Sorry about the mid-day posts these last few days. I’ve been in branch, and too wiped to write posts the night before. I’m working from home for the rest of the week, so I’ll be back to my scheduled flurry of posts during the day.
What’s up in the land of Professional Development? Well, I’ve discovered some more fun tools, thanks to the Library Voice blog. It’s primarily for school librarians, but I love exploring school librarian tools and lessons, because they have some great ideas. Sure enough, the Library Voice’s 25 Days of Digital Tools introduced me to some wonderful new toys to play with – and short videos on how librarians use them! The one I want to holler about today is Padlet. As a colleague put it, “It’s almost like Pinterest, without the ads”. It’s a virtual online bulletin board that you and your colleagues can share and work on together, like a Google Doc. This is fantastic for those of us in Readers Advisory, because how many times have you answered the phone or had a patron come in and ask for books, and have your mind go completely blank? I read over 200 books a year, but if a parent calls me and asks for picture books about dinosaurs, my brain resets to “567.9” or “How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?” What about the days when there’s no children’s librarian available and someone calls for RA? Having a padlet of booklists gives us the chance to collaborate on booklists with our colleagues and have RA at our fingertips when answering reference and RA questions in an area we may not be as knowledgeable about.
It’s free to start a Padlet, and you get three boards with your free account. Here, I’ve started my three: YA, Books for Grownups, and Children and Middle Grade Booklists. Once you establish your Padlets, you can add to each of them – and that’s where the fun begins.
Here’s a glimpse of my Children and Middle Grade Padlet. I can make any number of lists within the Padlet. Think of each Padlet as a binder, and within the binder, you have sections for each of your subjects. Here, in my Children’s and Middle Grade Padlet, I can make booklists with Arts & Crafts, Fun Facts, Realistic Fiction, Historical Fiction, and I can even deep dive into niche things like “Winter”, “Grandparents”, “First Day of School”, and more. You can add pictures, links, text, anything you want to make this resource yours.
I ran this by a few of my friends from our library system, and they loved it! So we’re collaborating on it together, and there are so many ideas, so many ways to work with this. I’m really looking forward to developing this over the next few months.
And now… I know I stick to kids and YA, but I’ll give you a sneak peek at my Romance padlet. Because I’m fairly new to Romancelandia, being a newish reader in the genre, and because everyone, EVERYONE loves Netflix’s Bridgerton, so you can expect to be getting a lot of calls and visits about readalikes (remember Downton Abbey?) I’ve started putting one together, so please forgive the patchiness – it’s in its fledgling stages.
Customize your background, how you want your info laid out, and share links for viewing and/or editing, all for free. Three Padlets gives you a lot of freedom to work, so you can get a real taste of it before thinking about whether you want to upgrade.
I haven’t started my YA one just yet – just created the list heads, so I’ll share when I have it a little more populated. You can also visit the Padlet Gallery to see other Padlets and get more ideas, and you can follow other Padlet folx! Very excited to play around and learn with this one. If you’re using Padlet, shoot me a link so I can see what you’ve got! You can find me here.
Mom Read It 