Coping with Personnel Change in Your School

Change is scary. It means having to rethink and possibly undo everything you've been doing up until that point. It means revisiting your own incompetence. It means spending a lot more time doing what should be easy. And for a library media center, change can mean the end of your own program. Especially if it's a change in administration. All of us have read stories of amazing library media centers with dynamic librarians at the helm paving the way with innovation and grace. And I would venture to say most if not all of those libraries were able to do the things they do because they had a supportive administration.

 A supportive administration listens to your ideas and then brainstorms with you to come up with solutions. They are willing to compromise and may even have the ability to give you the money you need to get started. A supportive administration recognizes that it needs to constantly learn and evolve, and more importantly will allow you to teach them about librarianship and its ideal role in a school community. In short, a support administration is...supportive. They have your back, and in turn, you have theirs. They help you out, you make a rigorous program and facility that bolsters the school community and positively affects student learning outcomes, and you make the administration look good to boot. It's a win-win-situation. It takes time to create a relationship like that though. You need to get a feel for each other's work flows, management styles, and preferred methods of communication. And even if you have the exact same vision, sometimes it just all comes down to personality. Either way, when you have a school where the library media specialist and the building administrators mesh, it's a beautiful thing. So then what do you do when something threatens to change all of that?!

OneTab Chrome Extension for Teachers

I learned about a new chrome extension (also available for firefox) on the House of EdTech podcast.  It has been such a game changer for me and my work flows that I just had to share it with you.

It's called OneTab:  www.one-tab.com.

How to Pitch Your Library Renovation to Admin

Most of us don't work in state-of-the-art school libraries with unlimited budgets.  Instead most of us work in libraries that are falling apart, often with no budget at all, at a time when society is doubting whether or not libraries should even exist anymore.  Librarians are being fired.  Libraries are being closed.   In order for your library to not only survive, but thrive, you need money.  Money that you can't access or control without the ok and support of your administration.  But how do you ask your admin for money to renovate your library when you're already pretty sure they're going to say no?

Here are some ideas to get you through pitching a renovation idea to your school admin.