GaETC Georgia Exemplary Media Program Presentation

I am presenting at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference on Thursday, November 3rd with some of my talented colleagues from the state of Georgia.  All of the Georgia DOE Exemplary and Georgia DOE Exceptional Library Media Programs were asked to present about the award and our programs.  I've been "meeting" and planning with the five other middle school librarians via my favorite collaborative web tool Google Docs.  I'm so excited to meet them face to face!  Thanks to Christa Dover's hard work and our online collaboration we have created a website for the presentation complete with our links and contact info.

 http://2011gaexmsmediaprograms.weebly.com/


Here's the outline of what I plan to discuss....

• Exceptional to Exemplary ---my process but maybe not the same as your....
• Changes to be made--more info lit, digital lit, and professional sharing
• Library as a place to inquire, create, construct and share (broadcast as participatory learning in copyright, using Web 2.0 tools w/lots of research projects, and Elizabethan Faire w/UGA research)
• Beyond our walls
• Advocacy and Learning--share, share, share and be transparent!  I'm a Tweeter... @cmslibrarylady

What we've been working toward: Our program is Exemplary!

The CMS Media Center was named a Georgia Exemplary Library Media Program for the 2011 school year! This is what we have been working toward since 2009 when we changed our program development planning to use the Georgia Exemplary Rubric as our guiding document. After receiving GA Exceptional status (step below Exemplary status) for the 2010 school year, I made some changes and our program was nominated again, so I rewrote our application for the 2011 school year back in the spring, and finally, last week the Georgia Department of Education called our administration and told them we had won!

A little more about the award and our programing:

A library media program named as Georgia Exemplary Program must be nominated first. Then, the library media specialist must write a six page narrative detailing their programing, and the program must be evaluated and receive Exemplary in all twenty areas of the Georgia DOE Library Media Program Rubric.

A strong focus of the CMS Media Program in the last few years has been on information and digital literacy skills. We have collaborated with teachers to provide participatory and inquiry based learning experiences for our students. Many of these collaborative projects integrated technology in various content areas through hands on experience with digital media, Web 2.0 tools and using music and images from the public domain through Creative Commons Licensing.

One significant change we made in the media program this past year was to add additional hours outside of the normal school day and to extend a warm invitation to families and community members. The CMS media center was open before school and after school until 6 p.m. this past year. In addition, over the summer, the CMS Media Center Website hosted a Summer Reading Blog in which students blogged online about the books they read this summer, and we opened the library media center on Thursday afternoons in the summer time for students and parents come and check out books, play games, read, use computers, or just hang out.

Additionally, an area reflected in the GA Exemplary Rubric that I felt I needed to improve in was professional sharing.  Although I have done a pretty good job with sharing with my district media specialists, I had not created a state or national professional learning network for myself.  I have since started this blog, acted as a guest speaker at new library media specialist grad school classes, returned to graduate school to work as a TA in grad level LMS classes, become a National Writing Project Teacher Consultant (with Red Clay Writing Project/UGA SI) , and most importantly joined Twitter.  I would say that this professional sharing, especially my Twitter PLN, has probably been the most beneficial change for me as a teacher.  I have learned so much from this sharing and my new professional learning network!

Our 2011 Application

Five steps to a Rocking Library the first week!

The new school year has begun, and our library is Rocking! Remember the old days when school librarians would wait until the second or even third week of school to open their library, not the case anymore. To provide access we must be open from the first day!


1. Open the library over the summer with a summer reading program!
We had a chance to open our library on Thursday afternoons over the summer. This was a great opportunity to meet students and their parents before the school year began. On the first day of school students were ready to check out new books or renew the ones they checked out over the summer. Students were able to blog on the media center blog over the summer. We had 300 plus posts of book reviews, and we hosted a Summer Reading Ice Cream Celebration the 2nd week of school for students who blogged!

2. Start your daily broadcast the 1st day of school!
Last year was my first facilitating the OWLS TV program. So, this year I brought a few kids in during pre-planning and we were ready to go live on the first day of school! It was so exciting to have this flurry of activity in the library on the first day, not to mention the chance to pitch our media programs to the whole school right away.

3. Get classes in for checkout right away!
I talked with my English teachers and invited their classes in for checkout starting the 2nd day of school. You'd think they would want to get their classroom procedures down, but their main focus is to get books in the hands of their students, so they jumped at the opportunity! The excitement over books put the perfect spin on a new year.

4. Open before school even on the 1st day!
My doors opened at 7:30 on the first day of school and there were 50 plus kids in the library by 8:10. As classes came for checkout I promoted the library as a place to "hang" in the morning and by the second week of school we have over 100 kids each morning. They play the Wii, prepare for morning broadcast, use the computers for work and gaming, check out books, read, play chess, work on our community puzzle, or just hang out with their friends.

5. Meet with teachers on collaboration ASAP!
Within the first few weeks of school I have had a chance to start planning collaborate lessons with many of my teachers! It's very important to get out to the teachers' collaborative planning meetings, build relationships with your faculty, and jump on any chance you get to offer resources or collaborative teaching opportunities. Our teachers are very busy so it is important that we help them! I'm working on a pathfinder and curating from the Internet on topics related to the American Revolution for a collaborative unit for a Hollywood vs. History Extended Learning Time Class. They will be in Thursday to get started on their research and learn about digital literacy project options they will be able to choose from to present the findings of the research!

What are other suggestions for ROCKING your library during the 1st weeks of school?

Library Day in the Life--cmslibrarylady

A Guest Blogger on One Crazy Summer

Our students have been reading this summer and posting book reviews on the CMS Media Center Blog. I thought I'd share some of them with you. Katy M., a rising 6th grader, wrote this one on the Georgia Book Award One Crazy Summer.

Guest blogger, Katy M. rising 6th grader:

I read, and loved, the book One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia. It was a fantastic, humorous tale of three young girls who visit their runaway mother in Oakland, California. I, along with the three sisters, learned a lot about the controversial times, groups, and happenings of the 1960's- especially a Civil rights reform group the girls join called the Black Panthers. Through this book, and the Panthers' adventures, I discovered a whole new side of protests and reforms- and the people behind them. I learned that behind any good social movement is a good plan, hard work, and courageous men, women, and as we learn in One Crazy Summer, children! I know that I related to Delphine, Fern, and Vonetta (The three sisters) and everyone in the wild cast of characters, from "Go-karting" Hirohito to Crazy Kelvin to serene Sister Pat. I, and many people I know, love the center of attention, and all the spotlight all the time like rising star Vonetta, pleading for her audiences' full focus. And I'm a big sister, so I sometimes feel the need to watch over, guide, and discipline my little brother, just like big sister of two, Delphine. And, as we want to guide and watch over, we all sometimes want to BE guided and BE watched over like little Fern does. All in all, I got a lot out of One Crazy Summer, and I think it's a great read for anyone's crazy summer- or spring, fall, or winter! I found this story really intriguing and interesting, and I highly recommend it!

Summer Fun

Here are a few projects that I am working on this summer...

participating in The Red Clay Writing Project in order to work on my professional writing and to learn more about language and literacy so that I may improve my collaboration and inquiry projects with my school community; students, teachers, and families. My goal is to continue my broadcasting digital literacy project to include the knowledge I have gained this summer about writing and to include more digital writing and participatory learning.

hosting the CMS Summer Reading Responses on the CMS Media Center Blog

working on my Applied Project for my Ed.S. in the SLM program at UGA. My applied project is looking at the roles of the media specialist and creating a balanced program through program development using the Georgia Exemplary Library Media Rubric.

opening the CMS Media Center this summer for students and families on Thursday afternoons!

I plan to share more about all of this soon.

If you have experiences with opening school libraries for the summer, Red Clay, or program development you want to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Today is also Poem in Your Pocket Day!

All students and faculty are encouraged to carry a poem in their pocket today to share with others. Students and faculty "caught" sharing their poem today will have their name entered into a drawing for a Jittery Joe's gift card! Which poem will you have in your pocket? See Mrs. Hinger in her pocket apron or the pocket sign outside the media center for a poem if you do not already have one. Thanks to all of our teachers that have helped promote this over the past few weeks!

Georgia Exceptional Library Media Program Open House Today

Today is our Georgia Exceptional Open House from 9-11 a.m. Come on out and see all the exciting things going on in the CMS Media Program! You can see our newly redesigned media center. Thanks to the efforts of several teachers, students and parents the CMS Media Center has been updated and transformed. We will have Jittery Joe's Coffee (thanks to the donation from the Googe's) and brunch type snacks as many of our students will present about our ongoing collaborative information literacy projects. I'll post highlights from these projects soon!

Elizabethan Faire--collaboration, info literacy, students to UGA library

--Elizabethan Faire 2011--



The CMS Media Center is hosting the Elizabethan Faire this week. We will be open for visitors Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Ms. McNeeley's 8th grade students have research topics relating to the Elizabethan Era during their study of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

During this collaborative project, the students learned about research and information literacy skills and created multi-genre research papers, three dimensional displays and presentations using both print and electronic resources. Students did their research in the CMS Media Center, online using Galileo and at the UGA Library on two Saturday research days. Please come in and see our AMAZING students present all they have learned on this exciting and interesting time in history.

Broadcast Update! Copyright Visitor, Fun with Music, and More!

Our Broadcast Extended Learning Time class meets each morning and is made up of 14 students from 7th and 8th grade. We take applications and 7 new students are selected each quarter to allow more students the opportunity to be a part of this class. This class is co-taught by me, our media specialist, and another CMS teacher Kasi Carvell.
Our class addresses many of the AASL 21st Century, TMLS, Social Studies, and English Language Arts standards. One standard we have focused heavily on this quarter is avoiding plaigarism and using digital content in a responsible manner. So, we had a guest visitor after our discussion on using music and photographs responsibly making sure to follow fair use guidelines taking advantage of items in the public domain and Creative Commons.

Bertis Downs manager and attorney for REM and professor of Copyright Law at UGA visited our class last week and disussed his take on copyright and music as well as the importance of following copyright law. He also brought copies of Bound by Law a graphic novel published by Duke Law School on the topic of using items from the public domain for each student.




He shared with us REM's Headquarters website where he has a link to their Remix Project. This is super cool! Read this article from USA Today on the Pop Candy Blog to find out more. Check it out and share it with your students!

After spending time with Mr. Downs our production crew memebers are now working on projects using CCMixter.org to find music in the public domain to incorporate in their comercials and other productions.

We've been funded! DonorsChoose.org ROCKS for book clubs!

Back in December when Borders partnered with the Waiting for Superman documentary several of our families shopped at Borders and recieved $15 gift cards for CMS to apply to a project on the Donors Choose website. So, I quickly went on their website and created a project to support our ongoing book clubs. I have collaborated with several teachers in various subject areas during and after school on book clubs this year. Our media budget has dedicated funds to purchasing student selected books, so using Donors Choose was a great way to expand this program. Right now we have book clubs going on in advisement groups, English classes, Exteneded Learning Time classes, and during afterschool.

After only a few weeks we were funded for $423 worth of book club sets including the Lightning Theif Series, Warrior Cat Series and the newest book by Mike Lupica.

Check out the kids with the new books!

A few posts in a row: Jan and Feb 2011 in a hurry!

It has been a whirlwind start to 2011! We started the new year with 3 days of school and then a week off for some serious snow for Georgia.

I have several different projects going on in the media center right now, so I am going to post on each of them!