I will be speaking at VAASL this year!

I am pleased (and just a little terrified) to announce that my presentation "Lightning-Fast Tech Tools" has been selected for the state VAASL conference this fall. I will be presenting in a concurrent session not yet scheduled, Nov. 19-21 in Williamsburg!

A Fall 2015 update

Well, I have four semesters done and three more to go. I am taking three classes this semester. One is a teacher education class in which I have to complete a 70-hour practicum. I have been assigned to a kindergarten class, so that will be fun and exciting! I love kindergarteners. Of course, I have some trepidation because it has been a long time since my own kids were in kindergarten. At that time I did plan some lessons, crafts, and centers for class parties and Girl Scouts, but making spider lollipops out of pipe cleaners and Blow Pops was pretty low stakes. I am already madly pinning lesson ideas on Pinterest. Despite my placement in a regular kindy class, I hope the teacher will allow me to teach library-type literature activities to get some practice. But I am prepared to teach anything! One thing I am sure of is that I can handle the curriculum. Pretty sure I know my alphabet and how to count to 10.

My other two classes are a bit less interesting, but necessary. Technical Services in Libraries is essentially Cataloging 101. The history of cataloging is dry but I do like history so it is holding my attention so far. The second class is Reference and Information Retrieval. I have tons of experience in research so I am not too worried about this class as long as I dot my i's and cross my t's.

I'm a bit concerned I might need reading glasses though...the font on some of the articles I have to read seems awfully small this semester. This is what you get for being a non-traditional student.

Tech Tools Presentation

This is a Web 2.0 Conference Presentation I have created as my final project for LIBS 602.


 

Makerspace Bonanza at the MAKESHOP

Last weekend I visited the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh with my family. Four years ago when we visited, they had a makerspace in its infancy. To my excitement, the MAKESHOP (on Twitter: @makeshoppgh) is now a force to be reckoned with, and I had to share some of the pictures I took there. My 12-year-old daughter wanted to stay there all day!

Words and pictures don't do the MAKESHOP justice, but I was hoping the projects, storage ideas, supplies, and so forth would prove inspirational to librarians. Although the makerspace concept is different in a children's museum in terms of scale and budget (and the MAKESHOP is on an epic scale), many of the lessons are similar in terms of safety, supplies, supervision, and scope.

I was lucky enough to chat with the MAKESHOP's manager, Rebecca Grabman, who gave me permission to share her name on my blog along with the pictures I took. Her email is rgrabman[at]pittsburghkids.org. (Replace the at with @.) She is incredibly knowledgeable about makerspaces and making/learning research, some of which is supported by the Children's Museum. We had a fascinating conversation, and while we talked I was busy making a tiny house out of cardboard while my daughter sewed a bunch of grapes out of felt. This place will truly bring out the creativity in everyone. Go see it if you're ever in Pittsburgh!!

Here is part 1 of my MAKESHOP slideshow!

And because PhotoSnack limits the number of slides you can use, here is part 2:

A Blog to Watch

After viewing several blogs that were new to me, Will Richardson's really grabbed me: http://willrichardson.com

I took a class last semester about teaching social studies, and my professor spoke a lot about authentic intellectual work (AIW) and project-based learning. This seems to be what Richardson is interested in as well. His posts are extremely thought-provoking, and he challenges many of our base assertions about what school is and needs to be. He has his finger on the pulse of the need of education to evolve with the technological times. Very interesting stuff and one to learn more about.

AASL Best Websites 2015

The American Association of School Librarians publishes an annual list of Best Websites for Teaching & Learning in several different categories. I perused many of the websites on the 2015 list and chose a few to highlight here. What I found somewhat universal is that, because these sites are meant to be crowd-sourced, a few are not yet as populated as they will be if they prove to be a hit. Therefore it can be a bit difficult to judge the potential of the online community when sites are in their infancy. These websites are all worth visiting and revisiting!

WhatWasThere: As a history buff and vintage photo lover, I appreciated the potential of WhatWasThere right away. Both an app and a site, WhatWasThere ties Google maps to historic photos, with the idea that visitors can see a historic street view along with a modern one. Once you click on a photo to select it, you can click to go to Google StreetView, where the photo you selected will be overlaid over the modern view. A slide bar allows you to fade the vintage photo in and out so you can simultaneously view both old and new.

What this could potentially mean in real time is that a visitor could stand on a city block (or search for it) and see photos of all the historic buildings that existed on that same spot. Alternatively, a class could research the history of a particular building as it was built and evolved over time. While it does take some age and experience to appreciate how cool this view of the past is, students might be excited to see what was there before their school building or the grocery store on the corner. It is a good way to get students interested in local history and to give them a sense of how time changes things.

The site currently has about 50,000 photos and is crowdsourced, meaning users are able to upload their own vintage photos with simple tags and labels. I tested the site by searching for Virginia Beach, VA (where I currently live), Ewing Township, NJ (where I grew up), and Chillicothe, OH (where my husband's father grew up). These are roughly in order of population, and I found photos for all three, with Chillicothe only having two photos thus far. Bigger cities obviously have more, but the site is growing all the time.  

MyStorybook: This one is so fun and has instant appeal to children who want to create their own storybook. There are plenty of sites and software that do similar things, but MyStorybook is an excellent entry. It's free and quick to get started with no account needed unless you want to save your story. Accounts require an age range, email address, a username, and a password, but not a child's full name or any other details.  

MyStorybook offers tutorials to help young students get started creating their storybook, but most will probably be able to dive right in. Teachers can easily provide structure to the creation process or let children's imaginations run wild. The characters and other pictures, backgrounds, etc. are numerous, flexible, bright, and colorful, and it is easy to add pages to your story. When you are done you can save it as an eBook and/or share it online. 

Gooru: This site, unlike something like MyStorybook, requires a bit of a deep dive in order to fully engage with the site. To take a snorkel, you can browse the "collections" uploaded by contributors--basically, annotated web links with suggested lesson ideas, all curriculum-mapped to Common Core and/or other standards. 

If you want to take the plunge, you can "remix" them into collections of your own. You can also upload your own content and create a "class" within the site to share the resources you have remixed or uploaded with your students. Digital analytics help you monitor whether your students have visited and successfully completed the module you create.

A few districts have adopted Gooru, at least experimentally, and like other sites such as Edmodo, it does seem like a district or school-wide adoption of Gooru might be a more effective use than one teacher using it alone. Gooru has potential to be very useful and has the backing of some impressive corporate and non-profit partners.

Presentation Tools

This week's post is about presentation tools. As Dr. Kimmel stated, between apps and the Web there are about eleventy billion choices. I chose to explore three that I'd never tried before. The first one was Slidely, which I found to be easy and pretty intuitive. I could see using Slidely for those end-of-the-year slideshow presentations. You can create a separate account or login using Facebook, which is what I chose to do. I was able to access all of my FB photos and albums instantly, and I made a quick slideshow of my kids' school pictures through the year. I was able to add music from an infinite (seemingly) range of choices, so I chose "Time in a Bottle." You can also make a collage or movie. You can of course upload pictures or access them directly from several different sources, including Flickr. Despite poking around, I couldn't figure out how to share my slideshow any way except on Facebook, although it does seem like there are other options if you can figure out how to do it.

The next tool I tried was Haiku Deck, which is very simple to use though its options are limited. Taking my inspiration from the name, I chose to illustrate a poem that I like. One of the nicest things about Haiku Deck is that it contains a large array of tagged photos, making it super easy to find photos for your slides. (They are internally credited, too, which is helpful.) The templates are simple and you cannot control very much, but it is definitely quick. HaikuDeck, like Slidely, is integrated with social media and available as an app. I wish there was a way to add music, and at least when I was using it the autosave function crashed Safari several times, but otherwise this is a very painless way to make a quick presentation. I think students who do not have much patience with technology could find many ways to use it. Here's my creation:


Life has loveliness to sell - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires


Finally, I tried Pixton, an online tool that allows you to create your own comic strips. The site offers a seven-day, limited function trial membership, after which you can pay for different installment plans that range up to $90 a year. The site offers a number of community features. The comic strips that others have created are way more impressive than this one (here's just one example), which I made in about 15 minutes using some Sondheim lyrics from the musical Company. While I am not inclined to pay to use a site like this, I could see students really enjoying it and using it for literature projects. How fun to illustrate a scene from a novel the class is reading, for example!

You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia...the 3-D Printed Lady

The subject this week is 3-D printing, coding, and creativity...but first I'd like you to meet someone: The little doll on the left is Lydia. She belongs to my daughter.

Lydia also has a friend named Vivian...you can see them below left. (Lydia is wearing a yarn wig my daughter made for her.) My kid and her friends are 12 years old and obsessed with these dolls, which they design themselves online.

Why is this relevant? These MyMakie dolls are 3-D printed in England from the designs their owners create. (Go try designing one, it's fun and there's no obligation.) They are fully articulated, balanced perfectly so they can stand without falling over, and have detachable replaceable parts. (Lydia and Vivian switch eyes fairly often.) Viewed close up, their skin, which comes in one of many colors you choose from, is just a bit rough, like expensive parchment stationery, and you can see the slightest bit of layering. But they are sturdy and playable just like any other doll.

Cheap? Ha. No. They cost over $100 each, and my daughter spent all her Christmas and birthday money on these girls. But they have given her hundreds of hours of creative crafting enjoyment. She made the house you see in the top picture and the "secret garden" in the bottom picture as well as many clothes. In fact, she has learned to use a sewing machine, all because of these dolls. And because she loves photographing them, they have their own Instagram.

3-D printing is an amazing technology that we only dreamed of just a few years ago. Before 3-D printing, kids could imagine, dream, create, sculpt, anything they cared to invent. But they had no way of duplicating their designs. 3-D printing allows you to design and create an item, test it, alter the design, and create it again, almost effortlessly.

What on earth does this have to do with libraries? That's a valid question. Traditional print formats (unless they are pop-up books) are two-dimensional. Presentations, research, even computer screens are all two-dimensional.

But the world of the imagination is in 3-D. To be able to create an exact replica of something you design is a perfect example of "authentic intellectual work," learning by doing. Increasingly, with information readily available in any room of the school via the Internet, and books ever so slowly moving to digital formats, the library is not a quiet place of silent reading but an active laboratory of learning. 3-D printing, though in its infancy, is a great addition to that laboratory.

Coding, too, is authentic intellectual work. My son spent thousands of hours on Scratch as a young boy, learning how to code because he wanted to create something. You want to make that picture of a cat dance and sing? You have to drag and drop the commands in exactly the right order. He would open up other people's projects, study the code, and edit them to make them his own. He readily embraced the learning curve because he was creative, not because he wanted to learn to code. This is an important distinction for me--you don't decide to learn to play the piano because the piano's mechanism is fascinating, but because if you do it right, you make music.

In the library, as technology leaders, we have to make the right tools available so that students can follow their creative urges to their conclusion. If we provide tools like 3-D printers and opportunities to learn to code or program robots, we can change those wistful "I wish I coulds..." to "Oh wow, I can actually do that!"

QR Codes, Augmented Reality, and You Kids Get off My Lawn!

My children tell me that I am behind the times, but here's my dirty confession: I don't get QR Codes. I am very tech-savvy in most ways, but QR Codes have always seemed like a cumbersome thing that often doesn't even work. I have failed to be wowed.

Recently, however, my son used a QR Code for a year-long middle-school project that resulted in a Youtube video. He worked with the organization Lynnhaven River Now to write and direct an entertaining video for kids about preserving the watershed. The video is called Pollution Pirate and my QR code below links to it. I'm very proud of his team's efforts.

The reason I thought to link to this is because when it came time for the exhibition of all the projects, I was more or less anticipating the old-fashioned TV on a cart, showing his team's video on a loop. Instead my son made a flyer with a QR code linking to Youtube so the parents and other visitors could watch the video on their smartphones or at home. So cool, and a way around the fact that Youtube is behind the firewall anyway. It's a reminder that while we librarians are supposed to be tech leaders in school, we should never forget that students will lead us to new ideas.

Without further ado, Pollution Pirate:



In the library, QR Codes have a million applications. I particularly like the idea of using them for book reviews. For example, in a marriage of the new with the old, you could make a color photocopy of a book dust jacket, print it out, add a QR Code, and display it on a "What to Read" bulletin board. The QR Code would link to student book reviews, blogs, and other resources. Sometimes books even have video book trailers you can link to. In fact, after writing this paragraph I decided to look for visual examples to point to for my blog. This library blogger essentially did exactly what I describe: https://freshlymintedlibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/my-very-own-qr-codes/ She also links to a book trailer.

As for augmented reality, the students and staff at my son's middle school use Aurasma quite a lot. About a year ago the librarian at his school was raving about this app. She had seen some demos and was brimming with ideas for it. Smartphones and iPads are pretty common, so the librarian thought students might use Aurasma in the library for adding their own quick video book reviews. They could take a picture of the book cover and then film a quick video of themselves talking about the book. I don't know if this idea took off, but I know my son created an Aurasma in the cafeteria, something to do with the benefits of recycling.

Augmented reality is a fascinating idea. The number-one thing that makes it new and different from the "regular" Internet is the ability to access information from 2-D images on a mobile device. I love it for marketing. The demos I have seen of scanning movie posters or car ads to get more information are impressive. HOWEVER...I think one of the reasons it has been a hit is the novelty. Once that novelty wears off, then what? Only time will tell. I am old enough to remember when simply visiting a website was really cool! In fact, reviewing websites in actual paper books about the "Net" was one of my very first jobs in New York. No kidding, I wrote a good portion of this book and several others:

Seems comical now. But that book came out in 1996, which is "only" 19 years ago. I plan to be a school librarian 19 years from now...so who knows what will seem comical then?

People want the information they want when they want it, and I don't think text-based search is going anywhere, for the primary reason that you cannot type an image into a search bar. (Although on the other hand, I use Google Image Search all the time.)

Also, and this is my own curmudgeonly bias, while these types of apps are incredibly cool and have many interesting potential applications, "Ain't nobody got time for that." Right now, augmented reality is an extra--an add-on to the real, everyday stuff we have to do. The Internet (circa 1996) used to be an extra. Once upon a time, computers were an extra too. Once upon a million years ago, moveable type was the most advanced technology in the world. I do not think QR Codes and Aurasma are the be-all, end-all, but they are certainly part of the evolving journey.

Too Late, but Hopefully not too Little

It is not like me to miss any sort of deadline, but this week due to a difficult family situation I missed the Sunday due date for talking about video. I am grateful for our grace period because sometimes life smacks you really hard and you need a minute to get yourself together.

I have played with video tools before. The one I use most is my iPhone and iMovie, but I have also used Animoto a bit. My son has enjoyed using Animoto in the past and I have seen it used in high school classes for short presentations. Animoto is a little frustrating because your abilities are so limited with the free version. You can't do much with only 30 seconds. You can, however, make a short, effective set of photos, and Animoto's themes and evocative music do make an emotional connection, or as Garr Reynolds says in Presentation Zen Design, "Make them feel something" (p. 129).

Last Thursday night was a beautiful night. We took a couple of hours to go to the beach. I treasure these photos because the light was so pretty and I enjoyed the family time, and this Animoto video definitely makes me feel sentimental. Happiness, true happiness, can be so fleeting.

Perfect Night at the Beach

As for other video tools, I played around with Powtoon. I found it difficult and kind of uninspiring. The seven-click introduction seemed like it would be intuitive, but when I opened up a theme to start a new project, nothing looked familiar. The theme, Blackboard, did not have the stick people that the introduction used, and I couldn't figure out what to do. Not being in the mood to learn something new, I moved on. However, I think this could be a good classroom tool for someone who has patience with it. I know students always enjoy making animated videos.

Finally, I played with Sock Puppets, an iPhone app. This is the silliest thing ever, but like many such tools it is something that young students would enjoy. It is similar to Blabberize except that instead of a photo on which you draw a mouth, in this case you are animating a sock puppet. You can add backgrounds, props, and voiceovers, and choose among several puppets. However, the free version only allows you to record 30 seconds of video, so it is hard to make a long sock puppet play. Fortunately, the paid version of the app is only $3.99. So please don't laugh, but here is my Sock Puppets video. This is an unlisted Youtube video, which makes it a blog exclusive! Just embarrassing. https://youtu.be/ZPElDkRr6DI

Reference:
Reynolds, G. (2014). Presentation zen design. New Riders.

Library websites

This week we were tasked with finding two school library websites of interest. I knew which one I'd pick first! I have a personal connection to this site. Not only did I have a child at this school, the library staff here have been incredible mentors for me. But besides that, they have a great library website. It's simple in appearance, but it contains links to resources for ongoing research projects or class assignments, the library newsletter, the catalog, and library hours/events. It is updated often.

The site: Kemps Landing/Old Donation School Library. 

For the second exemplary site, after clicking around on a bunch of ho-hum or overcrowded sites, I settled on Moharimet Elementary School in Madbury, New Hampshire. Like the website I mentioned above, it has a clean and clear interface with top-level, right to left navigation bar and drop-down menus with clear links either to internal sites or external resources. The interface is pleasing to a child and very easy to navigate. The parent resources on the left hand bar are a nice touch.

For my own website assignment, I will most likely use Weebly as I have used it successfully before. In fact, Alysia Deem (In the Library with the Wrench) and I created a Weebly site this past semester, and I think it came out very well. This was for a class on teaching social studies. Here is our Gallery Walk. Last fall, I also created a digital technology portfolio on Weebly for my instructional technology class. These sites are very different. Weebly is a flexible tool.

Pinterest Boards

Here are my library-related Pinterest Boards:

         Follow Wendy's board YA PLN Toolkit (LIBS 678) on Pinterest.  

         Follow Wendy's board Libraries and Books on Pinterest.  

       Follow Wendy's board Learning Commons and Makerspaces on Pinterest.  

And my favorite, most popular board:

         Follow Wendy's board Broadway is a Very Special Place on Pinterest.  

Podcasts

This quick post about podcasts is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this medium. Anyone who listens to NPR regularly has heard Fresh Air, The Moth, This American Life, and other podcast-type radio shows. I love all of these, but one that is especially useful in the classroom is This I Believe.

First of all, it is a shorter program, and it's always personal and inspiring. Hearing people (both the famous and un) talk about their fundamental beliefs and approaches to life is eye-opening and makes a great jumping-off point for students to clarify and codify their own beliefs. It triggers some wonderful essays!

The website for This I Believe contains many resources for educators to use with students, which are located here: http://thisibelieve.org/educators/ I highly recommend you check this out!

Sounds like Audio

This week's topic is close to my heart as a singer. I actually record things all the time. I don't have a voice teacher so I am always recording songs to listen to myself so I can improve. For my birthday this year, my husband gave me a good microphone and a Soundrite Scarlett 2i2  audio interface, so I can record on something better than my iPhone.

I love to use the software Audacity. I first began to use it when I was taking speech pathology classes. We used it for my speech science class to analyze sound waves, but I began using it to cut down audio tracks for auditions and to record myself. It's not exactly intuitive but it works really well once you get the hang of it. Last fall for Instructional Technology, I made a Screencast showing how to use Audacity for a poetry podcast. It's a five-minute video that is worth watching if you are at all curious about Audacity: http://screencast.com/t/hLtCYYmrE (I also made a lesson plan for this assignment.)

This week, I chose to use the site Clyp to upload my audio track. I have used SoundCloud to upload my recordings before, but they have aggressive copyright scans that reject most files that are not completely original. Since I usually sing to karaoke tracks, it's impossible to get SoundCloud to work for my needs. I sometimes turn audio into video files and post them to Youtube, but that's a pain.  Clyp looks like a good alternative to quickly upload files and get a shareable link. Anyway, this week I was learning a country song for an upcoming audition, so here it is. It's a totally corny song, I do not actually have a Southern accent, and I can hear all the flaws. But there you go. Long story short, I really like Clyp! Easy-peasy to use.

Blabberize is a fun tool as well. Once, when I was subbing, I saw a librarian use this with students who were researching Greek gods. They had to find a picture of a Greek god and use Blabberize to have the god talk about him or herself. The kids enjoyed it and it did not take long at all. I had never seen anything like Blabberize and I brought it home to show my tweens. They were SO VERY unimpressed. I was surprised. I still think it's cute, but maybe for smaller kids. Today, I played with Blabberizing a picture of my dog and got to the end and had to make an account, and then I didn't bother.

Vocaroo is no-frills and easy to use and does not require an account. You simply press record and talk, and then they give you a link to share. (Here is mine.) You can also download your recorded message. This has many applications--anything you can think of for which you might need a sound file. There is no recording time limit. However, there is no Vocaroo app for mobile devices, and tech support is non-existent.

Voki is a tool I have seen used by other students, with varying degrees of success. You create a video with a talking avatar that "reads" your presentation. It can be a bit dull to watch a Voki video, in my opinion, but students enjoy making their avatars and watching the videos. It is more interesting than listening to a plain audio file.

That's all for audio this week...my daughter's dance recital is this weekend and we have two grandmas coming to visit. Should be action-packed! (Pray for me.)

Infographic-tastic

This week's assignment was fun for me! I used Piktochart to create an awesome infographic about adult literacy, which is one of my own topics of interest. I have some graphic design background but I have never tried to create an infographic before. I'm familiar with the graphic design and layout tools in Indesign, Photoshop, and other programs, and I found Piktochart to be quite intuitive. However, I became intensely frustrated at first, having chosen a free, pre-made theme to work with. I found it impossible to figure out how to edit it to be what I wanted, so I scrapped it and used a blank template. I am very pleased with how it came out.

Because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I am sure I spent longer on this than I really had to, but I found the site had a great ability to tweak things to exactly how I wanted them. I was able to use some of the site's automatic chart creation tools for my stacked Venn diagrams, and though it was tricky to figure out, the many different choices and customization tools made it worth it to muddle through. I would definitely encourage older students to use Piktochart to display data. I think that in order to make the process not take forever, though, figuring out how to manipulate the pre-fab templates is a must.

Without further ado: (Click here for larger version, opens in new window)

This week's photo tools and Creative Commons posting

For our assignment this week, I went on a Creative Commons dive for an awesome library-related picture. What a find--now THAT'S a library! My husband and I will have been married 20 years in September. For our honeymoon we toured Ireland, and I will never forget the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin. Home to the Book of Kells and many other rare books, it is an incredibly beautiful building. It is certainly not a modern learning commons though! I would love to return there now with a librarian's eye. Can you imagine performing a collections analysis...on a ladder? This library is really more of a museum. You can be sure the students of Trinity College have a full, modern library to use.

Hugovk. (2013). Old Library, Trinity College. CC-BY-NC-SA.

Our assignment was also to edit a photo in one of the many photo editing tools available online. I took this one recently, on one of those beautiful May days that almost force you to sit outside. I edited it in PicMonkey, adding a Focal Zoom as well as text to the bottom of the photo. This was an easy-to-use site and it must be a good one, because I know my kids use it and they know EVERYTHING. (Just ask them!)

The site is elegantly designed and very thoughtful of its audience, whether inexperienced or not. Everything is very well explained, with pop-up dialogue boxes to make things easier. The photo came out great, and I bet all teachers out there can relate to this one. I was in an elementary school today--it's Friday during SOL testing week and it's really hot outside. The kids are squirrelly and so is the teaching staff!

Nelson, W. (2015). If you need me... CC-BY-NC

I also played with ImageChef, which is a site similar to one I've used before to make memes. (I have a whole collection of memes of "advice from my mother," which you can see on my Pinterest site.) You can use a standard meme photo or one of your own and add text. But that is just one of the many types of templates on Image Chef. There are seemingly endless photo frames, animations (.gifs), text editors, buttons, and lots of "remixes" created by users. This site would be fun for students to use to enhance their presentations or for digital scrapbooking. The only caveat I can see is that it is difficult to focus on one type of frame or theme, because the site is disorganized and full of ads. But for those who like to play, ImageChef offers up plenty of interactive freedom. 

In terms of design and ease-of-use, BigHugeLabs seems to have an edge up on ImageChef. The site is a lot less ugly and seems to be better organized, and you can turn off the ads. The variety of options is extensive--there are 24 top-level categories with many internal editing possibilities. One pro: education accounts are possible. A con: BigHugeLabs is sales-driven and may entice students to want to purchase what they create in school. But overall, I'd point students to this site over ImageChef.

FoldPlay is one type of site I have never seen or used before. This one has me excited! First, in one of the school libraries I inhabit the most, origami is huge. This site allows you to create foldables from your own pictures, including origami, fold books, paper models and puzzles, and much more. What a fun thing for students to play with in a library makerspace. I want to try this right away.

Why library?

Before I add any of the posts that I am supposed to add this week, I thought I would post an explanation of how I got into the library field and, eventually, into grad school despite the fact that I am not a teacher currently.

I began at James Madison University as a music major in vocal performance. After quickly realizing I did not want an opera career, I switched to English, with a music minor. I established the goal of becoming an editor and dreamed of a bookshelf containing the books I had edited. After college, I went to George Washington University to obtain my publications specialist certificate.

I moved back to NJ, got married, and worked in various publishing enterprises in NYC and NJ. In 2000, I was working as a pet books editor (and doing community theater and choral singing as a hobby) when my son was born. Shortly after I returned from maternity leave, I was laid off. I stayed out of work, my daughter was born in 2003, and we moved to Virginia Beach.

In college and afterward, I had developed an interest in adult literacy. In NJ, I was an adult reading tutor for a while. When I learned about the Listening Ears program through the SPCA, I thought that sounded fun, so my golden retriever and I volunteered in our neighborhood school's library for about three years, doing one-on-one sessions with reluctant readers.

I loved the library and I began volunteering while also establishing a freelance editing career. One of the school librarians suggested that I get on the substitute list so they could call me for jobs. I did this in 2012 and began subbing in libraries around the district.

In search of a new career, I entered the Longwood University graduate pre-requisite program for speech pathology--a career that would use both my vocal and editing skills. I completed most of those classes and was thinking ahead toward the VERY competitive graduate school programs, until I had a serendipitous conversation one day. I was subbing and the librarian and I talked enthusiastically about various library issues for a while. Suddenly she said, "Why aren't you a librarian?"

The question hung in the air. I said I did not think the job market was very good. She said she had just exited the ODU program and most of the people in her cohort had gotten jobs.

This was big news. And I thought about it. And thought. Finally, after much consideration of all the options, I applied. That was last spring, in 2014. One year later, here I am...18 credits in.

Hello to all of my classmates and those who may be visiting this blog from elsewhere!

This blog was created for LIBS 602 with Dr. Sue Kimmel, for the Summer Semester 2015.
Notes on design:

• I chose the book template because it was perfect for a librarian. 
• I disabled the mobile template for now because they are difficult to maintain separately. 
• I made the column width a bit wider so the reader has less scrolling to do. 
• The page background is a very pale blue and the text is black to provide good contrast for reading.
• I chose the title font "Crushed," because it is playful but not too girly or unsophisticated. I like the mixed case. The title is white because that was the most readable color on the blue header.
• My post texts are in a font called "Trebuchet." I originally chose "Arvo" because it is a nice, compact serif font. It is contemporary and interesting but also readable. Then, when I viewed the blog again a few days later I felt that the serif wasn't working. Trebuchet is a good substitute. I also bumped it up to 16 px. I guess I am feeling like I need reading glasses today!

A library is...

(Created with Wordle)

Last semester I had a final exam question asking me to describe my ideal library. To create this Wordle, I cut and pasted my answer to that exam question into the Wordle text box. Then I took out some of the words that made less sense and bumped up the quantities of certain words I wanted to emphasize. I like how the word library is bolstered by the word students. That seems so appropriate!