I Read...What's your Superpower?

After the juniors leave, we usually decorate the library for our end of year theme.  For the past 2 years, that has been a luau theme.  This year Karen talked us into a superhero theme. The only problem with that was our lack of decorations for the library.  So we went to Pinterest for inspiration and was not disappointed.  We found lots of good stuff to help us decorate and plan for our end of year party.

If your library is not doing an end of year party yet, I would highly recommend it.  This is our 3rd year to host such a party, and we think it is the perfect avenue to thank our current supporters and recruit new ones.

We call it our annual "Patron Appreciation Day."  It happens after school for one hour, and we invite our own students and staff.  In addition,we also invite our superintendent, other district administrators, school board members, and key community members such as the mayor, the public librarians, and city councilmen.

Weeks before the party, we set a date, order refreshments (this year we ordered cookies at Tom Thumb, but in the past we have ordered cakes at CostCo), set the guest list, and contacted our area public librarians, Barnes & Noble, and Half-Priced Books to ask them for summer reading promotional information they may have. We also solicited student projects from the teachers so we could showcase the students' hard work and provide an authentic audience for their products. In addition, we talked to the Guitar Club about being our live music during the event.

Then we decorated the library and designed our flyers that we planed to hang up around the school advertising our event.  For decorations, we used this website we found on Pinterest.  It had templates that we were able to use with an OPAC projector.  From those templates, we were able to create...

Batman

Green Lantern

 & The Flash

Our biggest decoration was a message about summer reading...

The inspiration for this banner came from a bulletin board we found on Pinterest. We used Superman duct tape for the border which also helped to weigh down the butcher paper.

The inspiration for our  book display to go with the theme was also found on Pinterest.  Here is what ours looked like...

Our flyer this year was created in Word.  After we acquired our principal's permission, they were hung all over the building using this cool Superman duct tape we found at Target.  The duct tape was quite the hit, and many of our signs were found on the floor because the kids were taking the duct tape for whatever reason.  It was my hope that the students actually read the flyer before stealing the duct tape.  :)

A week before the party, we confirmed the refreshments, talked to any of the librarians that hadn't sent us information about their summer reading, and followed up with the teachers who were bringing down student work.  Then we sent out a general email invite to the staff, district administrators, school board members, and community members.  We also submitted an announcement to be read during our morning announcements each day.  

2-3 days before the event, we picked out the crafts, downloaded the Superhero apps for our newly acquired iPad lab (which we have thanks to our best friend, Vicki Smith), and created the buttons "I read...What is your superpower" that we plan to give away during the party. I think the pin looks great, and it took Blanca quite a few hours to create that "R" in the middle using Paint.

For the crafts, we turned to Pinterest again...no surprise there. After much research, we decided to create masks and make Superhero Tootsie Roll Pops.  Here are the templates from the website for the crafts we did.

Superhero Tootsie Roll Pops-Template

Masks-Templates

A word to the wise about the iPads.  When you go into the settings, make sure you block the student's ability to download the apps.  Do not block the apps themselves.  That was our one hiccup; I put a bit too much security on the iPads, and I had to go back into them and allow the students to see the apps that I had downloaded.  Of course, we did not know this until the kids had their hands on the iPad in the middle of the party.  Also, Karen was stationed in this area duirng the party to make sure the students used the sign out sheet when they took an iPad.  She also took their student ID to ensure they would bring the iPad back.  It worked; not one iPad went missing.

The day of the party, Karen set up the tables and distributed the area public libraries' summer reading information.  We had information from the libraries of Duncanville, Dallas, DeSoto, Cedar Hill, & Grand Prairie.  We also had a table for our Book Club, Barnes & Noble, and Half-Priced Books. Here are 2 examples of the tables...

Duncanville Public Library

Barnes & Noble

On the day of the party, the teachers started bringing their student products as well, and we arranged them on the tops of our shorter shelves. For each set of products, we created a sign so the general audience would know the name of the project, the subject, and the teacher.  Here are just a few of the products we displayed...

Ms. Peter's Pre Calculus projects

Mr. Tahaney's Art Creatures

Ms. Simon's & Ms. Ellis' Shakespeare projects

An hour before the party, we set out the crafts, the food, moved the iPads into place and generally took care of the last minute details.  The guitar club brought down their instruments and started to set up for the concert.  We checked out each area of the library to make sure there was something to do or see.  

• Section A - summer reading programs from area libraries
• Section B - food and drink
• Middle of library - iPads, chess sets, and book check out
• Section C - crafts
• Section D - Guitar Club concert
• Shelves - student work

Of course we dressed for the occasion as well...

Our party was from 3-4pm last Thursday, and I think we were able to escort the last of the students out by 4:20.  We had hundreds of students, many faculty members, our Superintendent Dr. Ray, our Chief of Staff Mr. Chrietzberg, our CFO Mr. Kuehler, our Chief of Security, Mr. Woolery, our head of Technology Ms. Smith, the Mayor Ms. Hodge, one of our city councilmen Mr. Cooks, our Duncanville public librarian Ms. Hudson, and our Barnes and Noble rep Ms. Howell.  We had a great time, and I think the students did as well.

The day after the party, we sent out thank you emails to everyone who showed up.  To go with the thank you, we created a Vuvox collage with a few of the pictures from the event.

Overall, this party is a great way to solidify our relationship with the students, staff, and district administrators while forging new bonds with the school board and community members.  It never hurts to have a few more friends for your library.

See you next time!

National Library Week

We had a great time celebrating National Library week at the DHS Library!  Before I get into that, I did promise to tell you who won our "Battle of the Books" March Madness event.  By only 5 votes, the Outsiders by SE Hinton beat out Harry Potter.  That is not how I expected it to go, but that is what I love about this job...never a dull moment!

Now for National Library Week.  We took an idea from Pinterest (no surprise here), and created a scavenger hunt for the students.  Our prize was an ipod shuffle.  Actually we had 2 that were generously donated by a person who prefers to stay anonymous.  The original scavenger hunt created by Kyna Hockenberry  for her library's Teen Tech Week was our model...Link to Pinterest

Blanca emailed the librarian who gave us her explanation as to how she used it and her permission for us to adapt her idea.  One big modification for us was that we made the students keep up with the paper.  The librarian whose idea we stole was a public librarian, and she kept the student punch cards posted on a wall.  We were afraid we would have too many, or something would happen to them if they were on display.  So each student became responsible for his/her scavenger hunt board.  Here is what ours looked like ...

I created this in Publisher which didn't take as long as I thought it would.  I imported a picture of an iPhone, and then created the shapes over the top of the picture.  Then I added the text or pictures on top of the shapes.

Back to the event...the idea of our scavenger hunt was to have the students doing 3 things each day, and the person with the most punches would win the iPod shuffle.  As the student completed an activity, one of the librarians used a hole punch to mark the finish of the event.  If the student set foot in the library, we punched the 1st button, which was the day of the week.  If they introduced themselves to the librarian of the day, we punched the second button, and the third button each day had them doing something different.  On Monday, students had to check out a book.  On Tuesday, they had to follow us on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.  On Wednesday, we had cupcakes in the library for all participants.  On Thursday, the students had to email, tweet, or FB us a picture of themselves reading.  We put the directions on the back of their iPhone sheet...(because who is going to remember all that!)

We left Friday off on purpose so that the students had the day to turn their iPhone into the library.  (Note: We used different hole punches, instead of just the round, so the students couldn't punch their own.  We had the "fancy" hole punches, like the butterfly, triangle, and square.)

We had a great time and plenty of participation.  We even met some students who had never been to the library before this week.  So I believe this event was a success! If we do this next year though, we should start with the cupcakes on Monday.  We had lots more participation after that event, but it was in the middle of the week. So the students starting on Wednesday didn't stand a chance of winning the iPod.

There were 9 students who finished all 12 activities.  Since there were only 2 iPods, we had a drawing.  Two lucky students went home with an iPod shuffle; they were Willie and Morgan.  Yay!

See you next time!

March Madness

March truly was a "mad" month for us here at the DHS Library.  We were involved in teaching research to the juniors while planning our Open House Family Event and our "Library March Madness" contest.  However, my purpose today is not to talk about the 165 classes that came through the library this month.  Instead, I am going to talk about the family night where 300 parents and students attended on March 5th, and our Library March Madness. 

Our Family Event did not have a theme as our Hunger Games & Angry Birds Nights did.  We decided to go with a more generic theme of "Family Night."  During Texas Public School's Week, the high school had an Open House.  During this Open House, the area 8th graders and their parents are invited to see where their children are going next year.  So we decided to have a few fun events in the library for them and our own Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior students.  Rarely do Senior students come, but they are always welcome.

We have 4 main sections of the library, and we set up a different activity in each section.  The first section (area A) had a multitude of crafts for the students to do.  The Cosmetology students set up an area to do face painting.  We used old book pages to make butterflies.  We made St. Patrick's Day hats and bookmarks . . .



and we had an area where students could adopt a Reading Buddy (which is a pet rock from the 70s) that we started with the Junior research.  See link to our Pinterest page for details... http://pinterest.com/dhslibrary/junior-research/

In section B of the library, we asked the Football coaches if we could borrow the inflatable Panther head to blow up and use as a background for pictures...



In section C of the library, we set up Coke Floats for both the students and adults to enjoy.



In section D of the library, the DHS Guitar and Bass Club performed for us.  This is just one of 4 different bands that performed throughout the evening.



And now... Library March Madness

So far we have had a strong response to the March Madness contest.  We started with 32 books and are now down to the final four.  This week the students are voting for the championship round.  It is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone against The Hunger Games, and on the other side, it is Dragon Ball Z against The Outsiders.  Crazy match up, huh?  This idea all started with Pinterest.  I pinned a couple of pictures of other libraries encorporating books into the March Madness bracket system.  Of course, they were just pictures.  I couldn't find anyone who specifically told us how they ran their brackets.  So we made it up as we went along.

Our first step was to find 32 books worthy of the competition.  We decided on 32 instead of 64 based on the amount of time it would take to get to the championship round.  We eliminated books once a week to give students and teachers the time to vote.  We decided that 2 votes in one week would be too confusing for everyone.  So each Monday, we would reveal last week's vote.  We went from 32, to the Sweet 16, to the Elite 8, to the Final Four.  We are now in the process of eliminating two more books for the Champiomship round.

 



After we mapped out the overall plan of how long this was going to take. We sent out an "all call" for books over the morning announcements, Twitter, and Facebook. Students and faculty members submitted their 4 favorite books of all time.  Then Blanca tallied the results, and the list of 32 books was established.  To pit one book against another for the brackets, Blanca put the names of all 32 books in a basket and drew 2 titles at a time.

Once the bracket was set, it was time to create the ballots.  Each week the ballot reflected the books left, and each week Blanca put the names in a basket to decide which book competed against each other.  Since we are not at the end of this contest, I'll have to let you know who competed in the competition and which book was voted the "champion."

After the champion has been announced, we have kept all the ballots and plan to use them in a raffle (since we made the students put their names and ID numbers on them) to give away a few small gift cards to B&N or Half-Priced Books as a "thank you" for voting and supporting our "Library March Madness."

See you next time!

Love, Mustaches, and Hippies!

So, let's talk Valentine's Day, Junior Research, and National Mustache Day. That has been our life since TCEA.

For Valentine's Day we put out construction paper hearts for the students to decorate so we can hang them up in our windows.  They love doing this.  The students write messages to their girl/boyfriends, create poems, or draw pictures.

In addition to that, we also have an interactive display.  We put famous book couples in each of our big heart cut outs.  Then the staff and students can try to guess the book that goes with each couple. The QR code under each heart reveals the book.  

Then we totally stole an idea from Pinterest to create a Valentine's Day book display....

This was a big hit with both teachers and students.  Everyone who walked by the shelves laughed.  Then a few stayed to look at the books on display to see what we were recommending.  The plan worked!

After having fun with Valentine's Day, it was time to switch gears and prepare for the Junior invasion.  I have to admit, the Junior research is fun.  The students research people, places, and events from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  As a person born in the 70s, and raised in the 80s, this research is near and dear to my heart.  So we decorate the library and dress as hippies and help our Juniors get into the spirit of their research.  In the past couple of years, we have even convinced the teachers to dress up.  We all love being hippies!  

Junior Research LibGuide

Let's talk National Mustache Day!  Who knew this would be so popular?  Last year we noticed that a few of our regulars in the library had fake and temporary tattoo mustaches one day.  So we asked.  Come to find out, there is an actual National Mustache Day.  This year we jumped on the band wagon and purchased fake mustaches to give to our patrons.  We told the students all week that we would give out mustaches that Friday if they checked out a book.

Blanca even created a book display to help advertise...thanks again Pinterest!  

She had way too much fun putting all those fake mustaches on the books.  My favorite was the dragon from Inheritance!  It was funny how many of these books were actually checked out the week we were promoting the mustaches.  LOL!

That Friday, Feb. 22nd, was crazy busy.  We had students coming in before school started, during lunch, during classes with a pass, and then a few classes convinced their teachers to take a mini field trip to the library.  We bought 400 mustaches, and we passed out the last one during our after school crowd.  Our library check out stats tripled that day.  I'd say National Mustache Day was a great success for our library.

The next installment of the Beta Librarian...Open House and March Madness.  See you next time!

TCEA in Austin, TX

We absolutely love going to TCEA in Austin every year.  For the past 7 years, Blanca, Karen, and I have been lucky enough to present at this fine event.  A very wise librarian, Suanne Johnson, once told us that it was our duty to present and share what we do with others.  The first time we presented it was with Suanne, and we talked about how we ran centers in our elementary libraries; that seems like a lifetime ago.  Suanne is now retired and has move away, but I can still hear her voice in my head saying, "you need to present" when that email comes to submit presentations for the next year.  To be honest, we dropped the ball last year and missed the deadline.  Thank goodness someone from the Library Academy at TCEA contacted us.  The district no longer pays for our accommodations if we do present, but we believe it is worth the money from our own budget to go.

My favorite presenter at TCEA is Tammy Worcester.  She is fabulous!  If you haven't checked her out before, you are missing out.  To take a look at her page, click here: Tammy's Website. She is one techno-savvy lady.  Here is a list of all her presentations at TCEA this year: TCEA 2013.  We went to her 3 hour session, "Tammy's Favorite Web Tools," and loved every minute of it.  We also went to her presentation on Evernote, but I will admit she lost me when she started encrypting quizzes for students to take.  That was way beyond my comfort level!  Blanca also went to one called "Tech Tools for Administrators," and she came back with lots of ideas.  I put a lot of the tools we liked from TCEA on my Pinterest board: "Our Favorite Digital Tools."

Now for our presentation...Last year was the first year we presented for the Library Academy.  We presented our Pirate Freshman Orientation dressed in full costume.  (Here is a link to our presentation last year, http://duncanvillehs.libguides.com/epirate ) We focused on the technology we used, like QR codes, the ActivExpression clickers, Survey Monkey, and Animoto.  We presented in front of a group of about 20.  So in preparing for this year, we estimated for 40 librarians, thinking we would be bringing home some of the buttons and postcards we made to give out as "freebies." 

Well, we were WRONG!!!  Our presentation was up-sized to a ballroom 15 minutes before we began, and I almost hyperventilated when the placed filled up.  It was the first time in 7 years that I was actually nervous.  We had to scatter the postcards 2 to a table and asked the librarians to share.  We gave out buttons to those who asked questions during and after our presentation. That was not our original intention, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances.  

Here are a couple of pics of us presenting...

And here we were after it was over...

So we'd like to thank everyone who showed up for our presentation.  We had a great time!  In case you want to take a peak, here is the link to our presentation... http://duncanvillehs.libguides.com/tcea2013

See you next time!

Slow Time of the Year?

January is not usually packed with reseach classes, but amazingly enough, we are still quite busy.  There is a lot of planning to be done for the Spring.  We are spending what is left of our budget, introducing Nooks to our circulation, creating book displays, helping both staff and students who come see us, taking care of technology issues, and running a Twitter contest to enlist more followers after creating a Twitter handle for the DHS Library, which is @dhs_library. Then there are the presentations and staff development classes we are designing.

In addition to our TCEA presentation we are making in Austin next week, and the presentation we are making for our district Showcase on Feb. 18th, we are also analyzing a staff survey we sent out last week.  I created the survey in Google Forms because, to be quite honest, I hadn't done that before; I usually use Survey Monkey.  When we went to Keller's YAK Fest a couple of weeks back, the librarians there convinced us that Google Forms was the way to go.  The free Survey Monkey only allows 100 responses, and Google Forms has no limit that I have hit yet.

On our survey, the librarians wanted to know how we could focus our efforts this semester to help.  If you are interested in what we asked, here is a link to our form... Staff Survey Link

 

I set up the survey to be anonymous so more people would be willing to answer it, but I did ask for the subject they taught; I was curious to see if every department was represented. We did indeed have many teachers from different departments answer our survey.  Yay!  I do have to mention this side note...although the survey was anonymous, we were amazed by the number of teachers who came by to see if we could guess which set of responses were theirs.  LOL!

 

After analyzing our results, we decided to focus on staff development, and here were our results...

• Alternatives to PPTs = 21%
• School Fusion = 15%
• Web 2.0 Tools that are subject specific = 15%
• Flipped Learning Model of Instruction = 13%
• Pinterest = 12%
• Twitter = 8%
• Organizing a Research project = 7%
• Word 2010 & Win 7 = 6%
• Google Docs = 2%
• Saving You Tube videos = .5%
• CPS Clickers = .5%

We are planning to tackle "Alternatives to PPT" first for obvious reasons, and we are going to take advantage of our library space and offer classes there.  We plan to offer a different digital tool each week (on Mondays)  in February during all blocks and after school.  For some teachers, that will be enough.  We are going to offer to teach the class to their students as well, if they feel like spending some time with us in the library. We hope that in offering to teach the classes to the students, those teachers who are intimidated by new technology will have the protection of adverse consequences they need.  AND the students get the exposure to a new tool.  It's win-win.

 

Our first Alternative PPT class is Kizoa, http://www.kizoa.com/ .  Karen is using this one in our TCEA presentation next week.  After that, we are going to introduce the staff to Spicynodes, http://www.spicynodes.org/.  I am using this tool in our TCEA presentation.  Blanca hasn't announced her tool of choice yet.  She is hoping to learn about a new tool at the technology conference next week.

 

The next class the staff wants is School Fusion.  For those of you who are not familiar, School Fusion is an interactive website that our teachers use for class.  We plan to address this topic during our sessions at the District Showcase on Feb. 18th.  Then we are thinking of a monthly work session after school to give the teachers a safe environment to explore.  Here is our library School Fusion page http://library-services.dhs.duncanvilleisd.org .

 

The 3rd class the staff wants is Web2.0 tools that are subject specific.  So we are going to start with the 4 core, English, S.S., Science, and Math (with different tools for each topic within a subject...i.e. Chemistry, Biology, Physics  within Science).  Then we are going to do Fine Arts and Sp. Ed.  We plan to create a LibGuide for each area, and then giving the link to that LibGuide to the appropriate teachers.  After the teachers explore the LibGuide, we will then offer a class, if 4 or more teachers are interested, to guide them through the resources.  If you are not familiar with LibGuides, they are the best.  Blanca went to a LibGuides session at the Texas Library Association (TLA) conference 2 years ago, and she convinced us to buy this product.  They are great.  Think of it like a digital Pathfinder.  Many colleges and some high schools have these.  Here is a link to our LibGuides site if you are interested http://duncanvillehs.libguides.com/ . If you are a librarian, I encourage you to take a look, and no, I am not receiving an compensation from the company for this.

 

So to say January is our slow time of year is a matter of opinion.  See you next time!

 

 

 

Happy New Year!

Semester one is almost over, and so far we have survived Freshman orientation and both the Sophomore and Senior research papers.  We have promoted Banned Books Week, an Angry Birds Family Night, and the Elves in our Shelves.

Looking forward, we are planning our presentations for the Texas Computer Education Association at the beginning of February and our District Showcase in the middle of February.  The Juniors are coming in March for their big research unit, the Freshman are coming in May, and we want to plan another family night for Texas Public School's Week.  Of course, I have not forgotten School Library Week and Teen Tech Week....can't wait for those.  Fun times in the library!

As I prepare my part of our TCEA presentation, I want to take a few minutes to stress the importance of keeping library statistics as a way to promote your presence.  We started collecting stats 3 years ago when the district decided to hire 3 full time librarians at the same school. We wanted to make sure that our stats supported the fact that 3 librarians are a necessity on our campus, not a luxury.

Three years ago, we prepared a monthly report and sent it to our Principal and APs.  At the end of the year, we invited our teachers, staff, the administrators (superintendent, deputy superintendents,  heads of departments, library director, etc), school board members, and key community members (mayor, public librarian, etc) to come to an end of year bash where we also shared our stats for the year and thanked them for their support.

Last year, we sent the monthly reports to the Principal and APs again.  Then quarterly, we also sent them to key people in the district with which we had an established relationship, and we invited everyone back at the end of the year to thank them for their support.  This year, we started by sending out the first month to all key people in the district asking them to reply if they wanted to be kept on the mailing list and receive a library report each month.  Over half of our audience replied with a definite "yes," including 2 school board members.

So, where do you start?

Three years ago we started taking stats on our book circulation totals, how many classes we were either co-teaching or facilitating, the number of students coming to the library on passes, and the number of technology problems we solved.  Here is what our report looked like .....

This year we are keeping track of our circulation statistics, number of searches from our databases, the classes we co-teach/facilitate, students who come in before and after school, students who come in on passes during the day, the number of staff development meetings and events that we host, the amount of technology that is checked out by our teachers, and the number of technology issues we solve.  Here is what our report looks like now .....

Needless to say, our report has grown.  I think it is all about reporting on the things you deem important. Does a report like this take time?  Of course, but the numbers speak for themselves. This is a great way to promote your library to those who make the decisions in your district.  Just a thought!