Tech Tune Ups with Staff

As part of my new job responsibilities, I'm in charge of offering monthly professional development related to technology to our staff K-12.

The first of school, we hit it hard with 7 Tuesday Tech Tune Ups in a row.

The interactions with staff members K-12 and seeing a variety of leaders sharing & leading during each session has been a blast!

Here's what's our focus will be in October:

The sessions are completely optional, but our teachers do need to earn 14 contact/professional development hours this school year. I hope the casual, hands-on sessions I'm offering continue to meet their needs.

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Review: Attachments

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm not sure why I waited to read this book. I had heard others mention they loved ALL of Rainbow Rowell's books, even her "adult" one, Attachments. (Side note: Why does mentioning it's an adult book sound so dirty?! It's not at all. It's just not a YA book. It's actually cleaner than many of the YA books I've read...) Anyway, I requested this title from my library and was pleased to pick it up a few days ago. I immediately began reading it. It was a breath of fresh air for me. Perhaps because the characters WERE adults, and not angst-ridden teens or supernatural beings, or any of the other stereotypes it seems like I've been reading too much of lately...

Rainbow Rowell has a way of writing characters that you wish you knew in real life. They're interesting, sincere, and realistic. I especially enjoyed the format of this book with the many emails between Jennifer and Beth. Lin…

1-2-3 Wonder

Collaborating is one of the aspects of teaching that I most enjoy. As a school librarian, I have the unique opportunity to collaborate, teach, and work with many different teachers and students in my school building, grades K-12. This school year, one of my professional goals is to collaborate outside of my school and even outside of Indiana.

When David Etkin mentioned on Twitter that he had an idea for a Wonder extension lesson, I immediately said "I'm in!" We talked it out a bit and decided to recruit a few more people to the collaborating party from the #WONDERschools initiative. Davidforced persuaded Reilly into participating in this project with her 5th grade students.

We worked together in Google Docs on the lesson idea, questions, and discussed how to best implement this in our classrooms. Then we decided how to combine and showcase what was done in each of our classes. The cool part of this collaboration was that we used several methods of communication: …

Totoro #PostItNoteArt

Our post-it note art for the fourth 9 weeks this school year is from the movie My Neighbor Totoro. It seemed to be a bigger undertaking than usual. I think the main reason for this was because we had to alter the patterns quite a bit to fit our windows. This always presents a challenge to keep the scale the same and make sure the finished art is still recognizable. Connolly does a great job with this and usually eyeballs the changes. I, on the other hand, prefer to be able to follow the pattern row by row.

Time wise, the three forest spirits were created in about six total hours.

Finished windows:

Daughter finished the #Totoro #PostitNoteArt on our library windows. Like every one we've created, it's now my favorite. 💙 (Top: view from hallway; bottom: view inside library) #myneighbortotoro #myfriendtotoro #TotoroSocietyART #TotoroisHere #RMHSLibrary @postit
A photo posted by Sherry Gick (@sngick) on Apr 21, 2016 at 1:14pm PDT
A few videos of the process: (It's always…

...sherry's...

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