New e-Book Trailers

Mrs. Rudolph can’t wait to share info about BI e-books.

Our Catching Fire original book trailer is running!

Students want to read these books right now!

Last month at the Georgia Conference for Media Organizations (GaCOMO), we were awarded the Mabel Wyche Underwood grant sponsored by the Georgia Library Media Association (GLMA). This grant allows us to advertise some of the e-book titles that we have available here in the BI media center. We already have students asking about these titles and how to get them!

Look for more information about a book trailer competition for students coming soon. We will also be posting “HOW TO” sheets for those interested in downloading the apps and digital reader on personal devices (phones, tablets, and personal computers).

Staff Book Characters

For Teen Read Week, we wanted to try something new this year. We asked staff members to dress up as favorite book characters and created an activity for students to identify the characters using three written clues. Here is a small group photo of a few staff members that stopped by the media center today. Students, don’t forget to turn in your entries on Monday to win a fabulous prize! All photos and clues will be displayed in the cafeteria commons and on our digital display screens.

It was great to see so much student interest in this activity and so much excitement as they recognized and named characters around the school. We will see if we can make this a school-wide event next year!

Teen Read Week

 

It was great to have a four-day weekend, but we are a little disappointed that Teen Read Week will be cut short this year. For those who don’t know, Teen Read Week is another special week for libraries and media centers to promote reading and books with our teens. Each year, we plan special activities in the BI media center to promote reading.

This year, we will award prizes to students who check-out a book with a hidden coupon inside, set a weekly book circulation goal, and have a special staff surprise to promote our favorite books. Also back by popular demand this year is our one-day only fine forgiveness for late fines up to $1. To have your fines waived, you must check-out a new book on Friday, October 18th and ask us to waive that fine!

Let’s see if we can circulate 1000 books over the remaining days in this week.  If we do, Mrs. Lukkarinen and a few other staff members will color their hair pink to celebrate.

 

Media Workshop Series

We will be offering a series of workshops for our teachers using the Liberty County School System navigation theme for the 2013-2014 school year. This series will feature six different courses for teachers to choose from and will be offered during each planning block. Participation is voluntary and open to all Bradwell staff members. We hope that our staff will join us in charting the course for 21st century learning here at BI.

Session 1: October 22 ~ Blogging with Students

Session 2: November 21 ~ Implementing Big 6 into Projects

Session 3: January 28 ~ E-Books: Using Library Resources in the Classroom

Session 4: February 25 ~ Getting the Most out of the SMARTBoard

Session 5: March 25 ~ Edmodo: Expand Your Classroom Walls

Session 6: April 24 ~ Study Island In-Depth

To view the informational flyer, click the thumbnail image below.

Click to enlarge and print this flyer.

Banned Books Success

Wow…it has been a busy, busy, busy week in the BI media center. We are sad to see our Banned Books week celebration to come to an end tomorrow. Many students have stopped by to check out our displays and ask questions about banned books. We have circulated classics that normally get overlooked by our students in favor of the more popular contemporary titles, in part thanks to our BBW advertisements. Our daily trivia has also been a huge success with well over 100 participants so far! My favorite activity of the week, though, has been our Banned Books Week Graffiti Wall display (ok – so it is not really a wall, but we work with what we have). Students can list their favorite books or series, memorable quotes from selections, or titles that have survived challenges in other libraries. Even students who have not listed a book on the display stop by to see what books others are recommending. Here are a few photos from early in the week. I don’t think there is too much room left to write on that display now.

Banned Books Week

It is one of our favorite week’s of the year in the BI media center. We love Banned Books Week because it promotes one of our favorite things – reading! It also encourages us all to reflect on core American values, like our freedom of speech. According to the American Library Association:

Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others. As such, they are a threat to freedom of speech and choice.

Although many books and favorite authors have been challenged across this country, most books are never removed from collections or banned from libraries. To celebrate at Bradwell this week, we have created a Banned Books Week display featuring popular challenged books. We also have a graffiti wall where students can leave comments about their favorite challenged books. In addition, we will have a daily trivia question that features a frequently challenged book. Prizes will be awarded daily!

Artwork courtesy of the American Library Association

Newsletters

This year, we are trying something different for our monthly newsletters. Instead of creating a traditional newsletter and posting it on the Internet, we have decided to use a Web-based tool to share some of the fantastic resources that we encounter as media specialists. One of my favorite features of this tool, Scoop.it, is that it allows us to curate information for our readers. Information curation is a relatively new phrase used to describe how information experts like media specialists preview, summarize, share, and recommend information to their core audiences. We want you to know what we think about each featured resource so that you can decide if it is worth your time to read more.

Don’t worry! We can “scoop” photographs from the media center, blog posts, and others bits of information to include on our Scoop.it newsletters as well. We hope that you will check out our September edition at the end of this month and let us know if you like this new format.

You can visit our Scoop.it page here.

Books and Tattoos

Since we are celebrating Spirit Week and preparing for the big rivalry game tomorrow night, we decided to offer a special incentive in the book fair on Thursday and Friday. When you make a book purchase, you get a free school spirit airbrush tattoo. Morgan and John Michael took us up on our offer first thing this morning! GO TIGERS…BEAT LIBERTY!

Books, Books, and More Books!

What is more exciting than getting your annual book fair delivered and set up? How about receiving 18 boxes of NEW FICTION titles delivered on the same day! While we had a blast seeing all of the new arrivals and fun stuff in our book fair, we have been up to our eyeballs in processing the almost 600 books while trying to prepare for Wednesday’s opening day sales in our fair.

On another note, we kicked off Spirit Week this week with a Crazy Hair Day. This was the perfect way to start off one of our craziest days yet in the media center. We are on the way to having our busiest August ever – both in circulation and student visits. A busy media center is a happy media center!

A small selection of new arrivals

Mrs. McCallar and Mrs. Lukkarinen with crazy hair

Boxes and boxes of new books arrived this week

A New Year

Wow…we have tried to sit down and post a welcome back blog, but it has been a busy, busy, busy first two weeks for us in the media center. Although we have been extremely busy, we have really enjoyed our first 10 days back in school. We are currently in the process of conducting orientation sessions with our freshmen class (over 500 students!) and getting prepared to host our back to school book fair. After meeting with about half of our 9th grade students last week, we think the class of 2017 has the most readers of any class we have worked with in the past few years! In five days, we circulated almost 1600 items. We also had our busiest Mobile Media day ever last Friday!

We hope we stay this busy all year long!

Mobile Media Friday

Media Center Mornings

iPad Destiny Stations