LSTA GRANT!

We were notified today that we received the LSTA grant at both midle schools, both North and South in our district. We wrote for high/low books for our at-risk students "Science Success Begins @ the Library." So, this was a very good day! The librarian at the other school and I co-authored the grant and this is a nice boost to our budgets as well as a big help for the teachers and students. No one in my current district has applied for anything like this and so this is quite an accomplishment. It also comes just in time as some budgets are being cut in the district.

My Space Article & stuff

If you haven't seen the U.S. News & World Reports, it is well worth a look. It certainly gives a better view of the site that "the Internet & social networking is bad" frame of mind that is prevalent in many school districts.

I was able to get our catalog on our web site and it works when we are logged on at school. Still cannot put holds there and need some guidelines and instructions about how to customize it, but it is much improved over the Unix based catalog we used in the past. When we get updated computers, we can put that on as our catalog and not deal with Unix any more. Now when we can get rid of the Unix circ desk, we will really be somewhere.

Great News - a useful catalog??

In fighting with Dynix for I don't know how long, calling tech support and working with our tech person I just found out that our antiquated Unix catalog has the capability to be accessed on the Web! That means we might have a catalog that looks like the one at our high school. OMG, this means it might actually be usable to the kids and staff, what a concept. I can't wait to get the info and reconfigure our two lonely search stations so that a classes can search the library from any computer in the school or at home. This means the kids could actually use it to search for books. We might also be able to do our holds electronically and not with paper slips. This is the best news I have had all year.

On other fronts, since I only got half of the Michael and Jenny road show in our 753 class, I am signing up for Jenny, the "Shifted Librarian's" session at ISLMA. Since the other sessions she has done in the area are during the week, at NSLS and other locations, I figured ISLMA would be a good chance to hear the other expert in the Web 2.0 field. This will give me more ammunition to fight the"Internet is bad and dangerous" mindset going on in our school district. If any of you are there, I am presenting about "Differentiation and the Rebecca Caudill books" on Friday the 10th of November in the afternoon.

New class!

I am taking Library Materials for Children, a class that is right up my alley. This is a class where you HAVE to read great books, my idea of nirvana. This weekend will be a blur of reading for class, preparing for 6th grade orientation in the library and moving my son into his dorm room at Columbia in Chicago.

On other fronts, school is racing off to a quick start. I taught 8 classes today in between trying to catalog books, process new items, reconcile orders and refill our beanbag chairs. I have established a blog for my book club that is not blocked. Yea! Now, all I have to do is find a way to enroll kids so that it is a closed blog for just the members of my book club. I know Andy did that with our RSS group, so I know it is possible. I will try to figure it out before our book club starts meeting. A few eighth graders are already interested in the book club and will be checking with their friends to get enough participants to make it worthwhile for all of us.