View from the School

I just discovered a great tool to organize my computer use.  A web 2.0 site called Protopage (www.protopage.com) allows the user to set newsfeeds, weather, favorite sites, and just plain old sticky notes on a free website.  I made it my homepage so now when I access the web, up pops my information at my fingertips. Since it is a web site, I can access it from any Internet connected PC.  This is better than Backflip!

I am constantly amazed at how I am not a teacher sometimes and other times I am.  For example, our district sent out an Organizational Health Survey to the teachers.  I did not get one.  When I inquired as to what happened to my survey, the answer was “we only sent them to teachers.” The Governor of Texas is considering the 65% rule for our state…but of course, it doesn’t include libraries or librarians, although it does include extracurricular activities such as football and coaches.  Hmmm, last time I checked, I had to have a teacher’s certificate to hold my job.  Go figure.

Seems like every year there is a big discussion around here about when school should finish before the holidays.  This year my district was the last one to finish.  The reason: we get more days (paid) for professional development and work days.  That is both bad and good.  Depends on which side of the fence you are on.  Personally, as the librarian, I attend many days of professionaly development outside of the alloted days such as ALA, TLA, and our state technology conference.  Seems like I have plenty of professional development.  On the days given by our district for PD, I must attend something…usually nothing I really need.  This year I took three days to get my ESL endorsement.  Did I need that as a LMS…not really.  It is nice to have some additional tools at my disposal, but I only did it because the rest of the offerings held absolutely no interest for me whatsoever. 

So what is it like in your district?  Should the LMS have to partake of the same Professional Development as the other teachers?  Should our Holiday vacation be shortened because of it?  I’d rather use the time at least if I must, to catalog, catch up on my paper work, and leave the PD to me.

I recently held my first book  fair of the year, and as I have been doing for a number of years, used Scholastic. It seems that my disappointment grows every year with this company. What used to be a company that provided the best titles available for kids, is now slipping in a lot of “trash.” There also seems to be more and more of the fringe stuff…pencils, gizmos and gadgets. But the worst part may be that the company is now cutting our profit margins and taking away some of the benifits. We will no longer get 30% on our second fair, and only get the 10% in free merchandise on the second fair, if we have one. What a sneaky thing to do. For the past five or ten years, Scholastic has been buying up the other book fair companies and now dominate the market. Looks like they no longer try to actually run a good fair with decent profits. Our district is thinking of putting on our own fair and calling it the NSBF…the Not Scholastic Book Fair Co. What do you all think of that!