, I created a Smore that I thought would convey all I wanted to share with them.



Before I got there, my principal, Racheal Rife, had everyone create an account so they were ready to go. A hashtag had also been created for this group, which showed them a way to share information with each other. I was able to see tweets being posted before I even started the presentation, so that was exciting. As I looked out at the crowd of administrators, I saw a room full of educators, many with years and years of experience, who were still excited and willing to try a new way to learn and grow. Being willing to try something new = life-long learning.

And one more thought, a little unrelated... connected educators retweet things on Twitter about how being a connected educator makes a huge difference for people professionally. What I realize though is we still need to reach the non-tweeters. Every time we post a tweet or share a blog post on Twitter, we are preaching to the choir, so to speak. The people we want to see those tweets might not have discovered the benefit of Twitter yet, so they never see them. Instead,  we should share how developing a PLN on Twitter can make you a better teacher, librarian, counselor, principal or superintendent, and make sure we are reaching out to those people where they are, which often times isn't on Twitter yet. We need to meet them in the library, in the hallways or at a conference. And then  make sure that we support them on Twitter, so that they feel its power when they reach out.

These are just some ways we model life long learning for our students. As we begin a new school year of encouraging our students to be life long learners, we must ask ourselves, " Am I walking the walk?" How do you model life long learning? 

Happy New Year!

Last week, while reading tweets from members of my PLN (Professional Learning Network) I could see that people were planning. Planning for a new school year, planning for a new challenge, even planning for new positions or new schools. For those of us in education, July feels a lot like January. It is a time for making goals and changes, for really looking at what you have been doing or where you have been, and then working to make sure that when August comes around, and the students walk in the door, you are right where you are suppose to be, ready to give your very best!

So today, I jumped on board the "Back to School" train! I bought my planner for the year! I've been thinking about the new school year all summer, as I participated in staff development, Twitter chats, Summer Learning challenges, brainstorming sessions with my #Wandoo5 +1 friends, and EdCamp Ft. Worth. But the purchasing of the planner says "I'm ready to focus & commit to ideas and goals for the new year."

Earlier this month, I watched with excitement as our school counselor, Lindsay Fuller started developing her own Twitter PLN and collaborated and connecting with other school counselors. I've shared how being a connected educator has helped me be a better librarian, and she experienced that this summer!  She wrote a fabulous blog post about her goals for this new school year that you can read HERE and sent out this sweet tweet!

This and a session at EdCamp FWTX helped bring to mind one of my goals for the new school year, which is to help teachers on our campus become connected educators. I can do this by providing opportunities for connections and supporting them while they develop their own PLNs on Twitter.  Joining and participating in conversations & chats on Twitter is a great way to become a connected educator.  During EdCamp FWTX, Todd Nesloney Skyped in to talk about his Summer Learning Series aimed at getting educators connected and comfortable with using various tools. He also spoke to the people in the room about creating a PLN on Twitter. Here some more tweets from that session.

Another goal I will have this year is having a MakerClub. Having had a Media MakerClub last school year, I know better than to name this club. The first thing the students did in the Media Maker Club was change the name to Digital Bookworms! :) #studentvoice

 If you've been reading this blog, you know we created a maker space in the library last spring. You can read the posts about it HERE and HERE.  My goal this year is to use this space not only during the school day, but also with an after school club. This club will change each six weeks, with a new collaborative project each six weeks. I have had several parents who are interested assisting with this club, so I will be calling upon them for help. The students have really enjoyed the time they have spent exploring the makerspace, but my goal is for it to be more product oriented, with a mini-makerfaire at the end of each session to showcase the creations of the students. 

The media maker club will also run similarly to this, so that students are learning a tool and then creating with that tool. This decision was based on feedback I got from the members of the Digital Bookworms at the end of last year.

Lastly, a goal I have this year is to collaborate even more with our campus teachers. Each year brings more opportunities for collaboration and more willing participants. These collaboration efforts, like other goals I have, need a specific focus so I will design collaborative projects for each grade level, with the help of the grade level teachers. With these collaborations, students will be taught a digital tool that they can use. While at AASL last November, I listened to Jennifer Reed talk about how she teaches each grade level a specific digital tool each year so that they build a tool box of digital tools. I did a little of this last year, but want to be more focused this year, planning ahead each grade level's tool. These tools will then be used for their collaborative project. 

I am excited about this new year! I'm ready to open my new planner, get focused and start working on these goals! What goals do you have for the new school year? 

Summertime & the Reading is Easy!