The Sassy Librarian: programming

programming

Showing posts with label programming. Show all posts

When I realized during my Hunger Games Party last spring that the nail art table was the most popular craft, the thought occurred to me that this was an ideal library program. Okay, yes, it's a bit stinky with the acetate and nail polish fumes, but usually no one minds and the fun the kids have (and associate with the library) goes a long way to making students feel the library is a comfortable, welcoming place to spend their non-nail polishing time.

Every October, one of my wonderful colleagues - who is a teacher, athletic trainer, class dean and dorm parent, no less - takes in upon herself to organize our school's Breast Cancer Awareness fundraisers during the month of October. This fundraising has at its center the selling of that year's t-shirt, which the students can wear on a set day and dress down, always a welcome break from dress code.

I wanted to make sure that the library had some kind of tie-in programming that would ramp the kids up and encourage them to buy their t-shirt. Having a bunch of supplies left over from the Hunger Games nail art table (like the OPI drying spray, which is pricey but a must-have and it lasts forever), I realized while browsing in my local Ulta that I could easily drop $30 dollars on pink nail polish and have a snazzy little programming afternoon (and supplies for the future). The store was having an October special where if you purchased two pink OPI polishes you would get a free top coat or base coat, so I choose six shades of pink (Japanese Rose Garden and Pinking of You were popular favorites) and got my freebies. Piles of pink Watermelon Jolly Ranchers to snack on and we had a fun party in progress!

The terrific aspect of doing a nail program is that you don't have to be an expert about the technique. I rely heavily upon sites like Pinterest for nail art boards which possess oodles of inspiration and links to the actual sites that contain the DIY components. With the addition of glass head pins and toothpicks to your program, and/or nail art pens if you want to get fancy with effects. I was amazed at how many students used the toothpicks and pins I had left over from previous craft programming to make this terrific breast cancer ribbons on their nails.

I know that other librarians will instantly note that anything involving nail polish is programming that leans heavily to our female patrons. Since so many students had expressed an interest, I still felt it was a good idea and I was pleasantly surprised to see plenty of boys. Granted most of them were watching and flirting with the girls, but more than a few boys were cajoled into having a single nail painted pink since it was "for breast cancer awareness."

When our Lower School bus let out at the Upper School campus, a bunch of little kids (faculty children) joined us, and since a bunch of the high school students present were babysitters for these little ones, the energy really jacked up a notch. The little girls LOVED having their nails done by the big girls and were particularly entranced by the nail art and sparkle effects that some of the students brought to the party. I asked a bunch of kids if they would put their hands out so we could capture all the pretty nails, and I love the picture (left) which was the result. Little hands and big hands, with lots of different skin tones, but all perfectly showcasing the pink. Over 40 students (out of a 420 student population) ended up having their nails done and they are still talking about how much fun it was. I'm going to have to think up other tie-ins (like Halloween nails for Teen Read Week 2012) that let my nail creators to express themselves.

The Information Bar of Kirby Library Post-Valentine's Day

I am a big proponent of catching people doing something right - I like it when my colleagues and supervisors do it to me and I love the blush of recognition students get when you let them know how much you admire them for something they are doing. So why not have an event whose sole purpose is thanking your patrons?

For me, an obvious day was Valentine's Day. February 14th is designated "Love Your Library" day at Wyoming Seminary's Upper School (yes, we wear pink or red at the desk). If students, faculty or staff want to come over to the library and fill out a heart about what they love best, the library thanks them by giving them a fresh-baked cookie (mostly chocolate chip, but I do make a batch of oatmeal craisin for the people who don't like chocolate or are allergic).

My kitchen prior to beginning - 200 cookies were made in 3 hours

I will admit, the cookie baking is not an insignificant undertaking. Luckily, as a boarding school veteran I have developed an excellent system of cranking out large quantities of cookies in a relatively compressed period of time (so I can go to sleep before midnight). My chocolate chip cookies are really popular, so I focus on those, with just one batch of oatmeal for the people with allergies. I made about 200 cookies this time, and they were all gone by the end of school, so I probably could have made 240 and it would have been perfect for the after school crowd as well, but I ran out of chocolate chips!

Publicity is important to any well-attended event and word of mouth among teenagers is total gold for publicizing library events. I had one of my LAB seniors make an announcement the day before and I also emailed and hung up flyers (which you can view for yourself on my Google Docs). Just using pale pink and lavender paper, I printed out simple hearts with a question: "Why do you love the library?" (Important note: be sure you only print as many hearts as there are cookies - that way the end of valentines directly correlates with no more cookies and you don't run out.)

This could seem like asking the kids to jump through a hoop to just get a cookie, but we actually collect these and use them as data to take an informal read on our program. My golden retriever usually wins the most mentions, paws down (you can see one of our student's rendition of him looking up at me reading a book, something I never get to do in the library) but usually my fellow librarian and I are a close second (and we don't have big egos, so the dog being ahead of us is fine).

Points I noticed this year that seemed unusual from other years where the notice of the "ambiance" of the library or the "warmth" of the library and I'm thinking this was related to more adjectives to describe our professional staff ("helpful librarians" or "friendly librarians").

Our kids are wonderful at our school (really, I'm not making this up - I know that I am lucky, almost every one of the 200 kids who did a valentine thanked me so politely when they took their cookie, or they enthusiastically spoke about how much they were looking forward to eating it!). You can see from this valentine (bullet points seemed another theme and we thought it was super that kids had so much to say they wanted to make a list!) that we were nicely listed first, followed by the books (our circulation has been up this year), then my dog, then the cookies (so impressed those weren't first), then "friends".

The "friends" part is of particular interest - this came up on a few valentine's or "the great people who hang out here" was listed as the reason the person loved the library. And that begs a point I'd like to make about creating a welcoming library environment. If a library space becomes identified with one group of students, it can become exclusionary as students who do not include themselves in that category decide the library isn't for them. Several valentines mentioned the "ambiance" or "stress-free environment" of the library as the main reason why they loved.

The blizzard of valentines on our Center Classroom glass

We often say that the library has a "no-guilt" relationship with students - we don't charge fines, we don't believe in a quiet library, we don't block or forbid certain websites or games (just wear headphones if it's noisy), and we are happy to proofread papers or listen to a student vent about their romantic relationship gone awry. Our theory is that students who are comfortable hanging out in the space to relax with friends and warmly banter with us when they get a laptop from the cart behind the desk, is going to understandably be more comfortable coming to us with an academic problem or question. "We don't judge" would be a possible t-shirt logo for us.

Anyway, Love Your Library is always a huge success. We gave out every one of the 200 cookies and had that equal number of valentines hanging up - all by 2 pm. Reading the valentines became a spectator sport with faculty and students munching their cookie while they walked around to look at all of them.

A few administrators stopped by (actually to schedule classes) so it was nice for them to see the reasons students gave for loving our program. While it's a lot of work to crank out all those cookies, I think making our students feel great about using the library and having a recognition party where all participants are thinking about why the library is so terrific, makes the sweat and tears well worth it.

Every librarian should love data. LOVE it. Data is our life's blood because it allows us to keep track of what direction (intentional or unintentional) our program takes. Not only is data beneficial for us, but is the unfortunate case that many an administrator responds better to seeing actual numbers associated with key talking points as we go over programmatic highlights.

In my library, a big piece of our data tracking is our shared Google calendar which records all our classroom usage (we have three classrooms in our space and we also sometimes schedule classes on the library floor). We moved away from our shared Outlook calendar because we kept getting frustrated that if our computer crashed, the formatting and some of the data would be lost, which made us crazy. As early Google adopters, Google calendar (which my fellow Upper School librarian and I were using personally) seemed like an obvious substitute.

We can see each other's personal calendar (to remember doctor's appointments, etc.) and decided that we would set up each classroom with its own calendar, largely because we can control the color coding and see usage at a glance when teachers want to set up an appointment to come to the library.

But there has always been one annoying part when it comes time to collate the data. We have had to input the data from each class (teacher, class name, number of students, collaboration level, skills taught, laptop usage) into a Filemaker database in order to generate usage reports. Gah! So tedious to do, especially since we do it at the end of each semester, when we are usually exhausted.

We started off our day this morning kvetching about needing to crunch the data and wondering if there was an easy way to get the reports in Google Docs rather than using the class by class input technique. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of librarians reading this going "duh," but in my end of trimester haze, I had the brainwave of doing a search on extracting data from Google calendar and discovered (for FREE!!!) GTimeReport.com.

It couldn't be simpler to use. You just have your calendar/Google docs open and give GTimeReport permission to access your Google account. You get this snazzy window (you can see all my various calendars in each different colors) and you can simply choose the time/date parameters for your report. Here's what you get:

Give it a few seconds and POP! It opens up Google Docs and we get the above beautiful report. You can see how we can sort by date, time, duration, the bell, and you can even see our occasional listing of skills taught. Now that I realize how it formats the report, I think we will use the "where" field (which we can ignore since our "where" is taken care of by the calendar name) for indicating the number of students or our collaboration levels (L1 = students are in library without teacher and no joint instruction, L2 = teacher is with student but no collaborative instruction is taking place, and L3 = teacher and librarian instruct students together and assess lesson's efficacy throughout project).

Anything that gives quick and easy (and FREE!!!) data is a boon to any librarian's heart and if you are already using Google calendar, then this might be a helpful addition to your repertoire. Next up for us - enabling the appointment feature so teachers can book themselves. :-)