To Genrefy or Not...

At the last METC meeting I went and saw Tiffany Whitehead, the Mighty Librarian, who talked about the genrefication of her own library as well as those of her compadres. So, upon talking with one of my middle school librarian partners in crime, we decided that maybe we would want to go that route. Well, she is gung-ho, already starting, crazy-ready. And I'm more like, how do I convince people that this is what students need?
I have really have been salivating over this idea. Instead of students asking me where the horror books are, or "I really like Peg Kehret. Got anything like that." I could actually steer them in the direction of the genre they are looking for, and even take them out of their normal comfort zone. This would benefit our teachers too. They are doing genre lit circles and instead of running all over the library to find books from their genres of choice, they could simply go to the genre on the shelves and pick out books.
I can already here my naysayers though, asking me where has the Dewey Decimal System gone, and while I want to say, "To hell, I'm sending it straight to hell." That might just be frowned upon. "Aren't we supposed to be teaching students how to find books?" Well, they will still have to know how the library is organized. They will still have to know to find the author's last name. But now they might find 10 other books to read as well. I just see how much the positives outweigh the negatives.
I know it will be a ton of work, but think of the weeding that will get done. If there is anything my heart truly enjoys, it is weeding. "Out with the old and in with new" I shout and sing as I fling old books onto a cart, getting ready to rid them out of the system. I'm in love with new books, and I can't stand anything yellow or musty smelling, but I also have the luxury of being in a district where libraries are pretty well valued.
I thought that genrefying a library was this radical new system of doing things, but it turns out I may  be a Johnny-come-lately. School librarians have been doing this for years. Years! And I'm just now hearing about this? However, I am one of those late-fine-hating, give them 10 books to checkout kind of gals. A book in a students hand warms my heart. Hell, a book in the hands of anyone warms my heart. So, I still feel like I'm being held back and have some convincing of others to do.

A little present from my amazing principal for spreading happiness.

 

 

 

My own make-shift Readbox... It will do for now.

 

METC... Now What

So I went to METC last week, which is the Missouri Education Technology Conference, for those of you not familiar. It's completely overwhelming because you get all of this awesome, amazing information, but who really has the 100 hours truly needed to go through it all. I'm taking baby steps people, baby steps. One thing that I truly enjoyed was hearing Tiffany Whitehead over at Mighty Little Librarian. She presented on using technology in the library as well as keeping up/creating your PLN. She has also genrefied her library which I am super wanting to do now. Oh, and I totally want to flip my library and make videos for the students thanks to Lodge McCammon (who has some pretty sweet videos on his youtube channel) So, needless to say, I'm completely and utterly overwhelmed by the amount information I received.
Well, one thing that I sifted through yesterday was smore.com which is this amazing newsletter site where you can embed videos, pictures, audios, or really anything your little heart desires. I'm including mine below. I am so sending this to my staff and praying that they read it. I do the newsletter thing about once a month, and I'm not sure if people are reading it or not, but you know if you build eventually they'll come, right? I will also just keep sifting. It's like I'm on a little treasure hunt, hoping to find the next thing that my students and faculty will love.




And also because I really enjoyed hearing Lodge McCammon at METC here is his song over Missouri. They also did this truly fantastic flashmob when he presented.

New Year's Resolutions and other things

So, I had the best intentions last year when I started my blog. I was going to document everything going on in the library so I could come back to it and see what needed tweaking and make it better. Well, I think my exhaustion got the better of me, and then I just kind of, well, forgot. Then the other day a good friend of mine mentioned this great website called Feedly. Sounds like a food website with amazing recipes, right? Actually it's a place where you can subscribe to various blogs' RSS feeds. And now I'm addicted. I started off just subscribing to ones for the library. Blue Skunk was one, Free Tech 4 Teachers was another, and The Daring Librarian, who always has great ideas. And then I extended it to running, and I found some great RSS feeds to help with my training and my nutrition or lack thereof. After looking on Feedly, I finally got my motivation back. I really need to do this. Not a day goes by in the library when I don't think, "What should I be doing better?" And I think this will really help. If I can just try to do one library blog post a week, it would greatly help me in the long run. I know there will be weeks when I fall off the wagon (like book fair week), but I know this will help me, so I should just stick to it.