Summary of Practicum Experience - Kent State University



Summary of Practicum Experience

Trent Roberts

My practicum experience was served in Springfield Local School District in Akron, Ohio, under school library media specialist Dodi Zbuka. I served one hundred plus hours from April 28th, 2009 till June 4th, 2009. I also served a full school day on October 8th to gather experience and accomplish one of my objectives of ordering and processing materials purchased for the school district. Most of my time during the practicum experience was served at the high school except for when we delivered materials to other schools or when we worked on shutting down the Lakemore Elementary library and distributing its materials to other libraries in the district. In the Springfield Local School District, Dodi Zbuka is the only certified school librarian. She is primarily located at the high school. The rest of the school libraries are managed by library aides who handle primary library duties, such as circulation.

My first week at the practicum I was introduced to many different teachers, staff, and administrators. I was given the opportunity, at this time, to market myself and my services to them. I was also escorted around the school and was made familiar with my office, the lunch room, the administrator offices, the principal’s office, available parking, and where the classrooms were located. We also took a trip during available time to see the other schools. During my first week of service, we talked about what I wanted to accomplish and expected from the experience. Here I reiterated my goals and objectives we had discussed months in advance and I was given the opportunity to exclaim that my main purpose was to assist her, the students, and the school in anyway possible. I told her that the students’ and her needs came first and that my overall goal was to be of assistance. Finally, I began cataloging new and old materials for the libraries and we remodeled the library and its bulletins to market a student art exhibit being held in the library and to make the library useable by the art students for their art exhibit and for the visitors.

The second week of the experience consisted of getting familiar with different technology and media tools that Dodi wanted to share with the students and the teachers so that they could use it in their studies and future endeavors. During this week Mrs. Zbuka introduced me to Google Docs and the ability to use it for word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and etc. She wanted to teach the students and the teachers about this because the Microsoft Software locked up many of the computers and the speed of the internet, which lead to poor use of the computers. We also discussed many of the electronic resources available for students to use for research projects. After I came familiar with these tools and resources, we developed a lesson for Mr. Graves’s history class that introduced these tools to the teacher and the students for use on their country report and other research and presentation projects. Dodi took the first class to see how the lesson would go and what would work and then I taught the same lesson to the other history classes taught by Mr. Graves. During this second week of service, Dodi and I attended a library meeting with other librarians in the region where we discussed closing activities for the end of the academic school year. Finally, we put workflows onto my laptop so that I could do work at home with the catalog, if need be, and the final two days of the week I mentored over Mr. Graves history classes in using electronic databases available through the school and helped them use Google Docs to make a PowerPoint presentation and a typed document of their country report.

For week three I continued on helping Mr. Graves’s history classes with their country reports and gathering of information by way of the electronic databases available to the school. Every time there was one of his classes in the library I would act as the collaborating teacher and would mentor the students on use of the tools. The lesson for his class and the mentoring was such a success that Mrs. Bauer and her Health classes and Mrs. Miller and her Science classes requested the same lesson and handouts on electronic databases but for their respected subject and for assistance to the students as they researched and completed their reports. This request happened at the end of the week and would go into the following week. Dodi and I would also during this week go to Lakemore to go through some of the books that they had and boxes and found books that she wanted to keep for the other libraries and ones she wanted to weed from the collection entirely. At this point an unexpected event happened where just a day after going to the closed school library at Lakemore, higher school authorities offered up most of the books that we had planned to weed and possibly relocate to other elementary libraries to an educational program that was taking over the shutdown school. This ended our plans of weeding and pulling materials and placing them in the other libraries. This also ended our plans of shutting down the elementary school efficiently and effectively. Also during this week Mrs. Zbuka and I went to an author presentation at Odom Library where we were introduced to Terry Trueman, author of Stuck In Neutral, and talked to him about possibly doing an author visit the next time he was in Ohio. He said he would be really interested and gave us his card. Finally, Dodi took me on a ride in the area to learn more about the demographics of the area and where the students came from, continued my cataloging of new materials, and subbed for an art class for one period at the end of the day because of an emergency.

Since the week before we learned that we would not be able to do as we planned at Lakemore, Dodi and I came up with a new project for me to undertake that would assist the students, school, staff, and myself. We learned around this time that the SchoolRooms collection of resources would not be available for access due to budget cuts so before they made it unavailable, I began a Google webpage that was similar to SchoolRooms and had many of the same links so that our staff and students would have access to it. Due to the time constraint, we decided that the links related to the subject of English were the most important to gather up because they were the ones who used it the most and was most useful to. This week I began the hard work of gathering up as many links as possible for this Google webpage accessible by only students at Springfield High School. I worked on this Google page when Mrs. Bauer’s Health class was not in the library and needed assistance with their Health projects. Also, I began the process of shutting down the high school library by printing out cataloging reports such as “List of items w/ xx calls, Title w/o copies, Review lists of missing items, and Review lists of transit items” and started putting them in legible fashion so that we could start finding and eliminating these materials from the list before the end of the school year. Finally, this week I discussed with Dustin, the technology specialist, about ways to use Google Docs for testing and grading for next year I continued cataloging new materials and covered and labeled others, and took materials that were finished being converted to different libraries to other libraries.

The fifth week consisted of working heavily on eliminating materials from the cataloging reports created the week before. During this time I went through the collection at the high school and also traveled with Dodi to the other school libraries in order to find missing materials or items that have been in transit for quite some time. Also, during this week I worked heavily on the Google page that we were putting educational links related to the subject of English. I was able to gather up a lot of links relevant to English that dealt with writing, researching, citing, and etc. that would come in handy for teachers and students the following school year. Finally, I placed call numbers and labels on new books that came in and put them on their shelves and also made new end of the year reports for Dodi to have after nearly finishing the other reports.

The final week, and the day I came in October, consisted of finishing up the Google page of numerous links for the English department. I was able to get to a point where I gathered up enough links suitable to the subject that was satisfying to the English department and Mrs. Zbuka. We also made one last trip to a few other elementary schools looking for missing books or in transit books. After exhausting the search, we left the list of still missing or in transit with the aides so that they could keep an eye out for the materials. The last two days of the practicum consisted of setting up the library for a retirement party for Mrs. Miller, the Science teacher, who was retiring at the end of the year. Finally, I came in one full day in October in order to gain experience purchasing materials where I was shown and given the opportunity to go through whole process of purchasing material for the library and putting in an order with the given budgets.

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