Transform Your Library Space Recently, I’ve been looking back through photos of my media center at Stewart Middle Magnet from the past five years… As I look back over these photos, I’m struck by how the space slowly evolved over this span of time. It’s easy to just focus on all the big sweeping changes we … Read more
A few weeks ago, I had the honor and privilege of attending the School Library Journal Leadership Summit in Seattle, WA. It was an amazing weekend filled with sightseeing, learning and good times with friends old and new. I’m going to break up the experience with several posts, starting with today’s. School Tours in Seattle, … Read more
5 Easy Ways to Make Space for Innovation Our school libraries are no longer made up of the rows upon rows of stacks and hushed, immovable wooden desks. At least, not if we expect them to support the innovative learning styles of our students. The libraries of today need to be interactive learning environments … Read more
LEGO Wall Round-up: Celebrating a Year of Awesome One year ago today, I put up that last brick and finished building our Epic LEGO Wall at Stewart. Since then, I’ve been awed and humbled to see so many other schools build LEGO walls. In classrooms, in libraries, in hallways, on old mobile whiteboards. I can’t … Read more
Towards the beginning of this school year, we created a whiteboard wall in our library as a part of our Makerspace. Around the same time, we gave our instructional space a makeover which included four Bretford quarter round tables with whiteboard tops. Later in the year, we also added an Interior Concepts Collaboration table with a … Read more
Recently, I had the unfortunate experience of dealing with criticism. I was told (not to my face) by a visitor to our school that our library makerspace is not a “real makerspace”. This same person stated that our woodshop is a “real makerspace” because it has power tools. She suggested that I “do some research” on … Read more
Over the past five years, we have redesigned our media center and transformed it into a more flexible, collaborative space. This is the story of how we got there, and how you can apply what we learned as you rethink your library space. Want to learn even more about transforming your library space? Check out my … Read more
(Post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase using them, I get a small commission that helps support running this blog) The Story of our Awesome Whiteboard Wall This past week, our library and Makerspace got one more step awesome with the addition of our whiteboard wall. This was a project that I had dreamed … Read more
The Great Library Makeover Back in August I blogged Part 1 of how we’ve been making over our library this year. We’ve been really busy since then with lots of good changes, including new computers and narrower library shelves in the fiction section. Part 2 is going to focus more on our new flexible, collaborative … Read more
If you’re the type of person who loves to print instructions out, I’ve created a printable pdf just for you 🙂 Click here for a free download! Building an EPIC LEGO WALL This post is a tutorial on how to build your own Epic LEGO Wall. I’ve had many, many people ask me … Read more