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President's Column: Welcome Laura!

10/8/2019

1 Comment

 
MSLA President Laura Luker is the library teacher at Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley, MA 

Hello MSLA members, and welcome. As our respective school years get up and running, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself as the incoming MSLA President. My name is Laura Luker and I’m a K-12 library teacher at the Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School in Hadley. This is my tenth year as a library teacher and my fifteenth year as an educator. Prior to working in the library, I was a secondary English and reading teacher, a background which I feel gives me an excellent footing for collaborating with classroom teachers. In my spare time, I foster rescue dogs and dabble in aerial circus arts. I am equally as enthusiastic about running as I am about cake.

Personal details aside, I’d like to convey to each of you how honored I am to have been asked to be President of this organization. I’m passionate about the work we all do each and every day - not only connecting kids with books, but also helping them to be discerning, involved world citizens. I appreciate the opportunity to advocate for our work being recognized by the broader world.


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Technology Column: Getting Students Oriented

10/8/2019

1 Comment

 
Margaret Kane Schoen is a Library Teacher at Newton South High School.

Welcome back! It’s the start of a new school year, and you know what that means - library orientation. When the library team at my school sat down to plan, we decided we needed a new activity, but weren’t sure what to do. So we did a little backwards design, focusing on what we really wanted the students to walk away from the library having done or seen. Reviewing our list, we realized that many of the items simply involved getting them out into our space so they could see all the different areas and options available.
​

While we were talking about activity ideas, I remembered a project I had done with elementary students when they were learning about maps in social studies. Students were given an unlabeled map of the library and had to fill it in - forcing them to walk around the space and really study what was there. We could definitely make this work for high school students, but I knew right away we’d need to make it a digital assessment - reviewing maps from a few fourth grade teams is one thing, but 500 high school students needs to be something you can handle online!

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Judi Paradis Action Fund

10/8/2019

2 Comments

 
Pat Fontes is a retired school librarian and the co-chair of MSLA Awards Committee.

Picture
After recovering from the shock of losing Judi Paradis, former MSLA President, dynamite school librarian, passionate advocate, mentor, warrior for social justice and all-around nice human being, there was a groundswell among MSLA members to develop a fitting program to honor her memory and legacy. To that end, MSLA is excited to announce that the Judi Paradis Action Fund has been established.

After a lengthy and very productive discussion at MSLA Executive Board Retreat on September 14th, eBoard members agreed that the goal of the Fund will be to honor the legacy of Judi Paradis by encouraging school librarians to develop programs that focus on social justice, literacy and collaboration. The eBoard has envisioned that up to $500 will be given each year from donations to MSLA in Judi’s memory.

While we have not yet worked out the details of the application and grant process, we are hoping to be able to make the first grant round available in November, 2019 with the first grant awarded at the 2020 MSLA Annual Conference. Stay tuned for details about the grant process in the MSLA Forum and through MSLA’s social media outlets.

We would like to encourage you to donate to this exciting new program. As of mid-September, we have received more than 52 contributions in Judi’s memory that have brought us within range of our goal of $5,000. Contribute through PayPal or by check payable to MSLA with a note or memo "in memory of Judi Paradis" mailed to MSLA, PO Box 336, Wayland MA, 01778.

If you have questions about this new program, feel free to contact a co-chair of the Awards Committee, Wendy Garland, Ingrid Mayyasi or Pat Fontes.

2 Comments

Secondary Column: Sparking Collaboration with Language Teachers

10/8/2019

4 Comments

 
Jennifer Dimmick is a Library Teacher at Newton South High School
and the recipient of the 2019 MSLA Service Award.

As high school librarians we find that collaborating with History and English Language Arts teachers is a natural fit focused on research and reading/literature support and all that entails. But what about all of those other important subject areas? Couldn’t they benefit from our expertise too? Do they have to be doing research with their students to warrant coming to the library for a collaborative project? At Newton South High School we’ve learned that there are other ways to “hook” diverse subject area teachers on library learning, most often via instructional technology. In this column I’ll be focusing on one department and one technology: using Adobe Spark Video with World Language students to practice oral and written language skills while simultaneously sharpening digital presentation skills.

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Managing a Middle-High School Library by Making Connections

10/8/2019

5 Comments

 
Pamela Vallée is the library media specialist at Lunenburg Middle-High School
​and a recipient of a 2019 Web Seal of Excellence Award. 

Four years ago Lunenburg built a new school containing a high school and a middle school, and a beautiful shared library. As the teachers packed up classrooms and I packed up the high school library, I learned that I would be the only person staffing the new school library. I spent many days that summer researching best practices for managing a combined middle and high school library, visualizing where I should place the middle school and high school book collections to promote usage, and then shelving all of the books and supplies. I relabeled and barcoded all of the middle school books to make them easy to find in the shared online Destiny catalog. I organized the middle school fiction collection into genres, and began color-coding the books and creating signs. I assumed I would be very busy with seven grades of students and teachers needing my attention, and hoped that genre organization would help students find a good read.

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Elementary Column: Focusing my Time and Saving my Sanity?

10/8/2019

4 Comments

 
Wendy Garland is the librarian at Avery Elementary School in Dedham, MA 

What I love about my work 

  • No two days/weeks/years are alike
  • So many different aspects to the work
  • Always something new to learn and do
  • Serving students, teachers, parents
  • The books!
​
I chose this profession because I knew it would keep me on my toes. I thrive on learning new things and serving many roles I am a librarian, teacher, counselor, technology specialist, reader, curriculum developer, and professional development deliverer.

There is great beauty in the creativity and diversity the position offers. However, for all of those same reasons I can sometimes find myself swimming in a sea of all of the above and finding myself underwater. There isn’t enough time to be who I want to be for ALL of my students, teachers, and parents. There just aren’t enough hours. I want to try new initiatives, develop collaborations with teachers, try out that new tool I read about, make a dent in my “to be read” pile, catch up with my professional reading, write a blog post, and learn from my Twitter PLN.  

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Community Read

10/8/2019

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Cathy Collins is the library media specialist at Sharon High School 

    “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.” - Rudine Sims Bishop
In efforts to build community, a “Community Reads” program was planned at Sharon High School in which all staff and students read and discussed On the Come Up, by Angie Thomas. Our Community Reads Committee, spearheaded by ELA Coordinator Rebecca Smoler, met several times to come up with discussion “norms,” plan logistics and a format for the school wide discussions, as well as to create strategies and question prompts for staff around the book talk.

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Picture Book Column: Shaking up Storytime!

10/8/2019

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Kelly Depin is the head librarian at Derby Academy in Hingham, MA 

Imagine yourself reading a picture book to students. If you’re a good sideways or upside down reader, you can keep the pictures in view the whole time. You may use different voices for each character, using inflection the way a chef uses a knife. A little library instruction may start or end the session : ‘What does the author do?’, ‘The illustrator?’. You might even draw attention to how the cover does this or that. But have you ever discussed the gutters or layout? How about the typography or endpapers? Megan Dowd Lambert, author of Reading Picture Books with Children : How to Shake up Storytime and Get Kids Talking about What They See does exactly that. In association with the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Lambert has developed the Whole Book Approach, a dialogic method used to read with students, not to students.

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Secret Lives and Summer Exploits of School Librarians

10/8/2019

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Patsy Divver is the School Librarian at Millis Middle/High School
​  and the originator of this new column. 

​In this column, we’d like to hear from YOU about the many hats you wear… not just during the day (with library, tech, homeroom, lunch duty, advisor, coordinator), but before your turn as a librarian - or even now, when it’s ‘after-hours’! Let’s hear what our colleagues have been up to!
​

Tricia Svendenson, Bishop Feehan High School:


Several times during my library career I have had the pleasure of setting up libraries in other parts of the world. In 2004, I spent a summer living with a Zulu family in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa and established a library at Mbazwana Elementary School. In 2006, I was asked to start a library in Guaimaca, Honduras at a mission. I went again to Guaimaca and set up a library at a school. It would be fun to go back to those schools and see how the libraries are doing!
​

Laura Gardner, Dartmouth Middle School:

This summer I attended a Climate Reality training in Minneapolis for three days with 1700 other people and former Vice President Al Gore. Now I'm a trained Climate Reality Leader ready to get started on climate activism. 
Climate Ready Leader Training Photo
Laura Gardner and the 1700 other Climate Ready Leaders in Minneapolis
Want to share your secret life or other exploits outside the library? Send me your information… a great place to give inspiration, expand background knowledge, and even make a new connection!
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Challenge your students to travel the World by Reading!

10/8/2019

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Ms. Samantha Silag is the Library Teacher at Manchester Memorial Elementary School

How can you get your students to learn about different people, places and experiences through literature? How do you get them to try a book outside of their comfort zone or frame of reference? And then how do you keep them reading? These are the questions I set out to answer a few years ago sparked by two unrelated messengers.

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Advice Column: Ask a Library Legend

10/8/2019

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Valerie Diggs is the Graduate Program Coordinator MEd Library Media Studies at Salem State University, and a former MSLA president

Can you tell me about doing a full-scale inventory. Do I really need to do it?How often? Do I have to scan everything in my library?!

The dreaded word “Inventory” rears its ugly head and nags us as we look for that elusive book or that missing artifact. This is a great question, and one which deserves a straightforward answer. When a student, teacher, parent or community member searches for a book or other resources in your library, the search should be accurate and point them directly to the resource. By conducting a thorough inventory at least every other year, you are ensuring this accuracy.


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Right-Sizing: Handling a Space Change for Your School Library

10/8/2019

1 Comment

 
Sheila Packard is the Library Teacher at Ward Elementary in Newton and
a recipient of a 2019 MA Super Librarian Award. 

“The only constant in life is change.” This saying, attributed to Greek philosopher Heraclitus, might be repeated by many school librarians as they grapple with unasked-for changes in the size of their libraries, prompted by shifts in enrollment or budgets or other circumstances. Often they will hear that flexibility is the key to dealing successfully with this change, but is it really? Over the course of 13 years, one of the libraries I work in has gone from small to large to smaller again, and with each change, even downsizing, has become a better version of itself. While flexibility helped me cope, I became convinced that there was something more that influenced these results. Here’s the story.

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Library Bloopers

10/8/2019

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Patsy Divver is the School Librarian at Millis Middle/High School
​  and the originator of this column. 

Many of us are sole practitioners so there is nobody in the building to share the "can you believe this" moments. When something wacky, embarrassing or just plain jaw-dropping happens in your library, submit it here and we'll share it in the next Forum. 
​
From Kim Keith, Library Media Specialist at M. E. Small Elementary:

A second grader returned her library books today after checking them out yesterday.

Me:
“Oh, you already read your books?”
Second Grader:
"No, my mother wants me to get better books!”
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Building a Virtual Learning Commons for Boston Public Schools

10/8/2019

0 Comments

 
Aaron Noll is the Library Teacher at Winship Elementary in Brighton
and a recipient of a 2019 MA Super Librarian Award.

In the summer of 2019, I began to build a new website intended to inspire and facilitate inquiry and project-based, student-centered digital learning in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). The BPS Virtual Learning Commons (BPS VLC) was conceived by BPS Director of Library Services, Deborah Froggatt, and I as a district-level expansion of the VLC idea originally proposed by David V. Loertscher, Carol Koechlin, and Esther Rosenfeld in 2012. Loertscher et al. intended the VLC to be paired with a physical Learning Commons, a 21st century update of school libraries. The VLC concept is grounded in the building “of a greater level of engagement through exploration, experimentation, and collaboration”(“Virtual Learning”). Our challenge in creating the district-level VLC was to provide the BPS with a powerful digital tool with which to engage students’ curiosity and creativity in constructing their own learning experiences.

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Forum Feedback

10/8/2019

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    Forum Newsletter

    Co-Editors
    Reba Tierney and
    ​Luke Steere

    Reba is the School Librarian at Waltham High School; Luke is School Librarian at  Wilson Middle in Natick

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