As sole librarian in a school, it helps me to write goals that make clear how my library programming, teaching and collection development intersect with the academic, social and curricular goals of the school. 

Goal setting helps me focus my work and celebrate what went well. This past year saw a successful collection development effort to purchase books featuring characters of color. Of fiction books purchased in the 2016-17 year, 46% featured a main character of color and 33% of those were African American. 

Another celebration was that every grade level participated in a mini-research project during their library time. 

Goal setting also makes visible areas for improvement. I set a goal of attending morning meeting at least once per week for the whole year. I did this consistently during first semester and learned that having dedicated classrooms to visit each quarter helped me follow through. However, second semester I got swept up in other work and stopped attending as frequently. Having a mid-year review of my goals might have helped me re-commit to my goals for supporting building-wide PBIS initiatives. 

Feel free to offer feedback in the comments or by emailing Miriam at larsonmi@u4sd.org!

​I love summer reading time! I appreciate having a sunny window next to me as I sit on the couch and loose myself in a story. Here are two of many I spent time with this summer: 

El Deafo by Cece Bell, Bluestem 2017

Cece wears a giant hearing aid that connects to a microphone her teacher wears. She can hear her teacher great, even when she's in the teacher's lounge! But mostly other kids talk to her like she's dumb. This spunky character never stops looking for true friends. 

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Bluestem 2017

Mrs. Frisby, a single mama mouse, is in trouble. Her youngest child is sick, but the family of 5 has to move because the winter is ending and their house will soon get plowed over for spring planting on the farm. Among the various animals who help Mrs. Frisby are the extraordinary rats of NIMH whose advances in technology are extraordinary, but whose philosophical insights are even more extraordinary. Great read!

Update: We will also be hiring several classroom teachers and hope to find teachers willing to learn with us as we develop our computational thinking theme!

We are looking for a magnet specialist who can keep pushing us to innovate and integrate our school-wide computational thinking and computer science focus. We are a year-round school that begin an innovation process three years ago to implement this vision: 

Through an immersive technology learning environment, Kenwood students will transcend simple usership to become digital producers, empowering themselves and others in their community through their critical thinking, academic and intellectual risk taking, collaboration and refined sense of digital citizenship. 

This is exciting! I was hired as Kenwood's Librarian at the moment that there was a crest of energy around computational thinking and computer science. There was contagious curiosity among teachers about teaching code, trying new things, and being willing to fail. 

As we say goodbye to Todd Lash (@Todd_Lash) and Minsoo Park, we hope we can find new leaders to support our growth. Former librarians are encouraged to apply (and work with me!), CS teachers, classroom teachers who have worked with code. Here's our school district's posting (scroll to Interim Magnet Teaching Specialist).

Are you part of a professional network? Do you know someone who might be an excellent CS instructional coach at the elementary level? Please help us spread the word!

I hope to write more about the establishment of video morning announcements with the collaboration of its founder who is one of our 2nd grade teachers. For now, I’d like to share a little bit about how we began using a green screen during Black History Month.
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As we settled into this first year of student-created video morning announcements, it was easy to see the many possible directions for this project. My challenge as a teacher-advisor has been to keep it simple enough that students can continue to do the majority of the production. But it is also an excellent opportunity for me to experiment with and demonstrate tools that teachers might want to use in the library or in their classrooms.

I was quite excited to try a green screen, although I knew it could push the editing beyond the reach and time-constraints of our student team. I chose to use Black History Month as a chance to experiment with the green screen and tie it into student learning for a limited period of time. I guessed at the beginning of the month that our student video team would not have time to do the green screen editing but that it would be a chance to showcase the tool to our school and gain experience so that I could advise teachers if they wanted to use it for classroom projects.

My goal was to feature a different location significant to Black History each day of our morning announcements. I asked teachers if they had suggestions and I used my own knowledge to select locations from African continental history to civil rights history to contemporary and local events significant to Black communities. I added a three sentence description to each script the day before and selected a picture to overlay behind our student anchors. Then I downloaded DoInk Green Screen App for less than $5 and got to work!

Here were some challenges and discoveries along the way:

• We do not have the capacity for very high quality green-screening, but it still looks neat! The green screen I put up is a plastic table-cloth that easily reflects light. When the iPad re-adjusted focus or student camera-people changed the angle of the camera the overlaid image would get grainy or our students’ would be a little bit see-through! Some ideas to work on: I would like to try using fabric to see if it absorbs light better. A film-maker also recommended putting cloth over our lights to disperse the light more. I’m not sure if there is a way to do this without violating fire code!
• I needed to use multiple apps to edit and then upload, which was time-consuming. DoInk does not have a way to add text or captions. This was frustrating. So once our student editors finished adding the opening title to our announcements in iMovie, I would add an image credit, then export the video to DoInk, add the background, export the video to Camera Roll, then upload it to Google Drive. These steps took more time than I’d hoped. As I look forward, I am not able to continue to do this every day. I plan to reduce our green screen “travel” to once a week and look for ways to simplify these steps. Perhaps other green screen apps would allow us to do all videoing and editing with the app.
• As I copied images from the internet, I realized it would be good practice to acknowledge where the images were coming from and give credit. This added another step, but I felt it was an important one. I would put the website URL into iMovie before exporting the video to our green screen app.  

Here’s an example of what our video morning announcements look like:

Are you looking for a good book? Here are two great ways to find new books:

Book Trailers for Readers - This website compiles book trailers made by kids. Watch a trailer or two and then find out if we have it in our library!

Champaign Library Recommends- Take a look at the Champaign Library's recommendations or log in to Novelist to search read-alike books. 

Stay posted . . . Next week visit the blog to see book trailers created by Kenwood's own students!

Thursday Tech Time wrapped up and students finally got the chance to showcase their new coding skills! Here’s an overview of what we’ve done this Fall.
 
On day one, Mr. Martin gave an introduction to the Raspberry Pi, a small, inexpensive computer developed by Ada Fruit as a learning tool for adults and children. Students learned the parts of a computer, and how to hook up the Pi’s to monitors, keyboards, and mice, and they got some practice in troubleshooting when things didn’t seem to be working quite right.
 
The real fun started when we opened up Minecraft. Instead of opening on a network, Minecraft for the Pi allows students to experiment in their own worlds, leaving them plenty of room to get comfortable using Python coding to set blocks, plant flowers, and teleport in the game.
 
While enthusiasm for coding started out a little low thanks to the tedious typing work, students quickly gained appreciation for it when they realized that it allowed them to go beyond the limitations of creative mode to accomplish the most important thing in Minecraft: blowing things up.
 
Enthusiasm grew as students started experimenting with their own scripts, writing messages in the chat, placing blocks of flowing lava, and creating giant cubes of live TNT and glowing obsidian.
 
As students exercised their creativity in the game, discussion brought out some unique ideas about networking, technology, and gaming. In a discussion about networking, students talked about the importance of networking as a tool for sharing everyday information, or for communication during disaster events, while more casual conversation challenged the stereotypes about gaming and gender.
 
By the end of the final session, thoughts changed. In small groups, we summed up ideas about networking, coding, and who can be a technology expert, then focused hard to get our scripts polished and saved. In the end, each student was able to share their newfound tech expertise in a showcase with their parents, describing the computers and how they work, and demonstrating their unique scripts and the steps they took to create them.
 
We want to give a big thank you to everyone who participated in Tech Time this term!

If you'd like to try working with Raspberry Pis and Python at home, here are some resources to help you get started:

• Python in Minecraft Pi Brief Guide 
• Raspberry Pi Equipment - In order to do these activities at home you will need a keyboard, mouse, and HDMI monitor in addition to the items on this AdaFruit wishlist to compile an affordable Raspberry Pi computer. If you have a TV with spare HDMI input, that can work instead of a monitor. You can also buy an HDMI to VGA adapter or HDMI to DVI adapter if you have a spare monitor, or are buying a monitor that doesn’t have an HDMI input.

This post was written by volunteer Natasha Wand who is part of Martin Wolske’s class at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
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Thank you to everyone who came to our presentation at the International Society for Technology Educators! Someone asked that we post the quotes we used for our presentation and so I’ve put them into slides below.

I look forward to continuing the conversations sparked at ISTE and at our “Creating an Afterschool Collaborative Space in the Library,” whether you were able to attend the workshop or not. You can look over resources from the workshop in the post below this one and I’ve also posted my narrative about the afterschool program at Kenwood and would welcome comments.

Additionally, a Champaign-Urbana group called CNTRL-SHIFT meets regularly and hosts a listserv about education and technology that you can learn more about here.  

Slides with quotes from our presentation: