Day 20: Loathe to Leave

Though I'm glad this day has come, I'm also disappointed the time has gone so quickly. You know it is a good place to be when you have given up your employed school's spring break and are still enjoying being at a different sort of work! I'm taking this as a sign that I am headed towards the right career!

We expected today to be a little crazy with students checking in/out books before the long holiday; however, the library was mostly quiet. Students had been checking in books they knew they wouldn't need or choosing books to check out that were a little bit longer or more complex in preparation for the ten days away from school. I have really loved to see how excited the students are about taking books home and reading them. This is so foreign from my experience of reading at the high school level and one of the most attractive things about the elementary level LMS position. I think this largely has to do with student choice. When I give my students choice novels, there do talk about the books more and actually read the books more. Less read than at the elementary level, but I am gladdened to give the high schoolers the opportunity to be engaged in reading again even just for one unit.

Even as we were completing the final evaluation and paperwork, I was still asking Cindy questions about how or why she has implemented certain behaviors and practices in the library. Especially details about finances and ordering priority are still something I am learning. As she was filling out the evaluation, Cindy said that some of the details I really won't be able to have a full handle on or a full opportunity to do until I am in the LMS position itself. Having gone through a practicum/student teaching in undergrad, I know that this is the truth. From my English teacher perspective, I learned that classroom expectations, grading on assignments, order of curriculum, and other classroom-specific details were all left to me unlike in my practicum experience. I was the end of the line in the classroom. I imagine I will feel the same way as I enter into a LMS position: I will be the end of the line! While in both situations, teacher and LMS, there are guidelines, expectations, and other decision-makers involved, the sort of daily routine and habits are really established by the teacher/LMS herself. I am looking forward to being "in control" of the library I serve but am certainly grateful for the patterns of paperwork and procedure that Cindy has shown me and that she told me to call and keep her updated!

I think I've grown the most with my understandings of procedure and protocols of the LMC. Going in, my biggest goals were to understand the catalog-circulation-ordering-weeding relationship, text selections, and financial practices. I have certainly learned about many books appropriate for elementary, both for specific titles and for how the books are supposed to "feel" in length and content. I have practiced using the Follett software to generate varied reports, update the collection, order resources, and run varied aspects of circulation. I have generated a wish list for a section of nonfiction after completing inventory and weeding the section based on age, relevance, and circulation. I have been introduced to texts the students love to listen to and are appropriate for varied seasons and ages. I have read children's books I'd never heard of and loved them. I have met with the school's bookkeeper to discuss account use and balancing. I have created an order on a limited budget, learned how a Book Fair works and affects the library, and used filing systems to maintain transparency and order in the library. I think I've certainly met my main learning goals for my library practicum and done more activities than I ever expected to accomplish in twenty days.

At the heart of the library, of course, is sharing the resources with the students. I was less worried about this aspect because of my teaching background, but I was so glad when I got to step in today to read to the kindergartners one last time. Cindy had to step out to address a teacher need and wasn't back when the first class arrived. I stepped in and pulled out the book she had chosen: Betty Bunny Loves Easter by Michael B. Kaplan. This is a story where Betty Bunny "is a handful!" She loves Easter so much that she wants to grow up to be the Easter Bunny. In her frolicking finding eggs, she realizes that her older brothers and sister help her find eggs! She had always found the most eggs at the hunt, but now realizes it was only because of her family's help! So Betty Bunny is determined to find eggs by herself, but only finds three. They "mean more to her" because she had found them on her own, and she still has the dream to be the Easter Bunny one day.

What a lesson for me to keep, too. I'm about to (hopefully) run a LMC as its leader and director. I've had help from Cindy, from Toni, from my professors, from my family...and will continue to have their support in my career. But now, I'm going to be taking a determined step and making the decisions myself. I hope that even if I have three "eggs" of success, I'll see the growth and continue to build a LMC program that best serves its school community.

Day 19: Username Troubleshooting

On my last day in February, the school was starting to distribute Chromebooks to all of the second grade classes. This week, the students were beginning to log in with their own usernames and passwords provided them by the district. Each of their usernames was generated by writing their whole first and last names together. Their passwords were generated:
1. first and last initial
2. lunch number (tied to SSN)
3. "SDOC" (School District of Oconee County)

This is extremely secure! This will protect the students' information! This will be nigh impossible for second graders to remember and type!

One of the teachers, Mrs. Guill, was logging in her computers to do the Destiny catalog lesson with Mrs. Edgerton. She sent a student down as a cry for help getting these kids to log on. When I went down there and tried the username and password on the computer, it had zero problem. When I had students type in the information, I had lots of problems.

The biggest problem was that the usernames and passwords were being typed incorrectly. The students have not yet developed their typing skills (still one-finger typists) so struggled with the lengthy passwords that were taking longer than the teacher expected. Even then, the usernames/passwords they typed often had mistakes of mis-keys and of wrong spelling. Especially the students with long last names spelled their own names incorrectly (as the teachers don't require last names written on classwork). One girl even had a hyphen in her name! How do you expect 7-year-olds to know all those nuances! Then came the problem of students that do not go by their legal first name. One student just could not understand why he couldn't change the username to the name he wanted to be called.

I normally spend my time with high schoolers who better understand the principles of their pre-generated school emails, but who still mis-key or fail to follow directions at sign in. These usernames and passwords must be secure and complex, but are also not best suited to the populations of school aged kids. This is the conundrum of the personalized accounts.

Technology has two sides: the benefits of assessment, access, practicality, diversity and the issues of troubleshooting, internet connectivity, user error.

Perhaps students as young as second grade don't require their own profiles for the county system. The students are not turning in major assignments like papers and projects digitally; they are not logging into the district programs for email or testing. There are other programs the students log into that are not affiliated with the county-generated account (i.e. PebbleGo, MAP testing, schoology, etc). As the district moves forward, I see the profiles being entered at an age above seven. Both for realistic purposes and to save the district money on profiles!

Day 18: A Slow, Stormy Day

To be honest, we haven't had any slow days in the library during my practicum experience. My first week was back from a break and almost all the students came through the library, the second finished with Battle of the Books, and the third prepared for the Book Fair. This week, the only big event is Spring Break next week! Today was also a big storm day in Georgia and South Carolina, so many students were checked out of school early. Spring Break plus few students made for my first slow day in the library!

This meant it was a perfect week to do the inventory/weeding/ordering and compare my SLIS 720 Program Analysis project with Mrs. Edgerton. This is what we focused on today. We looked into the End of Year report that Cindy makes for the principal each year to see what highlights Mrs. Henderson looks for. The report predominately focused on finances, Accelerated Reader, and circulation numbers.

I also used TitleWave online and the ABDO paper catalog to finish the development of the biographies section. We focused our order on three things: low level texts, Explorers/Revolutionary War/Civil War curriculum content, and current pop icons.

TitleWave has an "advanced search" option that we set for K-3 levels, published after 2014, and included at least two reviews. I had to manipulate the search terms a bit to garner enough new results that weren't already part of the collection at Ravenel. I also had to include levels 4-6 to browse further texts. Especially as the fourth grade students research for a wax museum of Revolutionary War people, some of the texts in the higher range would still be appropriate. Once I searched all three topics, 12 books could be added to the collection.

The ABDO catalog organized texts by content, then by series. Unfortunately, the page organization was not organized by age range, but still by series. Essentially, each spread was on one topic (i.e. athletes, musicians, presidents, etc), but the pages alternated or sometimes randomly listed grade level appropriateness. It was a little challenging to read through the catalog this way, so we had to be extra attentive when looking at which books to order.

Both methods were fairly easy and seem to offer some excellent biography sections to add to the library.

Day 17: Analyzing and Spreadsheets

Today was a paper-pushing kind of day. It is one of the things I both dread and love in the same breath: I love the organization and productivity and mental focus you can achieve in paperwork, but only if the tasks serve a relevant and useful purpose. Thankfully, today was just the kind of desk work I love!

Yesterday, I began inventory on the biographies, as my assigned part of the collection to weed. I have already looked at a specific section of the biographies with my SLIS 720 Collection Analysis assignment, but this week's task spans the entirety of Ravenel's biography collection.

Today, we actually weeded about 100 books! It started out with a "Shelf List" generated by the Follett software. Cindy printed out a list of the whole collection and brought me a highlighter. I kindly (I hope) asked if the program generated Excel spreadsheets as this data could be manipulated easily to narrow the around 1,400 titles to just the potentially outdated or non-useful texts. Thankfully, the program does, so I got to work. Using the conditional formatting tool, I first labelled texts according to dates established by Karen R Lowe's weeding formulas, the "queen of weeding" according to Cindy. Then, I conditionally formatted texts with less than two circulations in the last five years. I had to play around with the sorting filters until I was content that both the oldest and least used texts were in the top 10% of my spreadsheet. From there, it was much more hands-on and slightly more tedious. I first looked at the 0-checkout texts in the "red" and "orange" date ranges ("weed"/"aging") and entered the barcodes into Destiny to see how many lifetime checkouts the text had and when the text was added to the collection.

Interesting trends started to happen. Almost all of the texts that were both old and unused were entered into the collection on April 28, 2006! I asked Toni what might have caused this, as she and Cindy were in charge of the library at that time. Toni remembered that the office and the side storage room were FULL of boxes and boxes of books that had never been added to the collection by the previous librarian. 😞 The timeline both she and Cindy remembered seemed to fit with this date in the catalog. Evidently, these texts were unnecessary purchases (donations?) to the collection that were never offered nor advertised as part of the collection. This made pulling texts fairly easy for several of the books to be weeded. The second trend we noticed were for pop icons or sport athletes that were popular for a short time and were no longer relevant to today's children. For one collection of texts published in the 1990s, we asked a handful of students, "Do you know ___?" Some names like Enrique Iglesias, Brandy, N*Sync, Hillary Duff, etc, were named. Besides blank looks, shaken heads, and "no"s, one student said, "These aren't the people we study! I know about James Madison!" 😆😆😆 Those got weeded as well.

The last task we completed was the actual pulling of the books and removing from the collection. After I collected the books onto a cart, Cindy took a last thumb through each of the texts, determining if the text was still valuable despite the catalog (perhaps teachers use the book or she used the book in the library) and to determine potential books to send to other teachers or areas of the school that would find more use for the texts (old art or music books, role models for guidance, etc). All but three were determined "weed" material. The actual process of removing these texts from the catalog was as simple as a scan! Tomorrow we begin the process of pulling barcodes and other identifiers from the books themselves before looking at how to improve the biography collection moving forward.

Day 16: Puzzle Pieces, Teaching Destiny, and Biography Inventory

I am so excited and sad to start this final week of my internship! I can’t wait to receive the degree and be available to take a position in a school library near me.

Today started with a reading advisory project that is being sponsored by the art teacher and an initiative unique to Ravenel: Artists on the Green. This program brings in local artisans to share their craft and work with the students, organized through the art teacher. She asked each of the teachers to create a giant puzzle piece to represent their area of the school. For the library, we decided to use some book jackets that were sent by the distributors to create a collage of reading and new titles. At first, I was super hesitant to cut up the covers but chose to recognize that the book jackets would have been destroyed easily over a few circulations and the books themselves already have versions of these covers embedded in their hard back, shelf editions. Once I got over the initial “heartbreak” and my own nerves about creating the piece, I actually really enjoyed picking out some of the fun and engaging artwork from the book jackets’ front and back covers and inner flaps. To maximize the amount of material on the puzzle piece, I used the spine labels for the book titles and authors/illustrators to add reference in minimal space. Overall, the collage turned into a modge-podge of fiction texts that spans all elementary grade levels. I titled the piece “Characters Around” as the cover art focuses largely on a diverse set of character illustrations.

As I was finishing this project, one of the first grade classes came for library time. Cindy had planned a lesson using the school’s new Chromebooks to teach these students how to use the online Destiny catalog. I was glad to see that the lesson was structured much like my own collaborative lesson with the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th graders. The first half of the lesson was largely focused on learning terminology and location of buttons on the catalog screen. Then, Cindy used some interactive, formative questions to test if the students had paid attention to which search button they should use (keyword, title, author, series) and what section the call number belonged to (easy, fiction, biography, nonfiction). Lastly, the students worked with a partner to find four call numbers that Cindy had specified on a small worksheet addressing the four search functions they had just learned from the catalog.

Overall, I thought the lesson went as smoothly as possible for students both new to Chromebooks and still developing skills like spelling and reading. Thankfully, my presence as well as the teacher returning a bit early to the library made troubleshooting and answering student questions much much easier. I think I would keep this in mind when I teach the younger-grade students something complex or foreign to the students: enlist help! Maybe even pairing upper-grade students during these lessons would be helpful to the students. I have seen older students help younger students with finding a book in just this way. It would be really cool and rewarding to the older students to mentor the younger students as a potential program for my own library. Even still, the lesson as is seemed to make sense to the students.

Lastly, I started conducting inventory on the biography section of the collection. This is the section that Cindy wants me to weed and analyze for assessment and potential growth. The inventory was super easy to set up. Follett has a program feature in Back Office that allows you to set parameters for the section. From there, I went to the biography section with a laptop and a hand scanner to scan the books present. Boom! That’s it (for today)! I had to put on some latex gloves after the first row of the first shelf as my fingers were becoming caked with grime from the books themselves. I knew that it would be easier and better for my hands if I finished the collection scanning with gloves. Though there were students participating in circulation, I was fortunate enough to just focus on inventory because Cindy and Toni were present to run the standard library functions. I imagine that, again, volunteers could be beneficial to this process or designated time would need to be assigned to complete the inventory process most efficiently in my own library.

While weeding, a few books immediately stood out to me as potential weeding material: some old and yellowing texts and some outdated “pop icons” (like Enrique Iglesias and N*sync). I went ahead and pulled those aside as I will be working on weeding later this week. Otherwise, there were only a few titles out of place (Es in the Bs) and a few missing over-barcode tape strips. The real problem came when I had less than ten books left in the section. Whoosh! The power dropped due to heavy rains and winds in the area. In fact, the power is still out as I type into Word on a laptop—how ironic! The power just resumed as I typed that sentence! Being the end of the day, though, and with the network still down, I will start my inventory analysis tomorrow, looking to weed and to fill any curriculum gaps in the biography section. We did get to hunker down in the non-lit, no-windows closet for a while and generally relax as all technology and power halted projects needing completion. Thankfully, this laptop was available to continue working on my Practicum Learning Outcomes and this reflection.

Overall, I’ve learned that flexibility is the key to success in this environment: especially on crazy, unexpected days like today!