Monday, October 12, 2015

Orientation

This year I created a quick Pow-Toon video to start off my orientation.




I had fun creating it. The challenge was in summarizing everything I needed students to know about the library. However, since there hasn't been a certified librarian in this school for 5 years, I knew I had to go into more detail with the classes. I scheduled every English class to visit the library for one class period so that I could see all students. Starting next year I'll just work with freshmen.

These students have never checked themselves out, so I had to do some training in Destiny to show them the procedures. We also had to look at how to use the catalog because it had been a while since they had even seen the library catalog. My understanding from my library aide is that the library has been a hang-out for students over the past several years without a lot of productivity or book checkouts. I wanted to make a clear statement in my orientation that the library is a place to be productive, not to just hang out.

I also wanted to make students aware of the library website I updated over the summer so that they could easily access the library databases and other resources. Again, students (and some teachers) were not even aware that we had these databases available. I also wanted to introduce the idea of Genius Classes in the library this year. This information is also posted on our library website.

For the last part of my orientation I gave students a fairly easy scavenger hunt activity. The idea was to get them used to the various resources available in the library catalog and in the library itself. I thought that the scavenger hunt wouldn't take students long at all, but was surprised that they all thought some of the questions were difficult. I believe this is because they had not been in the library to use the collections or resources consistently over the past five years. I am hoping that I will need to make the scavenger hunt a little more difficult as students in our district are now being trained from elementary through middle school to use the library catalog and check out their own books.


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