Checklist Item 6 - County Level Meeting and Reflection week of 3/13 - 3/17

I attended the county Library Media Specialist meeting for Camden County Schools.  As you might imagine the agenda at this meeting was quite large so I will blog about the highlight and things that struck me as important in this meeting.  Much of the beginning of the meeting went over many web 2.0 apps that are available to the school systems teachers and media specialists.  Some of the apps on display are below:

●     TLDR - a reading app that shortens or summarizes articles for students

●     Instagrok - mind mapping tool for students

●     Plickers - a cool student response tool

●     Kahoot - a student interactive teaching/review game.  Kids love it!

●     MyOn - an electronic library of books for kids.  This is a really nice one

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Also mentioned was a GLMA workshop slated for June that some members were going to attend for professional learning.  Media specialists discussed problems they are having with barcode scanners and possible solutions to those problems.  Media specialist were told to pay close attention to check outs because books were not being properly picked up by the scanners.  Camden County library media specialist handled tech support so issues such as chrome book fixes along with other issues were discussed. 

As mentioned earlier, there was quite an agenda and it was interesting to see issues that were faced with different schools while at the same time the schools faced many of the same issues.  In any event, the LMS of all schools must work together to ensure that all students in the county are served correctly.  These county meetings are essential to the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the libraries in Camden County.

Checklist Item 2 - School level meeting and Reflection week of 3/2 - 3/6

This week I attended the school level meeting with the CMS media committee.  The meeting began with a discussion of the school book fairs along with the goals for the months that the book fair will be going on in.  Other topics were collaboration with teachers and the Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl.  Our librarian wants to increase the amount of collaboration between the media specialist and the teachers in the school.  Weeding and collection updating was discussed.  We identified sections that need to be weeded and updated in order to keep the collection up to date.  One other thing of note is that our school is moving to a system having all students use their lexile levels for reading.  Because of this our library has put lexiles in all of the books so that students check out books based on their personal scores.  We discussed how this process is working and it was determined that teachers, students, and the media center were all benefiting from the new process. The last item discussed was the budget.  Our media center has a budget of $13,000 for the year.  Of that number we have set aside $5,665 for books and $4,100 for supplies.  We will use these funds to update the collection and purchase needed supplies for the next school year.