Media Specialist Blog

 Week 7: School closures due to Hurricane Helene  Week 8: This week was not as busy as I expected after coming back from being out all week. I did need to catch up on the Georgia Literacy Modules that are required from our county. I worked on that for a couple hours this week. I had several whole classes come in for book check out, but a lot of my teachers that had originally scheduled a read aloud and activity with me asked to cancel or reschedule because they had to catch up on work from last week. This is totally understandable, and I enjoy being able to be flexible with teachers and just trying to meet them where they are at in order to support them.  Week 9: Fall Break- School Closed all week Week 10: This week was fun! I had several read alouds that were rescheduled from the previous weeks. We read "Creepy Pair of Underwear" and did a sequence of events activity. The kids loved the story and really did a great job working on the activity.  Another really exciti...

When I order books from Titlewave or Scholastic, I typically pay the extra money for them to do the processing. This is so much easier and a HUGE time saver! They apply the labels and send me the MARC records to import and VOILA, the books are entered and ready to be checked out the same day! The only thing I really have to do is add the appropriate "color dot" to the spine. We use colored dots to organize books by lexile/AR levels. This helps students to find books that are appropriate for their reading level. However, this varies from school to school, so I have to make sure the correct color dot is applied. This is a very simple task though! Below is an image of the conversion chart that we use in my library:  I do have some books that are donated to the library or sometimes parents will replace damaged books (which I am so appreciative of!) so I do have some to catalog. I received some donations for cataloging this year! It was fairly simple to add the title, but the most...

 My favorite blog to read that has helped me find numerous resources is the Trapped Librarian: https://trappedlibrarian.org/  Podcasts: 

I began this week at an all day training learning about artificial intelligence. I am included in a cohort in our district that will focus on learning about AI and how to implement AI at the school level in an ethical manner. We will be working with an outside company that will be coaching us on AI and how to teach other teachers about AI and the effects on our society and education. I am very excited to be included this, because I have been very interested in learning as much as possible about generative AI.  This week I also visited the middle school library. I spent half a day at the library, and I was able to help the media specialist with a few tasks! She had just received some new furniture for her library, and I helped her rearrange the furniture the way that she wanted. This was fun, and we felt like it really helped to brighten the space!  After we did that I helped her shelve a few books! She has genrified her fiction section, and this really inspired me to do the sa...

This week I started off by attending a conference in Macon, GA. The conference was put on by the RESA office and was called "Library League Consortium: Super Heroes of the Stacks!" This conference is actually 3 days split throughout the school year. During this particular day we focused on learning more about Adobe Spark and the Generative AI that can be utilized. My favorite thing that I learned was how to do "masked readers" where you can record someone reading and create a little character to read but use the other person's voice! This could be fun to do on morning announcements and have students guess who is reading!  I will say that this conference seemed to be geared a little more to Media Specialists that might teach whole classes on a specials rotation, and not necessarily geared toward a flexible library setting.  When I returned to the school the next day, I had to focus the entire day on unboxing, enrolling, and inventorying brand new chromebooks. Our...

 This week in the library was a busy one! I a plastic bin where I put books that need to be repaired, and it was time to start repairing several books! I was lucky enough to be able to order a CoverOne Machine that repairs the bind on books! I haven't used the machine until this week. I did have look up a YouTube video to make sure I was doing this correctly, but it was fairly user friendly! I repaired around 15 books in no time! The machine just simply heats up, and you place the glue strip in the binding and then close the book and place the binding down in the machine. You allow time for the blue to melt and adhere and VOILA! It is complete! Books are back on the shelf in no time.  Another task that I completed this week was a little bit of a weeding project. I ran a report in Destiny to find books that had been checked out the least in the A-L section of Fiction. I was able to weed several books that had infrequent circulation. I allowed teachers to look through these book...