Last summer I decided to go ahead and begin my practicum experience because a perfect opportunity opened up to help another media specialist open her new media center in a brand new middle school! It was a great opportunity to learn about everything involved in opening a new media center and to be a part of the organizational aspect of the media center. The text below are the journal entries where I recorded some of my experiences after helping to get the media center ready for the first day of school. We ultimately got the library ready in time!
June 30, 2008 -
I am doing my middle school hours at the new middle school in my county. The media specialist, Annie, just received her book and supplies orders today. The school is opening this fall. It is a beautiful new school, with many windows, stone accents on the outside of the building, and even columns in the media center. The media center is located on the second floor of the school and has a beautiful view of the woods across the street from the school.
When I arrived this morning, Annie gave me a tour of the new school. She had a long list of things she needed to get done before the teachers arrive on August 5. The first thing I did was go through her supplies from The Library Store to make sure everything she had ordered had arrived. Afterwards, I checked her RESA order (mainly basic office supplies) and made sure she had the essentials…such as staplers, pens, pencils, file folders, etc. When she made her big order, she was not given an amount to spend, so she wasn’t sure how much she should order. Then when they got her order, they told her they couldn’t pay for everything she had asked for on the budget. So, there is a lot that she ordered that she didn’t receive.
The second thing that happened this morning was that the elevator was broken making the task of carrying all the new books into the second floor media center a big chore! Luckily, a few of the baseball players from her husband’s school were there to carry all the boxes for us. When the books were shipped from Titlewave, they were placed on plats in a specific order so shelving them would be easier. However, when the boys had to carry them up the stairs they had to separate the plats and now they are all out of order! This will be the most time consuming thing we’ll have to do to get ready for the opening day.
I prepared the magazine storage area in one of the storage rooms by labeling the magazine racks and putting them in the proper place. Then we began shelving the Easy books. Hopefully those were the most time consuming to shelve because they were completely out of order in the boxes and we had to alphabetize them. I also searched for a less expensive wall rack for the bulletin board paper (craft paper) that will be in the teacher work area. Annie said they wouldn’t order the one she had picked out because it was too expensive. I found another one on-line that was about $75 less expensive.
The budget and ordering for a new media center is overwhelming! Unfortunately, Annie didn’t get much help from the county office as I would have expected. She said that she found another middle school media specialist in the county who was extremely helpful, though. I can imagine that was difficult! I look forward to helping Annie get things set up. It will be interesting to see everything that goes into it.
We unpacked 100 out of 189 boxes today! My back will surely be sore tomorrow J All the boxes were out of order, so we spent much of the time finding the boxes and putting them in the right order. We had a great assembly line going. One person shelving, another checking the inventory of each box, and another person arranging the books in the right order. It was a productive day!
July 2, 2008 –
We continued to unpack boxes and shelve books today. After today, we have the reference section and the 900’s to shelve yet. Really, my back is sore J We have yet to stamp the books and scan them into the computer. Annie has 10 days to all this work and I can’t imagine how she could have possibly done this on her own in that amount of time! We’ve had between 3 and 6 people at various times during the last 3 days working together and we’ve been working hard. I keep thinking how overwhelming it would have been to make such a big order. Now that the books are here, there are still quite a few books that were cataloged incorrectly, so Annie will have to fix some of them. That will be next week, though because everyone is going on vacation for the 4th of July holiday.
March 25, 2009 - Visiting an Elementary Book Fair
I just realized that I forgot to blog about this visit! I will try to remember all the details and document them now :)
I went back to the same elementary school as I did on March 9th. I really wanted to see a book fair because we tried to do a book fair at my school (which is a high school), but it completely flopped. We didn't make any money and we couldn't even find enough books on the list for our media center because they were all too low level. We ended up calling another media specialist in the county and asking her if she needed any books for her new middle school media center...she came with a big bag and a huge smile on her face! Anyway, that's another story... suffice it to say, I wanted to see a book fair that works!
I was impressed at what I saw! Mrs. G had all the books neatly displayed and the students were so enthusiastic about coming to the book fair and buying new books! Mrs. G told me that they had already made thousands of dollars (it was near the end of the fair) and that it had been successful. She had a parent night and many opportunities for students to come look at the books and come back again to purchase the books they wanted. She even had teacher wish lists that parents could purchase as donations. This is a great idea!
I really think the difference between the successful book fair and the unsuccessful book fair was that the books at our book fair were not exactly age appropriate, thus we had little enthusiasm from our high school students. It was great to see a book fair that worked. Next time we do a book fair at our high school, we will verify the number of young adult and adult selections (we only received a couple of tables of these items...it was mostly middle school level books).
March 9, 2009- Visiting the Elementary Media Center
Last Friday, I visited one of the local elementary school media centers and found myself amazed at how different life can be with the younger students! I arrived at 8:00 am to a quiet, small school. There were bagels and muffins on the lunchroom tables, a few young students entering the school, and teachers getting ready for the day. It was such a different pace from the fast paced mornings we have at our high school. The first thing Mrs. G does each Wednesday and Friday morning is air the morning news update with a group of fun and animated students. So, I was escorted to the taping room by one of the young students who was waiting for me in the media center.
After the show was finished, we went back to the media center, which was neat and very well organized, to prepare for the incoming classes. Today's lesson was with the 3rd grade classes. We were teaching them how to write a bibliography and use an information pathfinder in preparation for a project they were going to do. I didn't realize how much I assumed the students would know. For example, this was the first time many of these students ever used a laptop and we had to teach them how to use the touch pad and the mouse. The lesson was a success and the students were excited to use the information pathfinder.
Next time I visit that school, I will help get the book fair up and going. We tried a book fair at our school last semester and it was a huge let down, so I'm excited to see how another school does it. I left just before lunch so I could make it back to my school for our busy lunch period.
February 25, 2009-An Update
So, here it is February and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the activities I have going on at the same time. I'm currently working on the unit lesson plan with the English teachers at my school. We are trying to develop a remediation tool using a wiki. We've given the students their benchmark test, analyzed the data, and are working on the actual wiki now.
Since I've introduced the wiki to a few teachers, there has really been an increase in interest. It seems that I've been spending the majority of my time working with teachers and students on their wiki pages! I'm excited to see the interest. I had planned on doing my staff development lesson on wikis, but before going to the entire faculty I wanted to work with a few teachers to get my feet wet, so to speak. It's been a great experience so far. I've had opportunities to work with numerous teachers on setting up pages, teaching the students how to use the pages, and helping teachers develop rubrics for grading student work on the wiki pages. We found that the discussions can be time consuming to grade and review-- so we are working to tweak that rubric to make it easier.
As you can see, my unit lesson plan and my staff development projects are starting to blend together.
January 16th, 2009 - GETTING STARTED
Today, between working with classes in the media center, I spent much of the day researching the use of wikis in schools and figuring out how to set up accounts for the students in Mrs. C's 4th period class. Trial and error was my method...very time consuming! FINALLY, I found how to set up student accounts without needing an email and I was able to get Mrs. C's class set up. :)
We are going to try it first with her 4th and 5th period gifted English classes. Mrs. J and another English teacher are going to watch as I introduce the wiki to the students on Tuesday. I will show the students the class wiki and give them their account information on Tuesday. They will be working in groups to write an introduction paragraph with thesis. We will go over some of the rules of the wiki activity and let them try it out in class on Tuesday. Mrs. C asked the students if they knew anything about wiki spaces in class today and it sounds like some of the students in the class have used wikis before; those who had never used them seemed very intrigued by the new kind of group project. Some were concerned and some were glad to know that Mrs. C would be able to see the history of who contributed what for the group project...at last a way to ensure that ALL members of the group participate! Or, at least a way to track who participates and who doesn't.
I'll prepare for the lesson over the weekend. I'm a little nervous about Tuesday just because it still seems so new to me...but I guess this is the best way to learn ...just dig right in!
January 15, 2008 -
This week I have been thinking about what I wanted to teach for my professional development activity. I've now completed my first semester as a media specialist at LHS and I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable and knowledgeable about the many aspects of the new position. As I contemplate working with the teachers at my school, I remember how difficult it was last semester to get a couple of teachers (who were friends of mine) on board with having the students create an on-line newsletter for the culminating project in a genetics unit. Unfortunately, I was not successful last semester in convincing them that it was worth a try. As a result of that experience, I'm more careful now about introducing new technologies to the teachers at my school.
This time I went about it from a different angle. I've never used Wiki pages with students, but I am really interested in trying it out. Unfortunately, I don't feel comfortable using wikis at this point, but I really need to jump in and learn how to effectively incorporate them into teaching units. Maybe you can see my predicament already, I'd like to do my professional development activitiy on using wikis in the classroom, but I need practice! I need an opportunity to learn how to effectively use wikis with students.
So I decided to just be honest about my plan...I went to the English Department meeting this week and told the teachers about my desire to try out a new technology with students. I asked if anyone was interested in working with me to see how we could incorporate wikis into an upcoming unit. I gave the teachers a general description of wiki pages and a few ideas of how they have been frequently used by teachers with students.
To my surprise, I immediately had 2 teachers interested in trying it! They were both eager and also unfamiliar with wikis. So, we began talking about how we could incorporate the new technology into the teachers' next unit (both teachers teach 10th grade English). Now that we had a class of students, teacher, and a unit to work with, I began more in depth research on how we could use wiki spaces to allow the students to work collaboratively.
I opened a wiki space page for the teacher to show her how to do it and then we experimented with the page to become familiar with how it all worked. Mrs. C and Mrs. J were both very excited about trying something new. They were the perfect people to pilot the technology. My thought was that the three of us would work together and work out any of the kinks before I go before the faculty for the professional development.
My principal was hesitant at first, but interested to see how it worked. He was uncomfortable with students putting their work on the internet...he said that we definitely needed to create a permission slip that explained everything to the parents before going any further with our plans.
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