Whitney Hammond's Blog for LBS 850

This class flew by. I learned a lot both in this class and in my new job. It's been almost three years since I graduated college and I finally feel like I know who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel secure in my job at SJP and I absolutely love it. This is the first job that I absolutely and completely love. It just fits and I am so happy. I think one of the most important things that I learned from this class was assistive technologies. It can be easy to forget about the types of technologies that will help students who may have learning disabilities or special needs. However, as librarians we cannot forget about these technologies and these students. Like my boss always said, our main job is to serve our patrons and our patrons are our students. I feel like I have a better understanding of adaptive and assistive technologies and how I can implement them into my own lessons.  I also enjoyed learning about new web tools and technologies. It is easy for us to...

Updated Technology Tips  It feels like I just came up with this list of technology tips yesterday. Sometimes I can't believe how time flies. Anyway, I really wouldn't change that much to my list, but I do think there are a few more tips that could be added and maybe could replace a few of the existing tips.   1) Learn more about adaptive and assistive technology. You may have students in your class who have special needs and they require different kids of technology to help them in their learning. Learn who is in charge of assistive technology in your school, it might be the librarian!  Why?  I would add this tip in because I didn't mention adaptive and assistive technology in my original list. You need to learn about tools that will help all of your students. 2) I mentioned how teachers should be more involved in social media but they should also look into gaming as well. There are fun games that students play at home and then there are educat...

When I started working at my first school library in 2018, I had never heard of Follett. I knew a little about library catalogs because of volunteering at my public library and using the catalog to reserve books. So when I started working in Ipswich, Follett was a like a whole new world. I really liked working with it because it was so simple compared to the the catalog I had worked with at my public library. Once my boss trusted me, she gave me administrator access to the catalog and I was able to add books, delete books, edit books, etc. and it felt great! I was able to teach myself how to use the system because it is a simple system to learn, for the most part. However, the more I used the program, the more weaknesses I found. Don't get me wrong, I still choose Follett as my top OPAC but there is no perfect OPAC. I talked with my boss about her thoughts on Follett as well. Here are a list of strengths and weaknesses that we came up with.  Strengths Organization  ...