Philadelphia Zoo 2014

It is was such a nice day to go to the zoo and I think everyone in Philadelphia had the same idea. But despite the traffic it was a wonderful day!

POWER Library Gets a Boost from PSEA!

It may not seem like much but over the past weekend the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA- i.e. the State Teacher's Association) passed a motion to help their students who use the library. PSEA’s House of Delegates passed a motion to support the ACCESS PA /POWER Library program and its funding. I know, big deal. But it is a big deal! Every year for the past 9 years that I have been a school librarian funding has been cut for POWER Library and every year librarians across the state sounded the alarm. Trouble is, the number of school librarians across the state has been greatly diminished. In the past few years Pennsylvania has been bleeding school librarians! Even in my own school district we lost a librarian this year and our elementary school libraries are dark one day a week. School librarians in force are just not a big enough force any more to combat these kind of assaults on the resources our students need. The motion put forth at PSEA was made by Ila Verdirame, a program administrator in the Mechanicsburg School District. It was seconded by Stephanie Andrejack, a librarian in the East Pennsboro Area School District.  Mike Crossey is president of PSEA and PSLA President, Eileen Kern sent him a big thank you. In fact, thank you from all of us school librarians. I for one am excited that PSEA is recognizing the importance of school libraries and library resources. It is especially nice to know that the next time funding for POWER Library and ACCESSPA is on the line that it will not only be librarians spitting into the wind, but teachers across the state sounding the alarm!

Digital Curation

What tools do you use for digital curation? Several librarians were asked that question at a session during our annual state library conference. I was so impressed by their skills that I decided I needed to keep their list for myself... so I am using this Padlet on my blog as a digital curation for myself. Padlet is one great way to digitally curate but look at the responses and find so many more! How many of these have you tried?

Created with Padlet

Reading Olympics Again... but Happy!

I needed a longer song for my Reading Olympics Video and decided to use another song and post the video to YouTube so that it could be seen by more teachers in my building. Hope you like this version too. I am going to show this version to the students the last week of school before I hand out next year's list of books for the competition! You can check out the books on next year's list here. I have to say a special thank you to MCIU 23 for putting this together each year. This year was the 15th year for Reading Olympics and I want to thank my super partner who kept Reading Olympics going even when I was out of the building. Kelli Durling you are the best!

Reading Olympics at Skyview May 15, 2014

Skyview was so proud to host the 15th annual Reading Olympics on Thursday evening May 15th.
Check out this Awsome Event!