December 2016 TL Announcements

What to Know@BVSD this Month!

LIBinar- First Come, First Serve Making

On Dec. 1, Denise Von Minden, Teacher Librarian at Flagstaff Academy, talked with us about her journey to integrate maker education into her library program and the tools and resources that have resonated with her students. If you were unable to attend in person you can watch our conversation on demand here.

LAC Notes

December’s LAC meeting took place on Dec. 6th and you can review meeting notes here.

Insignia HTML5 Testing Needed

We need TLs to test what will be Insignia V 8.0! We need to put the Admin interface changes through its paces to ensure it performs as expected. Please review this visual map of the interface changes between the Silverlight Version and the HTML5 provided by Insignia.

If we don't test we can't complain when we roll it out and it lacks features and functionality we require to maintain the workflows and efficiencies we have come expect. We ONLY need an hour of solid testing to get the feedback we need. Please contact Rae for directions to supply test feedback.

Cohort 4.0

Cohort 4.0 (yes, that’s right 4.0) kicked off on Dec.13, click here to meet this dynamic group of educators. A significant portion of the day was live streamed and can be viewed here. TLs with teachers participating in the cohort have been invited to join this cohort in a support and leadership role.

Guest Bloggers

Mark Mabbett, Teacher Librarian Nederland HS

Google A Day Meets Breakout Edu, What?

"...if students could Google the answer then we’re not really asking the right questions." Read more...

Jon Georgitis, Teacher Librarian Centennial MS

Maker Kits - Part I

"In this post I will share some of the learning about setting up Maker Kits--what's in them and how I store them." Read more...

OverDrive News & Updates

The following MS titles received 100% approval from all Elem OD TLs and are now available to all K-5 patrons at OD Elem schools:

• I Am Malala
• A Long Walk to Water
• Eragon
• Golden Compass
• Artemis Fowl
• Heroes of Olympus I-III

Interactive Flyer

Jon G. gave us the idea to create a Google Drawing to promote both print and OverDrive titles. We modified Jon's original image to create this interactive OverDrive flyer to promote professional titles. The image can be emailed, embedded into a website, blog, or school newsletter. If you would like to do something similar, click on the image below to make a copy and modify to your heart’s content.

Events | Resources

Bi-Monthly Workshops & LIBinars

Sign up for Workshops and LIBinars via MyPassport.

MyPassport Code: 16312

January 10, Southern Hills Middle School  

• Tour of space and Q&A with Regina Hoskins
• Customer Service Tip(s)  (Host & attendees)
• Getting Things Done!
• Coding for primary grades
• Screen casting

TL Workshop Help

We have had a session cancellation for our March TL Workshop. If you would like to lead a discussion or workshop a topic with your colleagues, please email Rae and we will add you to the agenda.

Colorado Teen Literature Conference - April 1, 2017

Gizmo Dojo - newly opened Broomfield community and space | Check out upcoming classes

Bldg. 61 - Boulder Public Library Makerspace | Check out calendar of upcoming events

Have a safe and relaxing Winter Break!

Guest Blogger - Mark Mabbett

Google A Day Meets Breakout Edu, What?

Mark Mabbett-Teacher-Librarian, Nederland High School

In September I decided to try some of the A Google A Day activities with my US Film and Society class. I quickly found two problems. First, many of the questions weren’t really relevant to my class. Yes, students put various skills into practice but the content never really related to my course. And the bigger problem, for the pre-made Google a Day challenges I tried, my students just Googled the exact question and found the answers. So, after a little dismay, but also pride, I was reminded of a session I went to at GAFE 2014 by Holly Clark. My big take away from Holly’s session was that if students could Google the answer then we’re not really asking the right questions. I’ve started making my own Google A Days, I put in the content I want making it difficult for students to Google an answer. They often have to Google discrete parts of the question and put them all together. Hopefully, this makes them better at breaking down complex research tasks into searchable units.

Here are a couple of examples that I have used so far:

This example allowed me to review the film Scarface (1932) with them which was a film we had watched earlier in the semester.  

This second slide is a simple substitution where the answer to 1 becomes the 1 in the goo.gl.
Go ahead, see if you can solve it?  

It took about 10 minutes for students to work it out with their group but they’re were always having fun solving the puzzle and building community in their group. I still got them to read an article for me about what makes successful team dynamics before they started on their next group film project.  

I don’t have them conduct these exercises everyday, a let down for many students, they work collaboratively and they persevere through multi-step problems. If you’re thinking, “this sounds a bit like something else I’ve heard of” you would be right. Many of us have heard, seen, or hopefully participated in BreakoutEDU or similar breakout tasks.

Coincidentally, the final film that we will be viewing in my class is Inception (2010). Inception was a mind bending film where Leonardo DiCaprio and his team travel into people’s subconscious minds to attempt to unlock information and plant ideas in their minds. Of course, this will be a great segue into a final BreakoutEDU game that will allow my students to put to use many of the skills they have been building and practicing during our various Google a Day challenges. They’ll be challenged to open levels of locks to hopefully "breakout" as a team.

November 2016 TL Announcements

What to Know@BVSD this Month!

Thanks Loran L., for hosting the November TL Workshop. It was exciting to get a look at Whittier International Elementary’s renovated library space, learn about the renovation process, and the impact the physical changes are having on the Whittier’s learning community.

Loran’s insights:

  

"The space is now conforming to our diverse needs, rather than the other way around...I didn't realize before the remodel how this would change the mood, excitement and care of the space. We love our library!"

Greatly appreciated the TLs that led workshops and discussions for the 21+ TLs that attended this month’s workshop meeting

• Arlene G. | Amazing Race
• Sara W. | SeeSaw 
• Kim B. | GAFE Summit Sync-up

Guest Blogger

Loran Lattes, Teacher Librarian Whittier

Reaching All Our Families

“... family tech nights. The goals included increasing the use of digital communication, increasing comfort with technology, and increasing parent understanding of our use of technology with students at Whittier.”

Read more...

OverDrive News & Updates

1,206 - current number of unique titles in OD as of Nov. 16, 2016.

Check out OD’s December Webcast series (each session is 45 min.):

• Session #1 Building Your Digital Collection - Dec. 6
• Session #2 Enhancing Your Digital Collection- Dec. 7
• Session #3 Helping Users Enjoy Your Digital Collection -Dec. 8

Past webcasts are available here.

OverDrive's Teacher Lounge Professional Development collection is available for all BVSD educators. Additionally, all BVSD educators can access the 1,184 titles in the student OverDrive collection. Please help spread the word among your staff members that these resources are available to them.

Elementary and MS OD Consortium members, please review the Lower Grade Level Access to Upper Grade Level OverDrive Titles Policy. We are working on a process for Elementary and MS TLs to request approval from their colleagues to make higher level titles available to their patrons but it will require 100% approval by all Elementary and MS Consortium TLs. We will post details about this on the BVS Overdrive Google group--stay tuned.

Events | Resources

Bi-Monthly Workshops & LIBinars

Sign up for Workshops and LIBinars via MyPassport.

MyPassport Code: 16312

January 10, Southern Hills Middle School  

• Tour of space and Q&A with Regina Hoskins
• Customer Service Tip(s) form host & attendees
• Getting Things Done!
• Coding for primary grades

Thursday, Dec. 1 | 4 PM LIBinar

First Come-First Serve Making

Denise Von Minden, TL @ Flagstaff Academy will discuss her efforts to bring making to her K-8 library. (Access link to join the live stream will be provided closer to broadcast dates.)

Saturday, Dec. 3 | 10 AM- 12 PM , Ft. Collins Creator Hub

FREE Educators for Youth Makers and Entrepreneurship Fall Meeting If you are an educator, administrator or facilitator in education who is interested in Youth Entrepreneurship or the Maker movement, this meeting is for you.

• Did you know there is a CU Boulder Libraries YouTube Channel? Check out the series of interviews with CU college students, Research Demystified. The video How We Feel About Research Today got me thinking about what our students would say about their levels of confidence with various resources they routinely use for research and their research skills in general. It would be interesting to duplicate these interviews with BVSD students at the end of their elementary, MS, and HS careers--ask them to reflect on the resources they accessed and research skills they acquired via their library interactions and experiences.

• Boulder Public Library (BPL) will host a Research Rendezvous, Saturday Dec. 3. --click here for details.

Guest Blogger - Loran Lattes

Reaching All Our Families

Loran Lattes-Teacher-Librarian, Whittier International Elementary

Whittier International Elementary has a wonderfully diverse community. We are an International Baccalaureate, Title 1 school with 25% of students learning English as a second language. While this is something to be celebrated, it also presents some hurdles including parent communication!

The Family Outreach Committee at Whittier came to our Tech Committee with an idea for a collaborative parent night. We knew from a survey that close to 100% of families have at least 1 device at home with Internet access (often a smart phone). However, many parents still did not have an email address registered with us. Together, our committees decided to hold Family Tech Nights. The goals included increasing the use of digital communication, increasing comfort with technology, and increasing parent understanding of our use of technology with students at Whittier.

Family Tech Night

We held our first parent tech night Thursday (Nov. 10). We contacted all families without an email address by phone and took reservations for 15 minute sessions that took place right before a presentation on Internet Safety. Additionally, we decided it was important to have 1:1 help available for our most reluctant users and we had translators available for the languages represented. We worked with six families during our first Family Tech Night.

Inspiring & Bonding

Participating in the tech sessions was inspiring and bonding. On the tech side, during the hour we were "open for business" we set up gmail accounts, sent and received practice email messages, set up accounts to always translate messages, looked at our school and district databases and other resources that can be used at home, and communicated student username and password information, On the community side, we worked together to find solutions, laughed, cursed our technology when things went wrong, laughed some more, made new friends, built trust, played charades at times when translators were busy, listened, spoke, taught, and learned.

Build Community

We plan to hold at least two more Family Tech Nights this school year. We hope to build comfort and skills with our most reluctant users of technology and, in the process, build our community of learners.

Small Shifts | Big Results Fairview

Small Shifts| Big Results

Maura Rhodes, Fairview HS Teacher Librarian & Team

With the bond for my school being a few more years away, I wanted to do some updates to the library space that didn’t cost a lot of money. Last year we finished installing some bamboo countertops and added more electrical outlets for phone and laptop charging. Some of the updates this summer included painting the entrance doors, transforming the librarian office into a collaboration room with large screen monitor and genrefying the fiction section.

Tapping My PLN

The painting and furniture moving for the first two projects was minor compared to tackling the genre project. I thought doing it over the summer would be an ideal time, since most of the books were returned. I have been to workshops, discussions and panels in my former state by two ground shaking librarians, Library Girl @Jennifer Legarde  and Jennifer Northrup@candidlibrarian. Tiffany Whitehead’s blog was also inspirational in her work with genrefying. I asked for advice from some of the high school librarians in BVSD and talked in depth to Beatrice at Monarch, as well as looking at her web site the monarch method. I knew, I didn't want to tackle the whole collection (non-fiction and fiction) at once, so I settled with what I thought would be good for Fairview.

Goals

The reasons for changing the fiction have been many fold, but my number one goal reason was to empower the students to find what they wanted more easily. My goal was to increase self-sufficiency for the students, without so many steps. Can you tell me where the mystery books are? Do you have any books like Hunger Games?

Results

I'm getting a lot of positive feedback from teachers and students. Students aren't wandering aimlessly around the books, but instead are finding what they want. It has been amazing to watch the students in the space and see them browsing the sections. The collaboration room is being used, slowly as students realize they can use it. A student that wanted to Skype with a professor and needed a quiet space and the newly created collaboration room was perfect for her. I haven't had any negative comments.

Resources

The actual process helped me get to know my library collection. Check out

Maura’s How-To Guide to Genrefying Your Fiction Collection. It includes a link to the process and resources I used to inform my work in this effort. Of course, if you search Pinterest or just Google the keywords genrefying school library, you will get a plethora of information.

Finally, checkout the slideshow I put together to promote the changes I made in the library to members of my learning community.

October 2016 TL Announcements

What to Know@BVSD this Month!

Thanks to all of you that attended the 10.10.16 professional learning day at SparkFun. 
We enjoyed a day of discussion, reflection, exploration, and making.

To access resources from the day's activities please login into Schoology, Access Code: 9GKQ5-W8CFT. Check out Take Away discussion posts and Resources & Funding pages. 

Click the image below to watch highlights from our day.

Do you have teachers in your buildings that would like to be a part of the 21st Century Cohort 4.0? Applications are open now through October, 23, 2016! Click here to review participation details and pass along to your teachers.

The 2016 Colorado Summit Featuring Google for Education is BACK in Boulder Valley School District at Monarch High School on November 5th and 6th!

Click here to access schedule and review session titles, descriptions, resources and other fun events happening throughout the Summit.

BVSD Employees can register at anytime to receive the same host rate of $229 -- use the special BVSD only promo code! 

Rae and I are coordinating a Pop up Makerspace on Saturday, Nov. 5 from 10 AM-12:30 PM during the GAFE Summit. Do you know students that would like to come and play, demonstrate, and or present in our makerspace? If so, please pass along this form to the students and or parents of students that want to join us. 

Insignia has provided us with test environment so we can put Insignia Version 8.0 (supports HTML 5) through its paces. Rae needs a few teacher librarians to test functionality of this new release. Specifically, you will be required to login to the test environment from the Chrome browser and conduct day-to-day tasks and let us know what you think. Contact Rae directly if you want to be a tester. Testing will conclude by end of November--we will be sharing test feedback with Insignia. Insignia Version 8.0 is scheduled for release in January 2017. 

OverDrive's Teacher Lounge Professional Development collection is now available for all BVSD educators. Additionally, all BVSD educators can access the 1,184 titles in the student OverDrive collection. Please help spread the word among your staff members that these resources are available to them. 

Guest Blogger

Rebecca (Becky) Vancura, Teacher Librarian Boulder High School

My Journey to Genrefication

“The process has made it easier for students to browse a prefered genre when looking for a book to read.”

Read more...

Events | Resources

Bi-Monthly Workshops

Sign up for Workshops and LIBinars via MyPassport. 

MyPassport Code: 16312

November 9, Whittier Elementary (yes, not on a Tuesday)

• Tour of space and Q&A with Loran Lattes
• Insignia HTML 5 update
• Customer Service Tip  (Host & attendees)
• Amazing Race - Arlene Gregerson
• Seesaw- Sara Weatherly

January 10, Southern Hills Middle School 

March 14, Sanchez Elementary

May 9, Ed Center (End-of-Year Celebration)

LIBinars

Access links to join the live stream will be provided closer to broadcast dates. 

• Wednesday, Oct.26 - 3:30 -4:30 PM

HESL 2016 Update

Tammy Langeberg will talk update us on changes to HESL, how HESL tracks to TL Content Connections, and take questions. 

• Thursday, Dec. 1 - 3:30-4:30 PM

First Come-First Serve Making

Denise Von Minden, TL @ Flagstaff Academy will discuss her journey to bring making to her K-8 library.

• Join Mackin's Transform Your School Library (TYSL) movement and contribute to Shannon Miller's padlet, WHAT ARE YOUR “FAVORITE THINGS” FOR THE LIBRARY AND AS A LIBRARIAN?
• Boulder Public Library (BPL) will host a Research Rendezvous, Saturday Dec. 3. If you are supporting teachers involved with National History Day be sure to tell them about Boulder Public Library’s (BPL) Research Rendezvous on Saturday Dec. 3 --click here for details. 

My Journey to Genrefication 2016

My Journey to Genrefication

Becky Vancura-Teacher-Librarian Boulder High School


I had been contemplating organizing the fiction collection by genre for several years. The altruistic statement for why do this would be, “To make the collection more browser friendly, thereby making it simpler for students to locate a title they are interested in reading”. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I was tired of the being asked, “Where are the scary books?” “Where are the sports books?” “Where are more books like 13 Reasons Why?”

The biggest obstacle to getting this done was time. Where would I find the time to sort through the collection book by book? The answer to my dilemma came in an email I received early in the fall of 2014. The gist of the email was, my son will be a freshmen at Boulder High. We’ve just relocated from the Washington D.C. area. I am a retired Library of Congress Librarian. I would like to volunteer in your library. At first the thought of a Library of Congress Librarian as a volunteer was rather intimidating. I could not ask her to just dust shelves and cover books. Then it dawned on me - I could charge her with the genrefication of fiction! Once every year or so I have a really brilliant idea. She was an incredible source of information and a great sounding board.

Getting Started 

The first step was deciding which genres to use. After some discussion we settled on the following:

• General Fiction
• Historical Fiction
• Issues & Relationships
• Mysteries & Suspense
• Horror, Science Fiction
• Fantasy
• Sports

Your collection may have other genres by which you would like to sort. Next decision, how will you identify the different genres on the shelf? To avoid reprinting spine labels and re labeling every book, we decided to color code the different genres. We used Demco transparent colored spine label protectors, a different color for each genre. We did consider the DEMCO genre stickers but decided most of them were a bit juvenile for a high school library.

Cataloging & Logistics

Rather than completely uprooting the entire collection, I would recommend starting with one or two of the smaller genres. We started with sports. After my parent volunteer had gone through the collection and pulled a specific genre, we checked in cataloging on the ILS under the “MARC Expert” tab in the Copy Information for a specific title to be sure the correct genre was listed in the 650 code box. Books may have multiple genres listed. If the genre needed to be added, we sent an email to our district cataloger (Rae C.) asking that the genre be added to the copies’ information. The correct color label protectors were added to the books and the books were reshelved together.

The one exception to adding additional genres to the copy information was Historical Fiction. If the genre of Historical Fiction was not already designated in the MARC record we did not add it. In most cases the book would end up in General Fiction. We decided on this as we puzzled where to put Dickens and Austin. We might have created a Classic Fiction genre but we didn’t feel it was necessary for our collection.

To make inventory a little easier, Michael Serrano, BHS Media Tech, created new circ types to correspond with the color coded genre. We changed the circ type to the new genre for all the books in that section. For example,  Fiction - Green is the circ type for Sports Fiction. For specifics on how to do this please direct your questions to Michael Serrano, my amazing Media Tech. This change also made it easy to change the designated location for an entire collection in the catalog. I was able to batch process the change in location rather than needing to scan every individual book. Now when we search for a fiction title in the catalog it will list the correct genre under location.

Mixing Fiction and Nonfiction and Dewey

I support the idea of making libraries more browser friendly similar to the model used in bookstores. However, I believe there is still value to having the collections divided into Fiction and Nonfiction. I think Barnes & Noble still separates these two. In addition, it is still important to have some standardization between libraries to allow students to transfer their library skills to other libraries.



I also believe there is still a place for the Dewey Decimal System in the school library. The system, like any system is not perfect, but it does a reasonable job of sorting books into categories. Where the individual librarian might consider tinkering, to make the collection more browser friendly, is in clearly labeling bookcases and shelves. Large signs could be used for labelling sections. For example, use large signage for main subject categories, Philosophy, Religion, Mythology, and smaller, shelf talker labels can be used to further narrow the browser's search, for example Christianity, Islam, Greek Myths, Roman Myths, etc.

Outcomes

In addition to separating the genres, the process of genrefication presented an excellent opportunity to weed the collection as every book is literally pulled and examined. Another positive side effect of the process was it identified genres in the collection that might benefit from additional books being added to the collection. I discovered the collection needed more sports fiction.

The process has made it easier for students to browse a prefered genre when looking for a book to read. Also, when looking for a specific book, given the call number, I think the likelihood for success of the student to find the book independently increases when they have fewer books to search.