Listen. Connect. Empower.

I have been coding with students for years now.  Most Decembers we spend problem solving and students love it.  I did too.  For a while.  Then I started questioning how this authentically fit in my mission to " grow readers ."  I struggled with this significantly.  When I did a collaborative coding project several years back it made sense.  Simply exploring different coding activities didn't feel so authentic and true to who I want to be as a librarian.  So, it was time to change things up.   Student work for our introductory coding lesson The pros: My brain eats up coding and this could have been a game-changing moment for me as a student if I had been introduced to coding at a young age.   This is problem solving!  This isn't taught anywhere else in our school!   This is opportunity and exposure for students!   The cons: I am abandoning reading books to students for the month to do this.   ...

It is a joy to be back in our library and have students buzzing about choosing books and checking themselves out.  Yes, they do it themselves.  In the mornings our library is open for students to pick out new books and check in with me for a book recommendation.  I am able to match readers and books while books fly off our shelves, all because of self-checkout.  Self-checkout was the best decision I made for our library. Students help each other check out Why student self-checkout?   Self checkout helps students... have greater ownership of their library and their checkouts exercise independence respect our books, policies (how many they should be taking out), and privacy Self checkout frees me up to help other students find what they want/need! The challenges Privacy - Students were seeing the account of the person before them and sometimes checking books out to them. Solution: During 1 class have students demonstrate to me how they check themselves out. A...