One of the things I strive to do is collaborate with teachers. With teachers having so little time, this is hard. They are overwhelmed with paperwork and not nearly enough time to complete all their assigned tasks. As a result, they spend long hours before and after school and at home working. I have always said that as a librarian, my job is to make the job of teachers easier. Whatever I can do to make their life easier and better for the students, I will. I have volunteered to grade bibliographies, to come in and teach classes, and work with the teachers to create dynamic lessons. In my district, part of my role as media specialist is to help teachers integrate technology into their classroom. I love technology and I love books and research so I usually try to marry these things in working with teachers.
I just got back from the Texas Library Association Annual Conference in Austin. It really is the best conference. I loved it. I always do. I have two collaboration ideas that I want to implement in the next few weeks. And while I was at conference I was emailing teachers to share ideas and start getting dates on the calendar! 🙂
The first day of TLA was #txlaTechCamp15 and it was great. I learned lots of things. One of the things I want to try right away came from the The Tech Chicks in their breakout session — it was all out about bringing books and technology together. My favorite was having students record book reviews and adding the QR codes to the books. Nothing new, but I love the website Students Review Books where I can add my student reviews and use other student reviews for books in my library. I immediately emailed our department chair and asked her if we could do this. She liked it and we are already in the planning stages! I already have the beginnings of a lesson about how to write a review in my head!
The second idea came from Jill Bellomy in her session on collaborating with ELA teachers. I have a ton of ideas from this session. And because our school is 1:1 I am always looking to add technology to our collaborations. One of Jill’s ideas was to do Spine Poetry — pull books off the library shelves and create a poem with the words on the spine. Kind of chaotic and fun and exciting, but also a lot of creative thinking that can happen as students create poems and have to search for different parts of speech. I thought it would be really fun to have students use their Chromebooks to take a picture of the their poems and create an online anthology. Or connect to some of the authors via Twitter. Maybe they could research different poem formats and choose one to model their poem after. A few other ideas are bouncing around my brain, too. I will be working with some of our English teachers to come up with other ideas, too. Hopefully, a future blog post will have some pictures of this!
I have some other ideas, too, but these were the two that I want to implement right away. I have a lot of other things from TLA I want to write about, but that will be another blog post. One about listening to authors will be soon! Thanks for reading! Please feel free to leave comments!