Library Blogs

Since starting my position as Media Specialist at Bay View Elementary 2 years ago, I have been an avid blog follower of many teacher librarians. I use them as my inspiration of ideas I use immediately and ideas I dream about making happen. Many times when I read a new blog post from some of my favorites, I wonder what I am doing wrong, that I can’t find the time to do all of these amazing things. I have to remind myself that many media specialists don’t have a fixed schedule with 29 classes every week, many have an assistant to help them every day and MANY have left the classroom to teach other teacher librarians how to realize all of their dreams. With that said, I have decided that my own blog is something that I would love to make happen and I just have to start SMALL. As my principal likes to remind me almost weekly, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, Shannon.”

A library or librarian blog is a place to share information with parents, staff members and other librarians. Library time is not just a time to come and check out books and learn about the card catalog anymore. Libraries are media centers now and as such we are meant to be the HEART OF THE SCHOOL. We are here to be a students support, a teachers sounding board for ideas and a parents resource. We are so many things to everyone in the school. These blogs also allow new media specialists a chance to get ideas and learn more about recent technologies without having to search all over. A well organized blog will be a one stop shop for anyone that needs a resource of any kind. It could be anything from a book, to music, to clip art, to the best technology to use for a child struggling with reading or to use for a lesson.

The blogs below are just a few of the ones that are inspiration to me. You can also go to Edublogs and find their list of the best library blogs from years past for more amazing librarian bloggers!

Bulldog Readers Blog

I found a great resource when I chose to read the Bulldog Readers Blog. An elementary school librarian with an incredible passion for technology created this blog. When I grow up (hehe) I want to be a media specialist just like her!  Her blog is simply amazing. She has everything from lesson plans, to technology integration, author spotlights, to book reviews and more! She has book reviews categorized so it is very easy to follow and find what you are looking for.

I am working on my book orders for the year and I am always looking for book ideas, so I chose to check out her reviews on picture books. This was my favorite post because not only did she give great reviews but also she gave me an amazing idea for promoting books in an engaging and fun way for all of my students. She worked with the older kids to create book advertisements for the younger kids to watch so they could vote on their favorite picture book.  This is something that I have been thinking about bringing to my school for a while and this post reinforced my determination to make it happen. Since I am also in charge of the morning news, this would be a project that my crew could work on!

Another post I really enjoyed was about her backpack buddies.  This was an older post and I can’t tell if she still does this, but she has (had?) 48 backpack buddies available for students in grades 1-3 to check out. Each backpack buddy comes with a backpack, a book, a matching puppet and a journal. She has buddies like Pete the Cat, Go Dog Go, Mo Willem’s Pigeon and many more. Students can check out the backpack buddies and take them home and write the experiences they have with their buddy. The students in my school are hungry for more books and some of my more troubled friends would benefit so much from being trusted to take these backpack buddies home to cuddle and journal about!

Finally, she has a post called, A 2016 Facelift on Dewey. When I started at Bay View a few years ago, book organization was a disaster! I have been slowly, but steadily, working on making it more “kid-friendly.” I loved some of her ideas and oddly enough I have already done one of her bigger changes. I also found the post about Dewey on the blog, the Wrinkle in Tech and fell in love with her awesome Dewey signs. I bought them and have put them throughout my library. Now, I just need to work on everything else. Whew!

Lake Murray Elementary School

The next blog I decided to review is the blog for Lake Murray Elementary School. This is a blog written by the media specialist at Lake Murray Elementary School. She has a lot of useful posts and resources on her page such as: links to Web tools, user-friendly websites for kids to use for research, poetry links, author visit information and so much more. Her blog is set up more for the students and parents of her school to use so there are some areas that are password protected and unavailable to the general public. However, the majority of the links are available and extremely useful for everyone.

I love her page, Paws to Read a Good Book, which is a page of book suggestion websites and books for students. She broke the actual book suggestions down not only by grade level but by gender, interests, and awards won as well. It was very kid friendly and easy to navigate. This has been something that I want to add to my school website, but have not been sure how to go about making it fun and easy for the kids to use. How many times do we get asked by parents (and kids!) what books we would suggest to them? As a media specialist kids, parents, and teachers ask me. This is a great way to give them the information!

The Library Voice

The final library blog that I chose to read and review is yet another media specialist that I want to be like when I grow up! The Library Voice is a blog by Shannon McClintock Miller. She is from Colorado and is an amazing teacher librarian and blogger. Her site is chock full of lesson plan ideas, technology integration, inter-disciplinary lessons and did I say technology? I feel like a kid in a candy store when I read her blog. I feel like her blog is a lot more oriented to technology, but it is all technology that can used in the classrooms and for presentations!

She recently added a blog post about Celebrations Around the World. This is a global project that she has teamed up with Cantana on to show kids all around the world how everyone celebrates with stories, songs, illustrations, recipes, poems and any other creations you might do. She has created a Smore to show all of the details of this amazing project and this is also where teachers go to sign up on Google Docs to be included. She also includes links to books and other resources to help you plan the lessons and activities. PebbleGo has a fantastic Birthdays Around the World section and Miller also notes that Capstone will be releasing some new ebooks to help with this project. I signed up to do the “Winter Around the World” project with her in 2015, but unfortunately having a fixed media schedule made that very hard to do. This is something that I would like to do… if it can’t be done this year; I would love to make it an option for next year! This is an outstanding way to integrate cultural and technology into a media center.

Another post that I loved (and honestly I love them all) was about using Storyboard That for Thanksgiving activities. This is not something that can just be used at Thanksgiving… it is so much fun! She includes links and screenshots to everything that she has done. While she doesn’t give lesson plan ideas for every day use, just the fact that she introduced me to this amazing site makes me happy. The kids get tired of doing Google Slides and this is a wonderful way to engage them and keep them interested in what could otherwise be a somewhat dry topic.

This is a wonderful resource for teachers, librarians, and even parents. If you are looking for ideas for your staff on technology professional development this is the first place you should stop!