Resources & Links

September: Library Card Month

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September is Library Card Month! I am blessed to live in a place with an incredible public library system. Not only did the East Baton Rouge Parish Library give me my first job through high school and college, but it also provides it’s patrons with TONS of AWESOME resources. They’re great about ordering books that you request, quickly sending books and materials from other branches, access to numerous databases, and even free downloads from Overdrive and Freegal Music. This is definitely stuff that my students (and teachers, for that matter) need to know about!

SO we are doing a big push for students to get and use library cards! I’ve covered the school with fliers and posters, ELA teachers are offering bonus points to students that show their library cards, and I’m encouraging students to send me pictures of them with their cards to feature in the library and on our Friday videos. FUN!

To get them excited and aware of all of this, I (of course) made a video:

I also have a little clip that they’ll be watching with a message from the librarian at our local library.

How are you promoting Library Card Month with your students?

Back to School Special!

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I am beyond excited to be part of the 2011 Back to School Special webinar for the TL Virtual Cafe with my wonderful friend and library idol Gwyneth Jones! You can read Gwyneth’s post on her Daring Librarian blog about the upcoming cafe. We are going to share ideas for supporting your teachers and becoming indispensable at your school!  It’s going to be an awesome time…hope to see you there!

By the way, here’s today’s Tech Tuesday video with Tiff. I’m sharing some great websites to enhance YouTube in your teaching: ViewPure, Splicd, and KeepVid:

 

 

 

Tech Tuesday videos with Tiff!

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This week I debuted a video series that I’m creating for my teachers called “Tech Tuesday videos with Tiff.” I’m always looking for ways to share fun tech tools with my teachers, but finding common time to be able to do that is nearly impossible. By sharing something in video format, they can check out the tool when they have time. And I’ll build a collection of tutorial videos that the teachers can always access. In this week’s video, I shared SlideStaxx. You may find it useful as well!

Top 5 Posts of 2010

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I wasn’t going to do this, but curiosity got the best of me. So here are my top 5 posts of the year! And yesterday’s post is number two on the list, but it’s one that I shamelessly advertised to my Facebook friends, which I don’t normally do 🙂

5. Story Snoops – In this post I shared my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE resource of the year, storysnoops.com. Share this resource with teachers, parents, librarians, bookstores…it’s good stuff, I’m telling you!

4. Compiling and Sharing Links – This post was about my explorations with Only2Clicks and Symbaloo as tools for compiling and sharing resources with different groups. I’m hoping that 2011 will bring the capability to embed Symbaloo’s Webmixes. That would be really snazzy in my wikis.

3. 5 Favorite Christmas Stories – So this was a carry-over from my old blog, so it wasn’t TECHNICALLY written in 2010, but it was close, so I’m listing it anyway.

2. Middle School, here I come! – This was yesterday’s post that I talked about above. Lots of pictures of my fancying up of my MS library.

1. Stop the madness! – The title pretty much sums up the theme of my blog this year – MADNESS! But it’s mostly been the exciting, fun kind of madness.

I look forward to more professional growth, learning from my PLN, and becoming a better, more effective blogger. Have a happy, safe New Year’s celebration!

I survived!

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I, Tiffany Whitehead (aka librarian tiff aka Mighty Little Librarian), survived my first big presentation! After two weeks of completely immersing myself in preparing for this, I presented my “Free Tech Tools You Can Use” session at LACUE. The room was PACKED. Standing room only, with people even sitting on the floor. I’m not exaggerating, look:

Even though I wasn’t able to use my laptop, I got set up and was able to access everything through my wiki. I dressed like my Go! Animate avatar, which was way fun. I shared all of my favorite things and as many examples of them in use as I possibly could. I really hope everyone left with something that they’d like to try!

I fit a lot in to my 50 minute session. Hopefully I didn’t completely overwhelm too many people. I also tried my best to hold everyone’s interest. I’m loud, energetic, and a spaz so I think that helps. I also did a text-in Poll Everywhere survey to try and break it up. And I tried not to take it personally that one lady in the front row kept dozing off…

I really enjoyed myself and can’t wait to do more presentations in the future! I got a great response from the audience afterwards, so I definitely felt encouraged!

See all resources from this presentation on my fancy new presentation wiki at: http://librariantiffpresents.wikispaces.com

Thanks to my awesome administration for coming up and supporting me today. My principal even brought the camera and took these pictures ^. How awesome is she?!

Thursday at LACUE

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PHEW! It was a busy day at LACUE! The keynote session by Vicki Davis (aka Cool Cat Teacher) was freakin’ awesome. Here are my tweets from the keynote:

It was quite a motivational speech. We all know about the power of being positive and striving to be the change that you want to see, but she really laid it out well. Basically, YOU are the only thing that you can change. Whining and complaining don’t accomplish anything — they just foster more whining and complaining. Instead of harping on what we CAN’T do, focus on the positive and the things that we can do. We all know this to be true, but it’s so easy to lose focus and want to change EVERYTHING at once. Ain’t gonna happen. But doing what’s best for the kids and being proud of what you do can inspire others to change. So I’m now feeling inspired, thanks Vicki!! This keynote totally made me think of my great assistant principal who is always reminding me (and everyone else) of the power of being positive — so here’s to you Mr. Fountain!

My first session was Gadgets by Leslie Fisher. It was pretty much awesome and here are some links she shared that I jotted down to check out later in case you’re interested:

www.eventbrite.com – Manage event invites, guest lists, sign-in sheets

www.rockmelt.com – Social Media based web browser, still in Beta

www.tripit.com – Free planner that compiles all of your travel info

www.evernote.com – Store all of your notes in one place

www.ustream.tv – Record a stream for free

www.mozy.com – Free up to 2gigs of backup

www.istockphoto.com/lesliefisher-offer.php – use this for 15% discount

www.smugmug.com – for photo sharing

She also shared about a bajillion other things, so you should check out her resources on her website www.lesliefisher.com to learn from a pro.

Next, I went to Brian Mull’s presentation on Internet Responsibility. He shared some great points about being smart and aware when it comes to teaching students, teachers, and administrators to consider responsible Internet usage for students. See his wiki at www.brianmull.wikispaces.com. One thing I LOVE that he introduced me to is Jing. I just downloaded it and it’s pretty sweet.

Many other sessions that I will have to revisit and share about later. I’m off to a Tweet-Up and my battery is about to croak. I had to spend a lot of my blogging time taking screenshots of my resources for tomorrow’s presentation — I fear that LaCUE’s Internet access will fail me!

Story Snoops

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You must check out this AMAZING resource. Story Snoops is a website created by a group of mothers who read, review, and categorize books for tweens and teens. This site will be so helpful when trying to get the right book in the right hands. There are several different ways to search for books, ranging from a specific author or title search to browsing based on genres, categories, or content. Finding a book by looking at their “suggested reading” lists is my favorite. These incredible search tools are enough to make me passionately love this site. Information provided for each book includes the book details, a brief summary, “the scoop” (which describes the book’s content from an adult’s prospective), and content keywords.

If all those resources aren’t enough to knock your socks off, then check out the section that has their blog. I’m so in love!

I hope this site is around for years and years to come, because this is not only a great tool for me as a librarian but it’s also something that I plan to recommend for use by parents and teachers. I would so totally hug these moms if I could! So go check it out and love it as much as I do.