October 2013

Being a Connected Educator

As I work with students and teachers, I keep close tabs on my email and RSS feeds throughout the day. It’s not killing time, it’s keeping up, and it’s essential to my work as a school librarian. And I’m just as quick to respond to a request from a colleague thousands of miles away as to help those in my building. And when I have a question, I throw it out to my PLN, educators and librarians across the country and around the world using a vast variety of networks, automation systems, and applications in a diverse range of settings. And the response is always useful, and often thought-provoking.

It’s what’s called being a Connected Educator, and this is how it’s described ‘ by the’ eponymous organization:’ “Online communities and learning networks are helping hundreds of thousands of educators learn, reducing isolation and providing â€œjust in timeâ€ access to knowledge and opportunities for collaboration. However, many educators are not yet participating and others aren’t realizing the full benefits. In many cases, schools, districts, and states also are not recognizing and rewarding this essential professional learning.”

I’d venture to say that many school librarians were connected educators before connected educators were a thing.If you’ve worked in this field for more than a decade, I’m sure you can remember earlier incarnations of burning up the bush telegraph, via listservs, gopher-esque discussion boards, or text-based email between buildings or across the state. Then blogs and RSS started cropping up, making it even easier to pull the information you want, rather than just the information you need, or to push your own information to others.

So many youth services librarians work alone — as either the only information professional, or the only teen specialist, in a larger institution. And I hope that our professional preparation armed us for combating this this isolation. I remember signing up for two listservs as a requirement in an introductory class in library school in the late 1990s. I chose one for art librarians (I had majored in art as an undergraduate) and one for newspaper librarians. And I now know ridiculous amounts about working in those type of special libraries, just because of that passive exposure years ago.

Continue reading Being a Connected Educator

App of the Week: ZombieBooth 2

Title: ZombieBooth 2
Cost: Free (for Lite version; Pro version costs $1.99)
Platform: iOS (an earlier version of the app is available for Android)

Just in time for Halloween, ZombieBooth 2 will give you the power to see what you or any of your friends (or even pets) would look like as a Zombie. Using an image from your device’s library, camera or even your Facebook account, this app will create a fully animated zombie. The results are actually surprisingly believable and slightly disturbing!

Once you have selected an image, you will be asked to line up the eyes and mouth with a prompt from the app. This helps the app to detect the location of key facial features and allows it to replace the eyes and mouth with animated, zombified features. The result is a moving image with bloodshot eyes, a gaping bloody mouth and a senseless, zombie moan. If you swipe your finger around on the screen, the eyes (and mouth) will follow you. If you make the mistake of getting your finger too close to the mouth, you might even have a bite taken out of you.

You can also edit the image to change the appearance of the mouth or eyes or to add additional facial wounds and accessories (such as a cleaver in the head or glass shards). You can also add filters to the image to change the look of the image. The resulting image is recognizable as the subject of the original photo but altered just enough to look like a zombie from your favorite zombie movie.

Once you are satisfied with your new zombie, you can take a picture or even capture of a video of it moving around to share on Facebook, Twitter or via email. Whether you are looking for a fun project for Halloween, need an app for use in a zombie program, or are just a zombie enthusiast, this app is well worth a try. Check it out in action in the video below.

For more app recommendations visit the YALSA App of the Week Archive. If you have an app you think we should review, let us know!

Weeding Fiction: A Personal Tale

It’s hard not to make it personal;’ that book looks good‘ or’ I really liked that‘ or’ I’ve always wanted to read that, but never did.

There’s usually a reason you never read it. For me, that reason is usually that a better book came along. And if a better book came along for me, one probably is going to come along for a teen reader.

This year, we’re running out of space.

Every year, I do an inventory in the YA Room. I use that time for shelf reading and weeding, too. Usually it’s a light weeding; books that haven’t gone out in a while or books that need a little TLC. At first, I was operating on ‘ a five-year shelf life, but after talking with some other YA Librarians on twitter, I realized I needed to be more ruthless. If a book hadn’t circulated in 3 years, there’s a reason. I had to find out why.

from: http://sweetheartsromancebooks.com/

Some answers are easy.
* The cover is hideous. No teen in their right mind would want to be seen with that. Those are easily decided. If I feel I still need that book, I look for a version with a better cover. I wish I had taken pictures, but mostly if the cover had the 90’s feel to it, it was gone.
* The story and the cover are both outdated. Easy.
* The book is falling apart. Easy.

It’s the harder issues that make me pause and think. Continue reading Weeding Fiction: A Personal Tale

Amplified: Advocating with Your Co-Workers

In talking about advocating for teen services, we often emphasize advocating with your library’s administration, or with elected officials, or the public. But there’s a great–and often untapped–pool of people that can really help you spread the word about teen services: your library colleagues, from fellow librarians and library assistants to clerks and pages.’ If you get these people on board with your message, they will carry a lot of the load of getting the message out to others.

Think about it: who are the people in the library that the public has the most contact with? Yes, it’s the front-line staff, the folks who spend hours a day at the service points or in the stacks. These are the staffers that members of the public are most likely to know by name, or at least by face. In many public libraries, in fact, it is the clerks and pages who are most likely to be truly local–people who live and work in the community that the library serves.

So how can they help you advocate for teens? Well, they can’t, unless they understand why they should and how they can go about it. Your first step is to inform and energize them. Keep in mind that many adults don’t really understand teenagers and sometimes they’re even a little afraid of them. Your job may be simply to demystify teens and help others understand why they do what they do.

Offer to do a short session at a library staff meeting and/or new employee orientation on teen developmental needs.
When you are chatting with co-workers in the break room, share interesting stories about teens and the value of teen services.
Come up with a joint project in which you can work with children’s or adult services librarians to serve both teens and children or adults.
Make a note when you see a positive interaction between another staff member and a teen, and follow up by complimenting your colleague, either verbally or with a quick note.
Find out which of your colleagues have teenagers at home, or work with teens in some other part of the community–at church, at a volunteer organization, as a coach, etc.
Find opportunities to remind your colleagues that helping teens grow into strong and capable adults is good for the whole community.
Share your own enthusiasm for teen services at every opportunity–others will be swept up in your wake.
Find out if you can take another staff member along with you when you speak at schools or at community events.

When teen services and teens are seen in a more positive light, advocacy becomes the next step. To help your colleagues advocate, you will need to continue to provide them with the necessary information. Continue reading Amplified: Advocating with Your Co-Workers

Seeing It From the Other Side: Programming

As you might recall from my blog post last month, I recently switched gears in my professional life. After seven years of working with teens in public libraries, I am now an elementary school librarian in a large, urban public school.’ I’ll be writing a series of blog posts about how the two jobs intersect. This month I’m discussing programming and how it relates to what I do in my current job.

When I was a teen services librarian, I had a love/hate relationship with programming. The thrilling highs when tons of happy faces exited the library after a successful venture didn’t always make up for the crushing lows when nobody showed up for the program I’d spent time and taxpayer dollars on.

Still, I had supportive management who let me try lots of different things and tailor my programming to whatever teens were asking for.’ When I sat down to figure out what I’d be offering in the coming months, I was only bound by my own imagination and what I knew would appeal to teens.’ Whatever worked I was free to continue, and whatever tanked, I was free to abandon. If the program served only to entertain teens, that was okay. There didn’t need to be an educational angle or goal to guide the program. Continue reading Seeing It From the Other Side: Programming

Reimagining the World One Postcard at a Time

As a librarian working with teens, I often think of one of my most important roles is encouraging connections between young people and the wider world. I’ve done a project where students up-cycled magazines into PostSecret-type confessions to unburden themselves, but even looking for PostSecret examples to share with teens can be a little like Russian roulette, given that so many of the messages are NSFW.

A new book by Keri Smith, encourage users’ to use the public postal mail format to share in a more targeted way.’ Smith, the creator of Wreck This Journal, uses a similar creative scaffolding in her new project Everything is Connected: Reimagining the World One Postcard at a Time‘ (Perigee; October 1).

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Smith’s partially-designed postcards offer space for readers to’ confess their secrets, become’ superheroes,’ travel through time, create a’ secret identity profile’ and’ interact with people yet unknown. And it will provide teen librarians with an easy, fool-proof programming resource, as well a great jumping-off point for conversations about the shared challenges of the human condition.

The result of the postcards, Smith hopes, is a deviation from life as usual and the discovery of human connectionsâ€”new and old.

STEM Into Winter Programming

Everyone’s talking about STEM (or the arts-added version showcased in the October issue of School Library Journal), and YALSA’s STEM task force produced an updated toolkit earlier this year to provide 41 pages of STEM programming resources just for young adult librarians.

If you’re stumped for ideas and looking how to integrate science, technology, engineering and math into your program schedule, look no further than YALSA’s STEM Toolkit.

It includes step-by-step program plans, advocacy information if you need to justify your program plans, resources, and dozens of ideas to get your program going.’ ‘ Chock-full of research on best practices and â€œwhyâ€ STEM should be a priority for library professionals, the toolkit highlights the importance of developing a thorough program plan and guides you through initial brainstorming efforts to an adaptable teenprogram evaluation. Passive and active programming ideas from around the country are included,including three immediately replicable projects.

Check it out today! ‘ And ‘ thanks to STEM Task Force Member Jennifer Knight for the heads-up on this great resource.

Cinderella: My Favorite Bully Story

By Nicole Quigley, author of Like Moonlight at Low Tide (Blink), winner of the ACFW â€œCarol Awardâ€ for best young adult fiction

The best story I ever read about a girl who was bullied is Cinderella.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, which means a lot of really cool people will tell their stories of how they suffered and overcame. I love the new voices that lend themselves to this effort every year, which remind us what bullying is and of all the good things that can come once that dark chapter is over. But, for me, the best bullying story has been with us all along.

What I love about Cinderella is that, when I was a kid, her story never struck me as being about a girl who was bullied.

Sure, I hated her evil step-sisters. I cringed at her stepmother’s super pointy eyebrows that seemed to plot new chores and insults on every page. But what I remember most is that Cinderella’s pureness of heart made her dreams come true. Continue reading Cinderella: My Favorite Bully Story

Rethinking What We Do: Everything!

Over the past several weeks the YALSAblog has run a series of posts on rethinking how we do and what we do in libraries for teens. There have been posts on everything from library card policies to programming to professional development to social media policies. There’s a lot to rethink. And, actually, YALSA has been focused on re-thinking everything that we do in libraries for teens over the past year as a part of a year-long IMLS grant on the future of teens and libraries.

What does it mean to envision the future of libraries and teens? You can find out by reading the draft of the white paper YALSA is developing to help library staff and others determine next steps and how to move forward. And, YALSA doesn’t want you to just read the white paper draft, the association is looking for your comments. Read on for a sneak peek at some of what you’ll read about in the paper.
Continue reading Rethinking What We Do: Everything!

YALSAblog Tweets of the Week – October 25, 2013

A weekly short list of tweets that librarians and the teens that they serve may find interesting.

Do you have a favorite Tweet from the past week? If so add it in the comments for this post. Or, if you read a Twitter post between October 25 and October 31 that you think is a must for the next Tweets of the Week send a direct or @ message to lbraun2000 on Twitter.
Continue reading YALSAblog Tweets of the Week – October 25, 2013