March Newsletter

Connect Beyond BVSD!

“For so many of us, books opened our minds to a world of possibility...millions of children in America don’t have that chance because they don’t have adequate access to the books they need to learn and dream…”

First Lady Michelle Obama, introducing the new Open Ebooks Project

OpenEbooks.net

Open eBooks is an app containing thousands of popular and award-winning titles that are free for children from in-need households. Children from in-need families can access these eBooks, which include some of the most popular works of the present and past, using the Open eBooks app and read as many as they like without incurring any costs. The goal of Open eBooks is to encourage a love of reading and serve as a gateway to children reading even more often, whether in school, at libraries, or through other eBook reading apps.

You can see how to get involved and if your school is eligible here.

Insignia Info

• Insignia is converting their ILS platform from Silverlight to HTML5 this summer.  This means you can do all of your librarian work from a Chromebook--good to know as you talk with your schools about Tech Tools. Training on Insignia will be scheduled for late summer, before school starts next year.
• Your Insignia Search page can be customized to act almost as a home page.  See the Insignia sample below. You can add online resources, projects, announcements, photos and videos of your students at your library. I have a great idea for a student driven mapping project for elementary level that can be linked with your catalog so students can find the exact shelf the book should be on! If you are interested in exploring with me, email Rae and let’s get something scheduled!

Learning for You!

• As BVSD continues to explore what innovative spaces look like for our students, check out this article that provides insight on emerging trends in library design.

• School Libraries of the Future: 5 Trends to Watch
• State Library Webinar: The Irresistible Library: Renovate and Rejuvenate

Comment on this blog post about the trends you are most excited for and how you see these impacting your current and future library space! Your name will be entered into a drawing at our end of year celebration to win some great prizes!

• The 2016 Highly Effective School Library Program Rubric is posted and ready for use as you begin planning for next year and your work as a teacher librarian. More information will be available from the state and we will have a specialized blog post in the near future about this revised program!

Grant Opportunities!

Did you know that there is a grant website curated by the BVSD Ed Tech Team and geared towards teachers and teacher librarians? Check it out! Included in this is information about a Google Community Grant--read on to see all that is available to you!

What to Know @BVSD this Month!

• Our March Teacher Librarian Meeting Tuesday, March 8th from 4:00-5:30pm @Escuela Bilingüe Pioneer Elementary
• Host: David Smith
• Snacks: Arlene Gregersen, David Smith, Becky Vancura *Remember to have your book talks ready for the group!
• Workshops!
• Secondary Research Roundtable facilitated by Jon Georgitis & Regina Hoskins: How are you embedding in research instruction in your school? What are activities, programs, lessons, etc, that you use as a secondary librarian? Come chat and share your ideas with fellow secondary teacher librarians.
• An Evolution of Digital Citizenship Workshop with Kim Butler: Come learn about how the DigiCiti project continues to evolve and how to implement digital citizenship lessons and ideas in your own libraries

February Newsletter

“Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete”

― Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Think:
“A classroom coach needs to assist students rather than working and thinking for them. Coaches remove obstacles to learning or help students overcome them. The purpose of this is not to make the process easy, but rather to shift the focus on the learning rather than the obstacles”

• Five Habits of Great Classroom Coaches
• Many teacher librarians see themselves as the coach/facilitator of students learning. This article focuses on the teacher as coach, and with that, provides concrete ideas for how to be a great classroom coach!
• Leave a thought in the comments for this blog on how you see yourself as a coach in the library. When you leave a comment you will be entered to win a great prize at the May TL Celebration!

Celebrations:

Congratulations to Jon Georgitis who was awarded a $2,000.00 grant from NEA to begin a Makerspace in the Centennial Middle School Library. Read more about it on his blog!

Learning for You!

• The Colorado State Library is pleased to announce that we are offering four (4) ISTE 2016 conference registration scholarships! Our goal is to develop leaders within the Colorado library community by helping library staff who might not otherwise be able to attend the ISTE Conference in Denver June 26 - 29, 2016. Deadline to apply is Monday, Feb 8th at 5:00pm! See Scholarship Application and Requirements
• Did you know the Colorado Library maintains a Digital Literacy Resources site with information and resources for K-12 educators? Check it out!

What to Know @BVSD this Month!

• Upcoming Libinar: What We Learned in the eBook Pilot @BVSD Monday, Feb 8th beginning at 3:00pm

• Curious about what happened with the ebook pilot at bvsd? Thinking about exploring ebooks in your library?
• Don’t forget--you can check out our on-demand collection of Libinars on our EdTech YouTube Channel!
• Secondary PD Day is February 12th at Monarch K8 from 8:00am-11:30am. We will be learning about the BVSD Innovation Guidelines. We will also have Becky Russell, Digital Literacy Specialist @CDE, lead a workshop on “The Shift” in libraries. This is the same presentation that our elementary TL’s experienced in their January PD.

Connect Beyond BVSD!

• Still want to know more about Makerspaces? The Boulder Public Library Makerspace Grand Opening is Thursday, February 18th from 5:00-7:30pm. What an amazing opportunity to see how a library can provide and dream through this kind of space!

November Announcements

“The library should always be within reach”

~Dr. Michael Stephens

Assistant Professor in the School of Information @San Jose State University

Think!

“[The authors] document how educators and parents can lead a new path to a place they call 'Readialand' a literacy-rich world that marries reading and digital media to bring knowledge, skills, and critical thinking to all of our children. This approach is driven by the urgent need for low-income children and parents to have access to the same 21st-century literacy opportunities already at the fingertips of today's affluent families.”

~Publisher's blurb from Tap Click Read

• Tap Click Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens

Why Read This?

Digital equity is a necessity for students to have the same opportunity as their peers both locally and globally. This book, and accompanying website tapclickread.org, provide resources for building literacy to create what they’ve coined as “Readialand”, as well as resources for supporting digital equity in your school. This topic and book is a helpful companion to our 1:Web program!

Insignia Info

• On Monday, November 9 (UPDATE: This change is on hold for now. You will receive an update with a new release date) your student catalog will transition to the Insignia Discovery Layer. For more information about this change please see:
• Are You Ready? New Insignia Discovery Layer Coming November 9 - 31 people have viewed this post so far
• New Insignia Discovery Layer Coming Nov 2015 - 48 people have viewed this so post far
• If you have any questions about the Discovery Layer, please ask Amy.

Celebrations

• Katie Darrin, Flatirons Elementary and Creekside Elementary - chosen as a book reviewer for School Library Journal
• Loran Lattes, Whittier International School - named a Tech4Learning Innovative Educator

What to Know @BVSD this Month!

• Hour of Code Celebrations @BVSD; National Information Share what you & your school are hoping to do in the comments below!

Why Participate?

Hour of code is an opportunity to connect with students and empower their learning in whole new ways. Collaborate with the teachers in your building to help celebrate this powerful day! Need inspiration? See the CODEGIRLS (this link has been removed by the publishers).

Learning for You!

• Our next Teacher Librarian meeting is Tuesday, November 10th at Ryan Elementary School
• Host: Erika Arias, Ryan Elementary School
• Snacks: Loran Lattes, Laurie Brockway, Kelli Chynoweth (don’t forget your book talks!)

Connect Beyond BVSD!

• National Novel Writing Month
• Are you celebrating? Share how in the comments below!

Why Participate?

Participating in #NaNoMo is a way to empower writing in your life, and the lives of the students around you. Share this opportunity with your staff and let writing bloom! Write for you, write with our students.

• Colorado Blue Spruce Nominees deadline is coming up fast--December 31st. The website includes ways to access resources to promote this in your library.

Teacher librarians who share in the comments section how you and your students/school are celebrating Hour of Code, National Novel Writing Month or the Colorado Blue Spruce nominees, will be entered into a drawing to win some fun prizes!

Are You Ready? New Insignia Discovery Layer Coming November 9

UPDATE as of 11/16/15: This change is on hold for now. You will receive an email with a new release date.

On November 9, 2015 we are transitioning to a new version of the Insignia student catalog called the Discovery Layer. Hopefully you had a chance to read the previous blog post announcing this change.

Get a Sneek Peek

I have created two screencasts to give you an introduction to the Discovery Layer and its key features. I highly encourage you to watch both of them; they are about 10 minutes each.

• Intro to Discovery Layer pt. 1
• Intro to Discovery Layer pt. 2

What to Expect on November 9

I anticipate that the transition to the Discovery Layer will be pretty seamless. You won't need to make any changes to the catalog links you have on your library websites or other online resources. On November 9 the existing web address will point to the new Discovery Layer.

You can use the Discovery Layer in any web browser, including Chrome.

As a reminder, this change is only for the student catalog. The administrative part of Insignia will remain the same.

Try It for Yourself

Feel free to try the Discovery Layer before it goes live and send me your feedback. The test link is https://library.bvsd.org/library/discovery (note that we will only use this link during the testing period).

Email me, amy.hitchner@bvsd.org, with any questions. Thanks!

Our First LIBinar on Library Standards

This morning we launched our first BVSD LIBinar! LIBinars are the library webinars hosted by BVSD teacher librarians and friends.

Today's LIBinar host was BVSD library coordinator Nannette McMurtry. Her presentation, What Are My Standards?, was a discussion of how library standards are embedded in the curriculum. She shared some great resources about national, state, and local standards, and about what the teacher librarian's role is in supporting standards.

Watch the recording of today's LIBinar:

Takeaways

We had fun and learned a lot during this morning's event, which will hopefully make it easier for you to participate in our live broadcasts in the future. Our main takeaway was that instead of just inviting teacher librarians through Google Plus, we will be sending you a calendar invite with the link to join the LIBinar. We will also post that link to this blog. By getting out the word in multiple ways, we hope to have more of you join us during the live broadcast so that you can participate in real time.

Next LIBinar

Our next LIBinar will be on Thursday, October 29 at 4:00 pm. Barb Miller from Manhattan Middle will be talking about developing an LGBTQ collection for the middle school library. She has many helpful resources and powerful stories to share—I hope you will be able to join us for the live broadcast! You will be receiving a calendar invite soon with the link to join.

Connect with us on Twitter

Help us promote our LIBinar series and share what you learn using the hashtag #LIBinars. You can also follow @BVSDLibraries and @edtechmusings to find out what's going on in BVSD libraries.

Please use the comment feature below to give us feedback about LIBinars.

New Insignia Discovery Layer Coming November 2015

UPDATE as of 11/6/15: This change is on hold for now. You will receive an email with a new release date.

On November 9, 2015 we are transitioning to a new version of the library catalog called the Discovery Layer. I think you’ll find the new interface to be more appealing and user friendly, especially the results list and the title details screens.

Here is a screenshot of the results list*:

And one of the title details screen*:

*The options on these screens might be slightly different when we go live on November 9.

Testing and Next Steps

Currently, a team consisting of teacher librarians, Rae, and myself are testing the Discovery Layer and reporting any issues to Insignia. If there are no major issues by early November, we will move forward with the new interface on November 9.

During our testing window, I will make several screencasts that will introduce the features of the Discovery Layer. Look for those screencasts within the next few weeks.

What is your role?

You will need to familiarize yourself with the new Discovery Layer by watching the screencasts that I will be publishing soon. You may also need to update your lessons plans that refer to the library catalog.

If you are feeling particularly ambitious, you can try the Discovery Layer right now by going to this URL: https://library.bvsd.org/library/discovery (Please note: we will only be using this URL during the testing phase.)

Will you need to update your links to the library catalog?

No (thank goodness).

When we go live on November 9, the link you are currently using for the library catalog—the one on your desktops and websites—will automatically point to the new Discovery Layer. You won’t need to update any links, as long as the link you are currently using is https://library.bvsd.org/library

Next steps

This is the first of several communications you will receive about this change. I want everyone to know what to expect on the morning of November 9. You are always welcome to contact me (Amy Hitchner) or Insignia if you have any questions about the Discovery Layer.