Reflecting on technologies in the classroom

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-ed-tech
-can-help-leapfrog-progress-in-education/

Back in January, I posted a list of 10 things teachers needed to know about using technology in the classroom. This list emphasized everything from teacher role modeling enthusiasm and usability of technologies to preaching humility when - inevitably - some kid knows better than you do how to use a tech tool. Here's the original list:

1. Your approach is infectious - if you’re excited about it, the kids will be too. If you are wary, communicate why and ask for the kids’ thoughts/concerns.
2. Know that you may not be the expert in the room on a particular tech tool. It’s fun to have kids come up and teach peers - and you! - tips and usages.
3. You are unlikely to wreck anything - don’t be afraid to poke around and experiment.
4. Teachers often have free or low-cost access to great tools - like Canva!
5. Don’t fight the conveniences of AI. It’s here. Let’s use it to our advantage.
6. YouTube is a great source of step-by-step guidance for anything you don’t already know how to do in a tech program.
7. Encouraging kids to use coding programs (Kodable, Scratch, Khan Academy) allows them to think of themselves as future developers, and it may surprise you which kids feel the most success and connection during coding classes.
8. To ensure that the videos you play as part of a lesson in class are accessible to everyone, turn on closed captioning.
9. Do not assume that students already know how to find digital documents they’ve created or shared. File organization, creation and retrieval all need to be taught.
10. Keep in mind Murphy’s Law: if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. You just never know when the wifi is going to be patchy or the construction job down the road will knock out the power. Keep a couple of sub plans at the ready in case you can’t proceed with a planned tech lesson.

Looking back on the list, I don't have many changes.

Credit: Phonlamaiphoto | Istock | Getty Images

The #5 item -- don't fight AI, it's here and you should use it to your advantage -- I recognize as a bracing statement I mainly wrote to myself. There is a not-small part of me that fears AI, because I fear that it will hurt students' abilities to persevere as thinkers, problem solvers, and researchers. As a librarian, generative AI engenders such conflicting feelings: it's cool and exciting and librarians should be at the forefront of embracing new tech innovations and, at the same time, AI spits out text that sounds authoritative but are sometimes complete baloney.  But, I stand by that it is a wonder for teachers -- particularly those who find the task of writing a rubric, say, to be insanely boring. 

Item #9 also deserves a moment in today's post. I took deliberate care with third graders this year teaching them to create documents, share them with a partner, organize them into a library file, and collaborate on a project. Ours is a Google shop, and it was rewarding to see kids nimbly interacting with docs. These are practical lessons they'll use for the rest of their lives.

And - oh! - #10!! The library computer connected to the overhead projector went on the fritz this past week in several highly public ways! It was super frustrating, and I didn't handle it gracefully the first time, but I got around it the second time by unplugging the HDMI cable and plugging it into my laptop all while I was leading a 5th grade class discussion on the dangers of misinformation. Phew! 

Credit: iStock, https://edexec.co.uk/top-ways-school-
leaders-can-support-teacher-collaboration/

Finally, I missed one major suggestion in my initial list: the need to collaborate with everyone in the building. I learn about fantastic tech tools from teachers, the IT support team, other librarians, admin, and - often - students. There is so much rich and proven experience right down the hallway. All you need to do is ask.

On the search for a great OPAC

What is an OPAC?

Accessit "set & forget" carousel

OPAC stands for Online Public Access Catalog -- in other words, it's a tool for searching a library's collection of physical books, digital books, and links to databases, websites, and other resources.

Why is it important?

The OPAC is the public face of the library. Families, teachers, students, administrators, and communities can evaluate a library's collection and the librarian's curation of outside resources. The OPAC is meant to be the first and best place for conducting student research, and is - in a way - a virtual librarian that is always available. It is also the platform for cataloging, circulating and inventorying the library collection.

Click here to experience Accessit yourself

What do you ask of an OPAC platform before committing to it?

• What are it's strengths? Weaknesses?
• How intuitive is the system for students? How about for teachers?
• What features make the librarian's job easier?
• What features allow students to easily interact with the collection?
• What reporting tools are built into the platform?
• How customizable is the platform?
• How easy is it to migrate records from the existing OPAC to the new one?
• What is the cost?

Accessit example Fairy Tales dashboard

In choosing an OPAC, you are trying to ascertain the usability of it for all of the school's stakeholders. An ideal OPAC would be visually engaging, allow for book discovery, enable collaboration with teachers and administrators, and facilitate the many aspects of librarianship. Circulation, certainly, along with cataloging and the curation of websites, databases and online apps that support and ease the academic load for students. Can one OPAC do all this intuitively with a minimum of friction, so that students don't become frustrated or feel disengaged from the process?

Accessit example Roald Dahl ideas

After years of trying to 'sell' students on the usability of Destiny, I'm convinced that Accessit is a better product - one that smooths out the (static, tons of clicks, techy) user interface and boosts the intuitiveness. Accessit is dynamic where Destiny is static. Accessit is student centered where Destiny is librarian centered. Accessit is customizable where Destiny is limited. Accessit is drag-and-drop where Destiny is click-click-click-click-click. Accessit is fun where Destiny is, frankly, a slog.

I'm eager to read what other OPACs are recommended by colleagues in my program!

Cataloging and OPAC

I'm deep into the book Catalog It! by Allison G. Kaplan, a book about the art and practice of cataloging library materials. Fun, right?! The thing is, it *is* actually really interesting, once you get over the unbelievable number of acronyms (really, I felt like it was a test of my ability to cram more library acronyms into my brain).

What I really appreciate about this book is the unveiling of a host of codes and symbols used in cataloging that heretofore had been a mystery to me. Despite eight years of running a school library, there was so much I didn't know about the history of cataloging, the role of the Library of Congress (LOC, for those in the know), and - especially - the MARC records (MAchine Readable Cataloging). 

And knowledge is power! I feel so much more confident now in digging into and modifying a book's MARC record - something I had been explicitly told I should NEVER do by well-meaning and authoritative librarians in my former school district. Their definitiveness left me with the impression that I would be screwing up records all around the world if I modified - incorrectly - a MARC record. It left me with a sense of fear and also a question: if changing a MARC record is so incredibly consequential, why is it so easy to do? 

Who knew this was how to change the record type?*

In fact, we should be modifying the MARC record for every book that we bring into the library - to tie it to school curricula and make connections to other books in the catalog. Reading this book with my OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog - in my case, Follett Destiny) open, I found all kinds of lovely pieces of information in the MARC record that I hadn't known were there. It is really gratifying to have a handbook that explains what each line in a MARC record means and how / when to modify it. Additionally, Kaplan directs readers to the LOC's guide to the MARC fields as a quick reference tool whenever a cataloging question arises. I bookmarked it right away.

Recently, my supervisor asked me to catalog the posters that came with some workbooks ordered by the SpED department and my mind circled around the idea and came up blank. Now I see that this can be done, easily. It makes me feel like this:

Bing Image Creator. Prompt: "digital art rendering of a school
librarian excited about new knowledge." 5 Apr 2025.

Over and over again while reading this book, I found myself thinking: what is my goal when cataloging? The answer was always: to make it easier for students (and staff!) to access information. Indeed, Kaplan writes: "...the essence of cataloging is organization for the purpose of retrieval." (p. 50) Kaplan's guidelines have helped me to feel emboldened to modify spine labels, MARC records, nonfiction organization, and more in the library with that goal in mind. And, there is reassurance in knowing that - should I get it wrong the first time - I can always go back and fix it until it's right. 

* Obviously, lots of trained librarians! But, it was new to me.

Kaplan, Allison G. (2016). Catalog it!: a guide to cataloging school library materials (3rd ed.). Libraries Unlimited.

Professional Development and the School Librarian

When I think about the professional development offered at the two schools where I have worked over the last 15 years, I struggle to recall anything truly helpful for my role as a school librarian. Sure, there has been some PD on mental health and on special ed supports that has given me insight into working with special populations, but - by and large - school specialists in library, art, music and P.E. are ignored in school and district professional development. This has caused me to actively seek out opportunities to connect with other librarians for professional growth. (More on that below.) So, this week I was intrigued to read the January 2025 School Library Journal article by Andrew Bauld entitled Grassroots PD: school librarians create their own professional development. 

(Bing AI image generator prompt: digital art high intensity
school library professional development; 29 March 2025)

SLJ Jan 2025 cover

Bauld's focus is on the large-scale PD opportunities that leaders in school librarianship have actualized. For example, K.C. Boyd -- School Librarian of the Year in 2022 -- offers an annual free conference called Boss Librarian and Friends, in which thousands of librarians come together, virtually, over four days to learn best practices from each other. Bauld also identified PD opportunities outside the conference format, including the School Librarians Unite podcast by Amy Hermon and The AI School Librarian Newsletter by Elissa Malespina.

In effect, Bauld's article highlights what librarians tend to do best: seek, discover and create resources; establish and foster community; and share and learn from each other as life-long learners. Bauld acknowledges that the best PD for librarians is developed and shared in community with other librarians.

My action items after reading this article are as follows: 

• 

  Wal_172619. Pixabay, 6 Nov 2020. https://pixabay.com/
  photos/book-read-literature-reading-5717481/

  Read Joy of Reading by Donalyn Miller and Teri S. Lesesne to understand the steps of creating a school culture of reading;

• Visit library20.com to peruse its collection of free, virtual library events and trainings - I've already registered to join and am awaiting approval;

• Register for K.C. Boyd's next Boss Librarian and Friends conference. I joined her Clubhouse app and requested to follow her on Instagram.

In Oregon, there was a consortium of schools that worked together to buy library resources, such as digital books, the library management software, and even supplies for covering books. Through this organization, I was able to attend annual library-specific PD where we got demonstrations from Kapco on repairing books and protecting paperbacks with its Easy Cover II book covers. We heard about successful, low cost visits with local authors. We shared lesson ideas and discussed how to pace and plan out the year. We learned about new tech tools and shared tech kits that we could reserve to use at our schools. This was highly useful, applicable PD.

Here in Massachusetts, I have a much broader selection to high-quality library PD through the MSLA. The listserv itself is a form of PD, with daily inspirations from the network of super informed librarians, and the annual conference offers sessions on everything from legal actions when faced with book banning to examples of how to incorporate AI tools in the classroom to example lessons on news literacy. Additionally, the Collaborative for Educational Services hosts a monthly PLC for school librarians during which we share highlights, problem-solve common issues, discuss best practices for advocacy and administrative support. I have also been able to engage in CES's excellent PD event Transforming Education for Social Justice Conference. My school has also granted me time and money to attend two ACCEPT Education Collaborative PD sessions: one entitled Explore! Collaborate! Create! An interactive day for Librarians and one called How to Provide Effective Support to Students with Disabilities in the School Library. 

Bauld, Andrew. "Grassroots PD: school librarians create their own professional development." School Library Journal, Jan 2025, pp. 23-27.

Top 5 Tech Tools for the Classroom

 

I am what social scientists call a 'digital tourist' - I wasn't born into a 24/7 connected society but find myself immersed in it everyday. I am trying to maintain my outsider perspective on technology so that I can notice my own addictions (news scrolling - bah!) and delights (reminders of photos I took this week 20 years ago!), while also appreciating all the conveniences and guarding my boundaries against the unhealthful nature of being always-available. 

I carry this lens into the library every day. Is this lesson on genres enhanced by an interactive slidedeck, or is it just as effective without technology, and unnecessarily forcing children to stare at a screen?  Can we present our research on posterboard or is it better to have kids perfect their PowerPoint skills, as that is what is increasingly expected of them for higher education and the workplace? 

Technology is here and there is no use fighting it, and - often - it does make a lesson clearer and more engaging. Here are my top 5 tech tools for use in the classroom:

Infusing FUN into Library Lessons

"... putting play at the heart of a school results in students experiencing choice, wonder, and delight in their learning." (Mardell, p. 1)

I've spent this week reading A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and
Schools and thinking about ways in which I can encourage playful learning in the library. Like most school librarians, I teach multiple grade levels while also shelving books, developing the collection, managing a budget, collaborating with teachers, fielding parent emails, tracking down lost books, tending to my book hospital, running reading incentive programs, promoting the library, participating in committees and conducting small group reading intervention support. 

It's ... a lot. And it's relentless. And it's also delightful because I'm always busy and always connecting with kids and families and the entire school staff. I appreciate that this work is meaningful. I get to find books for grieving students who are trying to process loss. I get to provide space for overwhelmed kids during lunch or recess. I get to teach skills and tools that students will use for the rest of their lives. It's a privilege and a huge responsibility.

Teaching news literacy, copyright law and research skills has never felt more urgent than it does today in this age of misinformation and AI generated content. Though this work is serious and urgent, reading A Pedagogy of Play has reminded me of the importance of delivering lessons in an environment where kids are engaged and willing to take risks. Here are some tools that might allow you to do just that.

Gale published a series of escape rooms that require students to engage with the databases. I've done these with 4th and 5th grade students - usually during MCAS season to add a little levity to the long days of testing. You can find them here, along with a wealth of other activities (filter by doing a product search for escape rooms). I haven't tried it yet, but there is also an escape room template that you can customize for the topic and/or skills development of your choice. I'm looking forward to trying the Poetry escape room in April! 

Speaking of escape rooms, I did develop a Google Sites escape room as an end-of-unit assessment for 4th graders after teaching them about copyright law and writing citations. Because I was able to drop in their GenEd teacher's names, books we have  in the library, slides from my lessons, etc., the kids thought it was super fun. 

Teaching kids to find books on a shelf and/or put books away? Gamify practice before they try it in the stacks by having them advance through Mrs. Lodge's Shelve It game. Then, challenge kids to find specific titles on the shelves. You can slip phrases of a poem into each book before hand and then see if the kids can put the poem together once all the books have been found!

Though competitive digital quiz resources have been around for a while, they are perennial favorites. I use Kahoot all the time to refresh kids on content they learned the year before: databases, genres, research method, etc. Quizlet Live and the Jeopardy-like Categories games are great for assessing vocabulary

learning (for example: news literacy terms like rumor, speculation, clickbait, misinformation, disinformation, confirmation bias, etc.). My son loves the Don't Look Down game in Gimkit, saying, "You're learning, but it doesn't feel like learning." Students have to answer questions correctly to "fuel" their character in a dangerous race up to a mountain summit. And Breakout EDU has both quick Lock of the Day puzzles and longer breakout rooms that you can customize to fit your unit content. All but Breakout EDU are free for educators, with premium options available for a cost.

I highly recommend Book Creator and Canva as creative and playful research presentation tools. While neither is a game, the platforms are fabulous for collaboration and developing visual literacy skills. Students love them! My 5th graders this year had a unit on infographics - interpreting them, analyzing effectiveness, identifying key points - and then researched a Black history month trailblazer and worked in partners to create an infographic on Canva. Here are a couple of examples of their results.

During the same month, I had 4th graders working on their citation skills via a Book Creator project where they were illustrating a quote made by a famous Black history month hero. While I adore Book Creator's comic book layouts, newspaper template, and magazine format, for this project, each pair of students created a page that required the quote, a photo (with citation), an interpretation of the photo and at least one other visual element laid out in a collage. Even though this was essentially an assessment of their citation and research skills, there was tremendous excitement around the creative process. The students loved presenting their work to their classmates and took a lot of pride in their results. After its completion, I sent a digital copy of the book home for families to see the work we have been doing in the library.

Finally, there is so much to be said for having an array of old fashioned family games and crafting materials available for library rewards days. I like to tie these back to the library by creating inspiration from books. For example: 

• LEGO bricks alongside books about the design of medieval castles
• balls of yarn and books on finger knitting
• origami paper and origami instruction books
• board games and books like Family Boredom Busters and How to Play Chess
• puzzles and I Spy books

(Image created on Canva)

I leave you with a final thought from the book, which really struck me as true. 

"Activating and cultivating playful mindsets in which teachers and students view school as a place to lead learning, explore the unknown, and find joy in learning is central to playful learning... Playful mindsets are activated (or deadened) by how learning experiences are structured." (Mardell, p. 21)

Here's to more playful intention in the library!

Work cited: 

Mardell, B., Ryan, J., Krechevsky, M., Baker, M., Schulz, T. S., and LiuConstant, Y. (2023). A pedagogy of play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools. Cambridge, MA: Project Zero.

Social Media for the School Librarian

My Pinterest is full of beautifully decorated libraries and fun bulletin boards. My Instagram is reel after reel of library book suggestions and anti-book banning advocacy. My YouTube is stocked with helpful videos I can use to teach media literacy and digital literacy. My bookmarks take me to listservs and blogs that help me make my lessons more standards-based and engaging. While I sometimes feel like I am operating in a silo, my digital library PLC is rich and crowded! Here are some suggestions for people to follow on social media:

@Maistorybooklibrary (Instagram)

(photo credit: @Maistorybooklibrary)

https://www.instagram.com/maistorybooklibrary?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Maya Lê creates interactive read aloud videos and reading resources for young children. I admire the helpful book lists on a variety of timely topics, but more than that I admire her fierce advocacy for making sure every person’s story is on the shelves. Lê puts a lot of research and thought into her beautiful posts and she demonstrates absolute confidence in standing up to book bannings, hateful lawsuits targeting “other”, and recent executive orders. I aspire to be Maya Lê! 

Colby Sharp - (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X)

(photo credit: https://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWlO9Px0e0kpORVcPRvJDCg

Book-loving 5th grade teacher based in Michigan. Videos include author talks, book talks, book lists, and tips for read alouds. Useful for understanding best recent releases and popular titles for the 11-and-under set. Sharp’s enthusiasm is infectious! 

Diana Rendina - (Blog and Pinterest)

http://www.RenovatedLearning.com

Rendina’s accounting of overhauling her library space is detailed in her book Reimagining Library Spaces. It is also on Pinterest and on her blog. Her pictures, need/solution descriptions, and step-by-step directions offer a lot of inspiration. I appreciate her budget-consciousness and the reflections on what worked and what needs improvement. Great source of inspiration for thinking about library spaces.

Mrs Readerpants (Blog)

https://www.readerpants.net/

This is a fabulous resource for the realities of elementary school librarianship and offers both hope, tangible suggestions, inspiration and reassurances. As someone who started out in librarianship with zero training, I appreciate her checkoff lists of what to do when opening a library, weeding, planning lessons, etc. Her suggestion that children “read off” their lost book fines is brilliant.

The Adventures of Library Girl (Blog)

(image credit: librarygirl.net)

https://www.librarygirl.net/blog

I learned about Jennifer LaGarde when going through some slides from the MSLA conference. Her books Fact VS Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking In the Age of Fake News and Developing Digital Detectives show her focus on digital literacy, a topic that is front and center on my mind in this age of disinformation.There are all kinds of resources here (posters/infographics, slide decks, videos) to help librarians teach digital literacy in their classrooms. There is library gold here!

@TheBookWrangler (Instagram)

(image credit: @TheBookWrangler)

https://www.instagram.com/thebookwrangler/?hl=en

Mike Rawls specializes in KidLit curation, but there are great resources here for starting a school-wide book club, displaying Newbery winners, advocating for LGBTQ+ books in libraries, etc. He also has a huge freebies collection of gorgeous posters and bookmarks and more linked in his bio. This site is another win for me from a conversation at the MSLA conference!

@mrsjinthelibrary (YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/@mrsjinthelibrary

This is a little dated, but there are plenty of good ideas in Mrs. J’s videos for elementary school librarians. I particularly like her video on teaching graphic novels and comics to early readers. Other helpful videos include preparing for back-to-school-night in the library, setting up your library in 5 days, posting to SeeSaw or Google Classroom, and the 6 essentials for a library website. 

@MissMoeTeaches (Instagram)

(image credit: @MissMoeTeaches)

https://www.instagram.com/missmoeteaches?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Lisa Moe’s “magical library” is full of tech-centered literacy that helps her middle school students embrace life long learning. She models collaboration by having frequent guest speakers (in person and virtually). She is a frequent speaker and attendee at conferences centered on the future of education. She has a can-do attitude that pushes her to tackle all kinds of challenges with her students. This will be a helpful resource when tackling ‘next-level’ projects.

New EdTech Classroom (YouTube)

https://www.youtube.com/@NewEdTechClassroom 

Sam Kary produces videos on YouTube with the tagline: everything you need to know about teaching with technology. He walks you through the uses of various tech tools: Diffit, Pear Deck, NearPod, FigJam, etc. I'm grateful for the professionalism of his presentations and the no-nonsense way he presents the uses and benefits of the various tools. This is exactly what I need to evaluate whether it's worth my time to invest in learning a new tech tool!