Thank You School Library Journal

About 3 years ago I was selected to be a reviewer for School Library Journal which has been so much fun.  I love the fact that I receive a new book every month (or sometimes every other month).  Some books I would have definitely picked on my own, but some of them would not have been my first choice.  However, almost every book I have read so far has been worth the time I invested.  In addition to receiving the book to read and review before it is published, I also receive an additional hard copy when the book is published.  So I'd like to take the time to say "Thank you School Library Journal." Both me and the DHS Library have greatly benefited from this arrangement.

Here are a few of my favorites that I read this year and the reviews I gave them...

Kingdom of Ash and Briars - Hannah West

In the kingdom of Naissera, Bristal works as a common kitchen maid.  Be that as it may, her world completely changes when she is kidnapped, thrown into the “Water” and transformed into an elicromancer.  The elicromancers, now almost extinct, are an ancient race of magic beings.  Bristal’s power is the ability to change forms; she is a shape shifter.  Once she makes the transition from mortal to magic, Bristal is befriended by the only two elicromancers in the kingdom, Brack and Tamarice.  Brack encourages Bristal to use her magic for its intended purpose which is to serve those who rule Naissera.  Tamarice, however, believes the elicromancers should use their magic to serve themselves instead.  Under the tutelage of Brack, Bristal finds herself in many predicaments that reflect some of the fairy tales Walt Disney made famous.  The reader will recognize the resemblances to the storylines in Snow White, Cinderella, and even Sleeping Beauty as Bristal uses her magic to help the mortals of Naissera.  Under the tutelage of Tamarice, Bristal begins to understand the allure of power.  It is a balancing act she might not be able to handle.

In Kingdom of Ash and Briars, Hannah West is able to create a world where kings and queens seamlessly blend with the magic of elicromancers.  The characters are robust while the theme of good versus evil is universal. Books by Alex Flinn, such as Beastly (Harper Collins, 2007) and Cloaked (Harper Collins, 2011), come to mind as one reads about Bristal’s endeavors.  The twisted fairy tale theme is a popular one among young adults, and Hannah West does an admirable job of constructing a story that is reminiscent of multiple tales of old.  For this reason, Kingdom of Ash and Briars is recommended for both middle and high schools students from grades 7-12.

The Door that Led to Where - Sally Gardner

AJ Flynn is a typical underachiever.  He has failed all but one of his final exams, and now at 17, his future seems grim.  Despite his less than stellar academic career, AJ lands an interview with a prestigious London law firm thanks to his mother’s connections.  AJ believes this is the job he needs to break free from his mediocre life.  Once he is hired, AJ finds a key that opens a door to the past, 1830 London to be exact.  During his journey between both worlds, AJ has a decision to make.  Should he stay in the present, or start a new life in the past?

In The Door that Led to Where, Sally Gardner creates a world where a door that connects the present to the past seems believable.  She anchors each version of the city using the appropriate landmarks of London, both past and present.  The characters are universal, and many teens will be able to connect to their hopes and dreams.  The pacing and plot development are seamless which adds to the easy readability.  There are, however, many British terms and slang that the average reader may not be able to decipher.  Therefore, this book is recommended for general purchase, but not for reluctant or slow readers.  Due to the lack of language or adult themes, this book is recommended for Middle and High school libraries, grades 7-12.

This is My Brain on Boys - Sarah Strohmeyer

Addie Emerson attends a private high school, Academy 355, near Boston, MA. She and her lab partner, Dexter, are competing for the prestigious Athenian award which would surely finance Addie’s college education; she wants to attend Harvard.  She and Dexter are trying to manipulate the human brain to make subjects fall in love.  After researching and conducting one trial, Addie believes she has successfully guided two students to fall in love by placing them in life-threatening situations.  Now she needs to prove this theory by conducting one last experiment.  That is where Kris Condos enters the picture.  Kris is on probation and is spending the summer at Academy 355 working off his crime against the school - vandalism. The year before Kris and his girlfriend at the time trashed the lab where Addie and Dex worked.  In light of this action, the Dean of students has assigned Kris to Addie’s experiment.  Addie, however, seems to the be the only person attending Academy 355 who does not know Kris Condos’ involvement in wrecking the school’s science lab.  As the trials take place, Addie gains a new understanding of the world around her.  Through her struggles, Addie grows and perseveres.  The reader will enjoy the twist at the end of the story.

Author Sarah Strohmeyer has created an enjoyable piece of realistic fiction.  She designed a believable and very smart female character in Addie Emerson.  Addie has a very high IQ and finds it difficult to interact with the world around her because of her intellect. Many gifted high school students will relate to her struggle.  Although the writing style is complex, the theme is universal.  Books written about love are not new to the literary world, but the scientific approach the author fabricates in this story does put a new spin on this overtaxed theme. Because the vocabulary is reflective of the main character’s intellect, this would probably not be a book to recommend to reluctant or slow readers.  However, it is a book for the average and above average readers.  In addition, there are some situations that are not appropriate for a younger audience.  Therefore This is My Brain on Boys by Sarah Strohmeyer is recommended for high school, grades 9-12.

Thanks for stopping by!

Panther Go - Freshman Library Orientation

2016 - 2017: It's a new year with new goals...and another year of new administrators, both on our campus and in the district.  To be honest, we didn't have time to worry about that situation at the beginning of the year.  Instead, we had about 1,400 Freshman students that needed to learn more about our school's library. So how did we do that this year?  We tapped into the ever popular Pokemon Go craze that happened at the end of the summer.

I sent a text before school started to my cohorts in crime, Blanca, Karen and Judy, expressing my interest in rearranging the Freshman Library Orientation around the Pokemon Go game, and they were ready. So ...how were we going to do this?  A few days into my research, I came across this article, Pokemon Scavenger Hunt in the Library. It was the information we needed to organize this part of the orientation.

In the article, the author is so organized and even has resources to download which was great. However, instead of using her information as is, we put our own spin on things by creating a Panther Go scavenger hunt. Our mascot is a panther, and our new principal, Ms. Simmons, was and still is focused on school spirit.  Our Panther Go game could promote school spirit while helping the students learn more about the library.

Instead of 8 Pokemon "hidden" around the library, we had 8 panthers.  Each panther also had a QR code the students scanned to learn more about that area of the library.  Either the kids could bring their own device and download a free QR Reader, or use one of the school's iPads.  We broke the students up into groups of 2, 3, or 4. (We let them decide.) Then the students explored the library, found the Panthers, scanned the QR codes, and then had to record where they found each panther on the Panther Pokedex sheet.

That was the  fun part of our library orientation, but it wasn't the only thing we did with them.  To give you the "big picture," our Freshman Orientation went something like this...

• students logged onto a computer and set their first password of the year (While they did this, we played the school's first ever "Lip Dub.")
• students logged into their Skyward Student Access account to see their grades, class schedule, and new district Google email addresses
• librarian gave a short explanation of the library brochure...including where to go to access our databases (see link below for a copy of the brochure - minus our usernames and passwords for the databases.  Those are only available to our students - sorry)
• librarians gave a short explanation about the Panther Go scavenger hunt and the expectations and boundaries needed (we have a really big space, and kids like to run...even 9th graders).
• librarian passed out iPads to the groups that weren't using their own devices and let them wander around the library to find the Panthers.
• student groups who completed their Pokedex were able to pick a prize from the basket.  We had pencils, stickers, tattoos, and blue or red beads...all Panther stuff since it was a Panther game.
• After the scavenger hunt, students were free to check out a book, play a game, do some homework, or access a computer until the period was over.  We called this their "free time."

 In order to cover all of the Freshman, we targeted the English classes.  Those teachers have been working with us for years.  We are always grateful they are willing to give us a day to cover our library routines.  We all know how precious time is.  So we ended up doing this class 48 different times, or 16 times each for the 3 of us.  It was a long 3 weeks, but we managed to see all of the classes.

       

 In addition to the 48 English classes, we also did the Panther Go scavenger hunt during our "Meet the Teacher" night.  Then it was open to all grade levels, not just the 9th graders.  Overall, I think the students had fun and were able to learn more about our library in a way that "speaks" to them....using tablets and games.

Thanks for stopping by!

For all of our Freshman Library Orientation links, handouts and brochures, go to http://duncanvillehs.libguides.com/Freshman2020

Highlights from TCEA 2016

Blanca, Karen, and I arrived in Austin (Texas) the evening of February 1st ready to learn all that TCEA (Texas Computer Education Association) had to offer.  After 4 days, 17 sessions, one presentation, and multiple vendor visits, we were exhausted.

We were so ready to learn; we even had an 8am session on day 1 which led to a most interesting bus ride...

The session we almost didn't make that morning was on coding.  It is quite trendy to do in libraries these days, and we wanted to see what the hubbub was about.  It was a good session, by the way. Here is a link to that... Launching a Coding Club with Confidence.

Here are a few more highlights from our trip.

My favorite person to see while at TCEA is Tammy Worcester Tang.  She always has a session to introduce new technology tools.  I think my favorite apps she introduced were Photo Math and Google Translate.  Her website is a gold mine of technology ideas, tammyworcester.com.  The session I attended was Tammy's Favorite Tech Tips, Tricks, and Tools.  For all who love technology, you should check out these links.

My next favorite session came from a trio of ladies outside the Austin area.  They covered Marzano & GAFE (Google Apps for Education).  Here is the link to their PowerPoint. I enjoyed this one because of the McREL training I attended recently in our district.  McREL uses Marzano's 9 strategies in their program.  So this was a timely presentation for me.

In addition to these 2 presentations, I also enjoyed the Makerspace session that was organized by the librarians in Lancaster ISD.  I am always fascinated by this topic, and these ladies did a great job presenting what they have done.  Here is a link to their Makerspace presentation.  What I enjoyed most was that the librarian presenting was well into her 60s.  She understands that if libraries don't transform to what their users need, there will be no library.  Not as many librarians as you would think understand this.  It was refreshing to see a veteran librarian out there leading the cause.

Another session worth mentioning was the Google CS First website.  Google now has computer science clubs ready to go.  All the information and resources you need are organized on this site. Granted many of these clubs are targeting the K-8 audience, but we are going to take a look at these anyway.  What a great way to encourage computer science and get the support you need.  Looking for a computer science club?  You really need to check out this site.

Since I went to 17 different sessions, I am not going to annotate all of them.  Here are some of the other noteworthy presentations I attended.  Unfortunately not everyone's presentation was online.  So I was only able to link to a few.

• SAMR & Makerspaces
• The Flipped Library 
• Connecting the Dots: Library, Technology, STEM, and Literacy
• Google with Class
• What's Trending?
• Genreficiation Demystified

Of course I am going to mention our presentation as well.  I believe we did well.  There were probably 30-35 teachers there.  Our presentation was "eBooks: Check Us Out."  

I'm not sure how much new information we gave, but I think we gave comfort in the fact that we are struggling with this platform.  It is not as popular with the millennials as we have been led to believe. In our experience, the students don't mind having digital books when they are researching; it is easier to find the information they need.  However, when asked to read large chapters or whole books, they prefer print.  This would be text books and fiction books.  It is interesting that many librarians are experiencing that as well.

Back to the presentation...When we realized that we were going to throw some free advertising to some of our vendors, GALE, Follett, Barnes and Noble, and Capstone, Blanca contacted our reps to let them know what we had planned.  All 4 of our vendors donated enough SWAG for everyone in our audience.  So we felt pretty good about this....definitely an "Oprah" moment.

In addition to all of the tech sessions, we did carve out some time to go to the bottom floor and visit with the vendors.  We ended up with all kinds of SWAG.  My favorite freebie was a selfie stick.  We were all given one if we dressed up, used the selfie stick to take a picture, and then posted that picture using the scholastic hashtag.  It was my first time to use one.  How did I do?

Overall, we had a great time.  It was definitely an "information overload" experience, but we look forward to this great conference every year.

Thanks for stopping by!

Wintering in the Library

Well....Christmas has come and gone along with our whole first semester.  Where does the time go?

The librarians of Duncanville High School are wintering peacefully here among the students.  We have only be back for a few days, but we have been busy helping our students navigate our resources for their various projects.  Our AP Senior English teacher already has an assignment due, and it was refreshing to see his students in the library at the beginning of the week instead of at the end.

Our yearly book order just arrived this week, and now it is time to process 26 boxes of books.  Some of our regulars are excited seeing the titles they suggested.  Our student aides have been working to help us process the order, but we do catch them from time to time taking a break and reading one of the new books.  It is hard to be mad at a student for reading.

We will be presenting again at TCEA in February, and we are trying to gather our information and design our presentation.  We chose to target eBooks this past year, and we did learn a lot about them. Our book club went totally digital this year.  We bought the Barnes and Noble Nooks about 2 years ago, and we have an old Gen 1 set of ipads.  We also pushed the Follett eBooks with our Freshman classes this year, and we are always pushing our GALE ebooks for research.  We are still in the process of gathering information through our statistics and various surveys, but it should make for a pretty good presentation.  For those of you going to TCEA, we will be presenting as part of the Library Academy on Thursday, Feb. 4th, from 3-3:50pm.  It will be interesting to see if our findings are unique to our patrons, or if there is an eBook trend out there.

Thanks for stopping by!