41 Useful Websites for School Librarians

Posted on October 26, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

School Librarians accumulate dozens of great websites as we read education and library listservs, bloggers, Facebook group comments, and Twitter feeds. The hard part is trying to keep these sites organized in a logical manner.

I’ve tried numerous curation tools, but for personal use I find a simple browser folder—Library & Librarian—with topical subfolders is faster than an external site for storing and using my most useful sites. Alas, always in a hurry, I often just save a URL to the main folder, so I have a lo-o-ong list of uncategorized sites to organize into topical subfolders.

While I do that, I’m sharing out these valuable resources on professional development & advocacy, library lessons & activities, reading promotion, and technology, accompanied by short annotations on why they’re helpful. So here they are: 41 Useful Websites for School Librarians.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT, ADVOCACY

AASL eCOLLAB – 51 Free Webinars from the American Association of School Librarians on professional learning topics.

Library Impact Studies Infographic – a compact advocacy tool from Library Research Service. Available for print & online viewing.

Library and Information Science Encyclopedia – If you encounter library terminology in your readings, but may not be quite sure what it is, consult this brief list for an explanation! From internationally-known blogger librarian Salman Haider.

Mackin Community – Book vendor Mackin’s blog with resources for libraries & classrooms, makerspaces, and professional learning. Add this site to your feed!

Project Connect – Sponsored by Follett, this site offers guidance for the Future Ready Librarians framework, including PD and teaching ideas.

School Librarians: Why we still need them! – article by Jamie McKenzie with some strong support to use for advocacy.

School Libraries Work – While you can still download the 2008 version directly, the newer 2016 version wants you to submit your email address and other info. Still, a valuable document to use for advocacy and justifying (alas, we need to) having a certified School Librarian in a school library.

Top School Library Blogs – A list maintained by Laura McPherson with 50 librarian bloggers you can add to your blog feed!

Virtual Middle School Library – With dozens of links to useful resources for school librarians, this site, maintained by Linda Bertland, retired school librarian, has an especially valuable resource page for professional learning.

Web Junction – A free learning site from OCLC Research offers self-paced courses, webinar recordings on a variety of topics related to library services and management.

What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) – a U.S. Dept of Education website with research on programs, products, practices, and policies that answers the question “What works in education?”

LIBRARY LESSONS & ACTIVITIES

AASL Best Websites for Teaching & Learning – Every year our national association picks, what they consider to be, websites of ” innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. … free web-based sites that are user friendly.” What’s especially nice is the little icons that show which of our Shared Foundations each one addresses.

Bingo Cards & Word Searches are quick ways to engage students for reviewing content. Here are 3 sites that generate customized bingo cards on a 3×3, 4×4, or 5×5 grid: BingoBaker & ESLactivities both generate cards with words or graphics; MyFreeBingoCards has thematic backgrounds for words or numbers. WordSearchLab has already created searches, or create your own of any size and number of words.

5 Minute Lesson Plan Series – 37 different downloadable graphic templates to quickly create a lesson plan. Whatever your admin wants, you’ll probably find it here.

HyperDocs Interactive Content & Multimedia – As stated on the site: “The most difficult and time consuming part of creating a HyperDoc … is finding the content to engage your students in the learning process. I’ve curated several lists that I hope will help get your started.” There are a dozen categories with a varying number of websites with resources and tools.

Interactive Learning Menus (Choice Boards) – Ideas for differentiated learning that give students a menu or choice of learning activities; can be part of a HyperDoc. From Shake Up Learning.

Makerspace Starter Kit – The Daring Librarian, Gwyneth Jones, provides a list of great tools for starting a makerspace in your library.

Primary Source Sets – the Digital Public Library of America has more than 35 million digital resources including these curated collections on topics in history, literature, and culture, with teaching guides for class use.

Skype in the Classroom – Microsoft’s FREE go-to source for Virtual Field Trips, Guest Speakers, classroom connections, and live collaboration projects. I first heard about this from Stony Evans, and think it’s one of the most engaging activities you can do with students.

Smithsonian Learning Lab– free, interactive, easy-to-use tools using the millions of Smithsonian resources to adapt one of thousands of existing collections, or to create your own lessons, like digital research skills with built-in tools for creating & using proper citations.

Spruce Up Learning Centers w/ Tech – Tony Vincent’s blog post with lots of specific information and examples to make any learning station in your library that much better with technology.

READING PROMOTION

Biblionasium – sort of a GoodReads for kids; free, protected site for ages 6-13 to encourage independent reading. Use their tools to create book reviews, reading logs, and personalized reading lists.

Classroom Libraries: Best apps for keeping track – We Are Teachers blog post offers 6 apps teachers can use to keep track of their class books. Hey, they’re gonna have ’em, so we might as well support them…and they’ll love us for it and support the library even more!

NEW!Educational Resources For Individuals Working With Blind & Visually Impaired Children – children who are blind or visually impaired navigate a world primarily designed for sighted individuals. This site provides a comprehensive guide of resources, techniques, and organizations to help these children, including lessons & reading materials. Read the Comment below from William Moore to learn where this wonderful resource came from.

Librarians Love – nifty book talks and display ideas from secondary school librarians.

Library of Congress Center for the Book – a rich resource for librarians with recommended books, author webcasts, book awards, and the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled.

The Online Books Page – Plain website listing over 3 million free books on the Web, along with archives & indexes in languages around the world. This large database is maintained by a digital librarian at UPenn.

Social Justice Books – Booklists and other resources to help librarians build a diverse collection of titles and encourage a more culturally responsive reading experience for students.

State Award Reading Lists – This Simon & Schuster site has current Award Reading Lists from every state, along with curriculum, teaching, & reading group guides, themed collections, & reading levels. If you need labels for your State Award Reading List, they’re available as a customization in my Reading Promotion for ELA product at No Sweat Library, my TPT store.

SYNC – If you’ve never heard of this site, you are in for a treat. SYNC offers FREE audiobooks for teens every summer—2 complete audiobooks a week for 14 weeks. I always told students about it at their last library visit of the school year and provided a bookmark with a QR code link to the site.

TECHNOLOGY

AASL Best Apps for Teaching & Learning – As with the websites, AASL picks, what they consider to be, apps of “exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning.” They also have little icons to show which of our Shared Foundations each addresses.

BEAM Chart Maker – Yes, we teach students how to make spreadsheet data graphs, like MS Excel, but this online app is quick & easy. Just choose the style, click the graph element, and fill in the information. Graphics like this can add so much to those end-of-grading-period library reports for principals & teachers. (If you don’t do that, this is a great way to get started!)

GooseChase Edu – Free and reasonably priced options to create educational scavenger hunts with mobile technology (IOS or Android app). Students (or teachers!) earn points by submitting a photo, video, or text.

Internet Archive Digital Library – Hundreds of millions of important webpages and media. Their Wayback Machine is a searchable database of 20+ years of web history.

Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything – If you need information or guidance on educational technology, this is the place to go! Kathy has been blogging about edtech for more than 20 years and is still the best one-stop spot for general edtech info.

Media Literacy Educator Certification – Developed by PBS/KQED & Digital Promise, you can earn 8 media literacy micro-credentials to become a PBS Certified Media Literacy Educator.

Minecraft Education Edition – If you want to use Minecraft in your library, this site is the gateway to the education edition of the popular game. Special features for educators such as easy tutorials, classroom management tools, secure sign-in, classroom collaboration and tons of sample lessons, plus a global network of mentors and tech support.

100 Useful Websites for Educators and Students – With YA Books & More, Naomi Bates blogs about books, websites, and anything else a librarian might need. This page is a list of what she considers the most valuable website collection a librarian can have. It’s about 3 years old, but most of the links are still valid…and on my own “best” list!

Top 20 PowerPoint Alternatives – Post from the Visme blog offers an open-minded examination of free & paid apps to use for presentations. Video demos are helpful. (Heavy content, allow time to load in browser.)

You may be wondering about sites for information literacy or subject areas. Those are also huge unorganized lists, so we’ll save them for future blog posts. For now, have fun looking these over and adding them to your browser bookmarks. If you have some bookmarked sites on these 4 topics you’d like to share, add them into the comments!

Overdue School Library Books & How to Handle Student Excuses

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

Every year, about a month after school begins, School Librarians begin to tackle the recurring and everlasting problem of students with overdue library books. Each school seems to have its own special problems and each librarian contrives some unique solutions. There is, however, one constant for all of us: the clichéd excuses students offer about their overdue library book.

The excuses students give us for not returning books can be especially troublesome when they’re at the circulation desk and we’re trying to check out books for 30—or 60—students before the end of a period. However, if we understand the underlying cause of these overdue excuses, we can respond calmly and more productively. No matter if you are elementary, middle school, or high school, when we tell a student they have an overdue library book, the ‘reasons’ offered come in 3 forms: avoidance, blame, or contrition.

AVOIDING THE PROBLEM OF AN OVERDUE BOOK

An avoidance response is non-confrontational, and we don’t want to escalate it. We just need to provide a simple prompt to give the student a possible solution. Here’s how I handle 4 common avoidance excuses:

	This is a classic, spur-of-the-moment avoidance response. I tell the student the date the book was checked out, grab one of my handy overdue bookmarks, write the book title, and slip the bookmark into the new book as I check it out. When I hand the book to the student I ask them to ‘look in their locker and at home, and get it back to me as soon as they find it.’
	This is probably the truth, and why the book is overdue. I follow the same bookmark procedure and tell them I’m sure they’ll find it if they look around their locker and at home.
	With this excuse the student is embarrassed and doesn’t want us to make a big deal about it. I gently remind them I scanned their ID badge or they entered their ID number on the keypad, so they must have checked it out. I grab the overdue bookmark, add the title and, in this case, the date checked out, hand it over in their new book and give the standard ‘look in locker and at home’ request.
	This classic excuse is often a bluff in hopes we’ll let it go. Since even super-librarians make mistakes during check-in, I grab a sticky note, write the call number and title, and give it to the student telling them to go find the book on the shelf and bring it to me. If it’s a check-in mistake I scan the book and apologize, making a joke about ‘these darn computers’ or, in my case, ‘this gray hair.’ If they can’t find it, I follow the usual procedure with the overdue bookmark.

Students get a kick out of my ‘gray hair’ reference: I tell them my hair is gray because all the color has leaked out, and now I make a lot of mistakes because my brains are leaking out, too.

BLAMING SOMEONE ELSE FOR AN OVERDUE BOOK

Blame excuses are confrontational, and we definitely can’t let them go; however, we need to realize that blame is really avoidance accompanied by a fear of retribution. If we respond in a calm manner, offering a workable solution that puts the onus where it belongs, we’ll avoid escalating the situation by removing the fear. Here are 4 examples.

This is the universal middle school answer for anything that’s missing. If your school is like mine, a few library books do get shuffled around in the gym or cafeteria, so I simply sigh and sympathize that it happened, as I’m filling in the title on that handy overdue bookmark. Sympathy defuses the fear and when I hand the student the bookmark I tell them to take another look for it…just in case it’s in a locker or at home.
This excuse sounds like such a noble gesture, but it really shifts the burden of responsibility to another student. I ask if the other person is in the library, and if so, have them bring the book up to check it in and then I can check out the book to the newly responsible party. If the other student is not in the library, I gently remind the student that as long as the book is checked out to them, they are responsible for it, so they need to either get the book or the student into the library so we can solve the overdue…and I give them the overdue bookmark as a reminder.
This excuse implies the problem is our fault, but we can maintain our cool. I remind the student that we use our IDs for checkout so a mistake is unlikely, but since it is possible, they can help me by looking around for the book, in their locker or at home, and I hand them the overdue bookmark.
I lament this blame excuse, because I do have ELA teachers who tell students to put library books to return near their classroom door. Often other students grab a book they want to read before the teacher can return it. I have no control over this, so I tell the student to ask the teacher for permission to get the books from the classroom. If no, then I do an overdue bookmark and remind the student to check for the book in class the next day. Eventually someone does return it.

You’ll note that, during a book checkout, students whose accounts show an overdue get an overdue bookmark with the book title written on it. Why do I use this method? Because the student sees this bookmark every time they’re reading their current book and it prompts them to look for the overdue one and return it. I do run overdue notices at periodic intervals, but these bookmarks allow a friendly face-to-face conversation and tend to bring books back much more quickly.

You can download my Overdue Bookmarks Template from my FREE Librarian Resources page.

CONTRITE ABOUT THE OVERDUE…BUT…

Contrition is when a student admits to the overdue book but can’t return it for some reason. These excuses are easy to handle because the student accepts responsibility and just needs an opportunity to retrieve the book or a reminder to bring it back to the library. The worst thing we can do with these excuses is make a big deal about them, so I laugh and take them in stride.

	This is the typical excuse when a student has forgotten it’s a library day. I created a special ‘Library to Locker for Overdue Book’ Pass and I hand one to the student so they can get their book and return it. I have 6 numbered passes, to limit how many students are out and about during the period.
	I know this seems silly since the student just came from the classroom, but it proves my belief that middle schoolers are ‘brain dead’. I tell the student to ask the teacher’s permission to return to the classroom. The teacher knows these students better than I do, and who is trustworthy enough to allow this. If they don’t, the student gets the overdue bookmark and I usually get the book dropped off right after the class period or the next day at the start of the class period.
	This is an easy excuse to handle with some sympathy and the overdue bookmark. If it’s a long-time overdue, I’ll have the student leave a phone message to remind themselves to bring the book back to school. The kids find this funny; I find it works.
	Often a student says this as I pull up their account on the computer and they know they have somehow misplaced the book. When the book doesn’t show up on their account at all, they’re thrilled that it’s been turned back in to the library!
	If the ‘lost’ book still shows as overdue, I ask when they last saw the book as I fill out the overdue bookmark. We need to accept that students misplace things—after all, they’re still learning to become adults. I joke that the book must have been partying with the other books, and hand them their new book. The student laughs and says ‘Yes, Ms. P, it’s a book with legs!‘ We all have a good laugh and the book routinely turns up later on and is returned.

DO WE REALLY NEED A “SOLUTION” FOR OVERDUES?

Each morning during the last week of a grading period, I’d take a bookcart to a hallway where kids were getting into their lockers before first period. Reciting my mantra as I walked down the hall, “Library books, collecting library books!”, kids could easily grab books & put them on the cart. I’d do 2 hallways each morning, so by the end of the week I’d done all 9 hallways, and collected huge numbers of books. This tactic did minimize overdues.

Keep in mind that kids are busy. We adults have a single focus—our subject—and we often fail to appreciate that students must re-calibrate their brains 6 or 8 times a day for different subjects with different teachers in different classrooms. If they forget to return a school library book, we can be forgiving, especially since harsh repercussions don’t work and only alienate student readers. I’ve found 3 benevolent tactics that I believe we can all adopt:

Get rid of overdue book fines. Whatever the original reasoning behind fines, it doesn’t work. Fines keep books out of circulation and discourage students from returning books and checking out new ones to read, the opposite of what we are trying to accomplish.
Always allow a student to check out a book. We can limit a student to a single book if they have overdues, but depriving a student of a book does nothing in the moment to get that overdue back. Rather, it creates ill feeling toward us and the school library, and that’s just plain bad policy.
Quit thinking they’re “our” books, or even “the school’s” books. In a school library, the books belong to the students. They are provided for them and we are only the ‘warehouse manager’. A Facebook comment from School Librarian Jen M. Hash-Staley convinced me:

I always have missing books at the end of the year, I don’t let it bother me much anymore. Tax paying parents funded the purchase, so I like to think that they are enjoying a tax rebate. Crazy talk I know.

Going ballistic over overdues does nothing good. We need to figure out congenial ways to cajole students into returning overdue books. Having a friendly, non-judgmental policy toward overdues will increase both circulation and reading, and go a long way toward building positive attitudes toward the school library.

And remember, a student is always more valuable than a book!

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