I am beyond excited! I’m making major headway on a project I started (and stalled on) last summer – cataloging all my school books with LibraryThing. LibraryThing is a comprehensive web-based cataloging service that allows you to enter, tag, organize, review, rate and SHARE your books and/or entire library with others. Yes, share! The whole thing, not just a book at a time. Not only am I going to be more organized at school, I’m also going to be able to connect and share resources with others, especially with other school counselors. LibraryThing is also available via mobile devices, but you do not need a smartphone to use it. Here’s how you can get started too!

The Basics

LibraryThing came highly recommended to me via a professor of library and information science. It pulls information about books from the Library of Congress, Amazon, and about 700 other sources around the world. It is even used by some libraries! LibraryThing enables people to connect and search each others’ libraries – so, for example you could:

• gather information about which books other school counselors use on topics such as bullying, friendship, curriculum, etc.
  
• co-manage a library with another counselor in your school
  
• set up a book-lending program with other school counselors in your area
• pass your cataloged library on to the next school counselor when you change schools or retire (and take it with you at the same time!)
  

One of a number of ways that you can view your library. There are 6 basic styles, all customizable, so you have a crazy number of options. You can sort by title, author, tag, tags, date, rating, etc. Here the books sorted by the order in which I entered them.

If you can’t remember the title but think the book cover will jog your memory, try this view.

You can just enter your books and leave it at that, but tagging your books will allow you to categorize them according to how you think of them. For example, one person might prefer to tag Have You Filled a Bucket Today? with the tag “kindness.” Another might choose “friendship,” “school climate,” or “PBiS.” Somebody else might use some or all of those tags. Tags help you when you want to search or sort your books. For example, if I wanted to find all my books that were about bullying and involved secrets, I would enter “bullying” and “secret” into the Search Your Books box. (If I searched all of LibraryThing with those terms I would find books that other people had tagged with those terms.) Here’s what came up, even with the limited number of books I have entered so far:

All of your books go into your catalog (“Your books”). Within your catalog you can designate collections: Your Library (books you own), Wishlist, To read, Read but unowned, Currently reading, Favorites, as well as custom collections that you create, such as Loaned. You do not have to use collections, but it’s easy to do, and provides another level of organizational power. Books can belong to one or more collections at the same time.

By default your library is set to public, and you are connected to the 50 LibraryThing libraries that are most similar to yours. (It is possible to set your library or some of your books to private, but this does limit some of the features, including mobile access.) You can also connect by making friend requests or custom connections. Because I’m right in the middle of the process, I haven’t made a link to my library yet, but I plan too once it is closer to being done. I hope that other school counselors will do so too!

Adding your books to LibraryThing

I started the LibraryThing process late last summer and thought, “I’ll just add a few books now and then during the year.” Ha! The last two book entries I made before yesterday were November and September 2011! But I now absolve myself of all guilt about not keeping up with the impossible because in the interim adding books got MUCH easier! Procrastinators and The Overworked give yourself a big old pat on the back for waiting until now!

Adding books was already simple, by manually typing in the title or ISBN number or using a USB barcode scanner. Now, using your iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone makes it a total breeze. If you don’t have a smartphone, don’t despair! You can still do it the old way without much difficulty: do Step 1 below then skip to the next section. (Find out about LibraryThing’s Cuecat USB scanner here. Or just type where it says “Add Books.” I mostly did.) To add books to your LibraryThing library with your smartphone, follow these simple steps. I have an iPhone, so that’s what I’ll be telling you about, but the process for other smartphones should be very similar. It looks like a long process, but it’s really very fast. I’m just trying to be REALLY clear in case this tech stuff feels intimidating.

1. Create your LibraryThing account.

2. Download the Red Laser app onto your phone. It’s free.

3. Use Red Laser to scan the ISBN numbers of a bunch of books. It’s easy – your phone will beep as soon as it has captured each book’s info. Keep scanning. (I took 3 or 4 books through the whole process the first time through just to make sure that it would work.) I keep my books in baskets according to topic, and did them basket by basket, which helped save even more time because I was able to use the mass tagging feature. But you could do any old mixed up pile. I did as many as 45 at a time, because that was the greatest number I had in a basket. You could do more.

4. After you’ve scanned your pile, on your phone select:

• HISTORY
• EDIT & SHARE
• SELECT ALL
• SHARE
• EMAIL

5. Email the list to yourself. Open the email, click on the downloadable link, and select OPEN WITH EXCEL (or a similar option provided by your computer.)

6. An excel spreadsheet will open up, but the ISBN numbers will have been magically changed into formulas by the evil wizard of the Internet. Fear not! Select:

• the FORMULAS tab
• SHOW
• SHOW FORMULAS

Use the Formulas tab and select SHOW

Make the checkbox appear next to Show Formulas. Then copy the column of ISBN numbers.

• Highlight and copy the whole column of ISBN numbers.

7. Go to your LibraryThing account and select:

• the ADD BOOKS tab
  
• IMPORT BOOKS (it’s at the bottom left)
• paste into the PASTE TEXT box
• GRAB
  
• add a mass tag if all the books you’ve imported share a common feature (see photo below)
• IMPORT
• You might have to wait a little while because your books just went into a queue with other peoples’. Maybe mine! Don’t worry, your new books will soon appear.

Mass tag if you want. Or not. Then import.

Tagging, reviewing, and adding info

And you’re done! For some books you may want to add additional tags or put them in specific collections (You can do this at any time.) You can add reviews and descriptions too. (I haven’t done much of that yet.) You don’t have to limit yourself to books that you own. You can add books that you use from the school or public library, books that you want to buy, books that you want to investigate further, etc. Just tag them as such or put them in the appropriate collection and you’ll be able to access your list any time.

You can choose from a number of ways to sort (by title, author, tag or tags, etc.) and view your books. Take a little time to think about how you want to tag your books, and if you want to use one or multiple tags. I decided that it was important for me to know where my books are, so I use an asterisk to indicate not only a subject tag, but also location (e.g. in the friendship book basket, with my fourth grade class council materials, at the public library, etc.) In the picture below you will notice that I have tagged The Hurt with “feelings,” “safety,” and “*first grade.” It will now turn up in searches that have any one or combination of those tags (or the word “hurt”) and the asterisk-ed tag tells me that the book can be found with my first grade teaching materials. You can also see how I ranked it, and my review. In this case, since I already wrote a blog post about how I use The Hurt, I added the link as part of my review. (In the future I’d also like to add links from individual books to reviews by Roxanne at Books That Heal Kids and other bloggers so that I – and you! – can see their ideas about how to use the books too.)

There is tons of info here and room to add lots more. You have to be able to scroll down to get the full effect.

Troubleshooting is easy!

Occasionally your book will show up without a cover photo. All you have to do then is take a picture of the book with your phone and email it to yourself (or use a camera and load the photo onto a computer.) You can add a cover photo by selecting the edit pencil to get to your book’s main page, selecting CHANGE COVER, and uploading your picture to LibraryThing. Or you can leave it with a blank cover –LibraryThing gives you a bunch of choices of those, too!

But what if a book isn’t listed in the Library of Congress or on Amazon? No problem! You just add the book manually. Here’s how I did it for a book written by some previous students that I still use with other students who are having trouble getting along.

Here’s how to add a book that doesn’t show up automatically.

LibraryThing on your phone and iPad/tablet

You can use LibraryThing on any smartphone and iPad or tablet by using its web browser. There’s no special app, but you can make an app-like icon for iPhones and iPads (maybe other phones and tablets too, but I’m not sure.) Here’s a simple video that shows you how to make your own app icon. It was so easy that I finished doing it before the video was over. (For the iPad app icon use www.librarything.com as the address. For the iPhone app icon use www.librarything.com/m as the address.) You have full access to the site with your iPad or tablet. On your smartphone you can view your library and search title, author, tags, or ISBN number. You can’t add directly into your library via your phone if you’re out and about, but you can use Red Laser to collect titles and then email them to yourself to import later.

You can easily make LibraryThing apps for your phone and iPad. Here’s what it looks like.

I chose LibraryThing to catalog my books because:

• I wanted to use a web-based cataloging system that would be accessible on any computer, my phone, and my iPad (with no need to sync)
• I wanted to be able to share the whole library with others (and pass it along to my eventual replacement at school)
• it provides deep and comprehensive book information and categorization, search, and sort features.

But LibraryThing is not your only option. If you only want mobile access on iPhone or iPad and aren’t interested in sharing libraries, you could try the Book Crawler app. Danielle at School Counselor Blog has a post about it here and Andrea from JYJ Counselor has a review of the iPad app here.  If you’re a Book Crawler user and want to use LibraryThing try this: It seems to me that since you can export your list of Book Crawler books into Excel (as Danielle explains) then you should be able to use the Excel list (titles or ISBN numbers) to import your books into LibraryThing (as shown above). I don’t have Book Crawler so I haven’t tried it, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has! Here’s another way to compare the two: The Book Crawler app is $1.99. I haven’t heard anything about limitations on numbers of books, but it does require that you have an iPhone or iPad. LibraryThing is available on any computer or mobile device for the first 200 books, but costs $10/year or $25/life for an unlimited number of books. (I will go over 200 books, but the comprehensive cataloging and sharing and other features make $25 worth it to me. I could get school to pay, but don’t want to wait for the purchase order process now that I’m on a roll.)

I was going to wait until I had my library all done and beautiful before I shared it with you, but then I realized if I waited until I finished it could be the end of the summer and then you might be stuck in the same school-year vortex that I was last year! I’ll share it as soon as I get it done-ish, but meanwhile you could get started too if you want. I won’t have many reviews or descriptions because I’m going to add those “now and then during the year” . . . Um, on second thought, maybe you should check back about that next summer. Oh well, I’ll try, anyway!

I am anxiously awaiting the release of eduClipper, a tool for capturing and sharing educational content – links, images, videos, documents, and uploaded files. I am an avid user of Pinterest, but am looking forward to having eduClipper at my disposal too.  Here’s why:

• it’s school friendly and student safe
• clipboards can be private or public
• you can share your individual clips and clipboards with users and non-users alike, including students
  
• students can build and/or share their own clipboards
• all content is searchable

It hasn’t been released for everyone yet, although a few lucky beta users got to start using it as of this week. But you can sign up for eduClipper now so that you will have it as soon as it is available! Want to learn more? Here’s a video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ky8rpvsyO9c]

I hope to  use eduClipper to create clipboards containing collections of:

• all the resources I use for particular lessons and units, for my own reference and for sharing with School Counseling by Heart followers  (I’m hoping other school counselors will do the same!)
• resources I’d like to use or investigate further
• information and resources for parents
• links for students to use to explore a particular topic during a lesson or group or later at home

I’m also looking forward to exploring how to have students create their own clipboards. And I imagine that I will probably share individual clips from time to time. I’m sure there are many other ways I’ll find to use eduClipper. How will you use it?

I am incredibly lucky to live in a lovely, peaceful spot in Vermont, and really the only downside (other than Mud Season, which is exactly like it sounds) is the unreliable access we have to Internet and cell phone coverage. It works most of the time, but sometimes . . . Yesterday I had a 1:00 appointment to talk, via Skype, to Jeff from The Counseling Geek about how I use technology in my counseling program. At 12:56, – poof! – the Internet connection disappeared. Plan B – use my phone. Jeff Skyped in and I moved to the spot outside where we tend to get the best coverage . . . Suffice it to say that my cell coverage dropped to one bar, and technological difficulties ensued. Jeff managed the technology and I scurried around my house until I found the one little corner that had two bars, and we finished the interview. Jeff was a great model for how to manage frustration!

And he helps others manage their frustration too, by sharing tech tips and clear explanations of how different tools can be used, in his blog, The Counseling Geek! Check it out – Jeff has definitely helped me feel more confident about using technology.

Jeff the Counseling Geek successfully outmagic-ed the Curse of the Internet (problem solving on the fly = school counselor reality), and completed the video of the interview. Wait til you see his cool intro! There are a few wonky moments during the one-bar stretch - if you’ve ever wondered what I would look like if my face was melting off of my skull, you’re in luck -  but it gets better after a bit. This is the second interview in a series that Jeff is doing with school counselors and counselor educators about how they use technology. Here’s how I use it:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpo8-1r8eiE&feature=youtu.be&hd=1]

Feeling overwhelmed by the out-of-control number of tasks on my plate, I posted the following status on the School Counseling by Heart Facebook page on Friday:

I need an app that will create a 3-D to-do list. Two dimensions are not enough to wrangle all these tasks into manageability! #IthinkIcanIthinkIcan

Ask and Ye May Receive! I found a solution! But first, the problem:

Now, I’m a fairly well-organized person. I am a good list-maker and rememberer. I use the Any.Do and Wunderlist apps, handwritten lists, Post-it notes, colored pens, highlighters, and have even been known to write on my hand occasionally. However,  sometimes a simple list – even one with sub-lists – doesn’t cut it, and heaven knows my brain can’t always hold all the details at once! And this might be why:

Photo credit: iDoneThis.com

Master the Art of the To-Do List by Understanding How They Fail is a fascinating article (well, fascinating for those of us who are organizing geeks) that provides some insights into the to-do list problem, as well as reassurance that you’re getting more done than you think.

Right now I’m juggling finishing up and assessing units in two grades, beginning units – one brand new, utilizing technology I haven’t used before – in two grades, preparing two January inservice staff presentations, identifying, contacting, and coordinating community members for a career fair, managing a new semester of the Big Brother/Big Sister program (which has been very challenging this year – prodding elementary students to do what they’re supposed to is one thing, inspiring college students to follow through on their commitments is another!), starting new rounds of groups, re-juggling my individual counseling schedule, completing one FBA and starting another, compiling my portfolio for recertification, readying myself and my mentee for our mentoring program observation, gathering data for a PBiS Data Days workshop, plus accomplishing all the usual stuff and taming the gigantic pile of administrative tasks I’ve fallen behind on. And that’s just January – that I know about so far. And probably I forgot something.

But life is good! About an hour after writing that Facebook status, I stumbled upon iBrainstorm, a free iPad app which allows you to use a combination of sticky Post-it-type notes and freehand drawing and writing.  It looks great for brainstorming, but I immediately thought, “Ding-ding-ding-ding! Here’s the answer to my 3D list problem!” I created iBrainstorm projects for some of the larger tasks and very quickly felt clear-headed, relieved, and motivated to tackle them. Here’s what my January Inservice Training iBrainstorm project looks like:

Now all I have to do is DO the tasks! I’m anticipating great joy when I delete the stickies! I’m also planning to try out iBrainstorm as a tool for Post-it Note Counseling. I think for most kids the tactile experience of moving actual Post-it notes is part of the process, but using the iPad might be motivating for some. I’m also looking forward to trying a brainstorming session with my counseling colleague or even some students. Multiple users can contribute to a project by using the iPhone iBrainstorm app to “flick” ideas from a nearby, connected iPhone to the iPad. You can see my “test flick” sticky in the middle of the picture above.

Here’s a video with more information about iBrainstorm:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oKFpEMG3BF4]

Good luck with your to-do list! I know it’s just as crazy as mine. But here’s hoping that it sometimes looks like this!

You might also be interested in:

Guerilla Planning

Doin’ My Thing with Library Thing

Post-it Note Counseling

I’m always tweaking and working to improve my lessons and units – I want to make sure that they’re meaningful and engaging, and that kids are learning and applying what they’ve learned in real-life settings. Also, I am addicted to just love figuring out how to incorporate new ideas and techniques! (Which may have something to do with why my to-do list is completely ridiculous.)  Most recently, I set my sights on my fourth grade bullying prevention unit. Even though this unit has been impactful and well-received, I wanted to: (1) experiment with how integrating technology and art might expand kids’ understanding about bullying; (2) see how this could help me assess student learning; and (3) increase my knowledge about how best to address the Common Core standards within the counseling curriculum. It was a LOT of work, but the outcome has been amazing!

The foundations of the unit did not change. As always, we reviewed what the kids had learned in previous years and added fourth grade level content. (See the scope and sequence of our K-5 bullying prevention lessons in Spiraling Bullying Prevention). Lessons included read aloud, video clips, book studies, writing, and role playing. The kids took turns re-teaching concepts at the beginning of each class.  At the conclusion of the unit the students shared what they had learned and I assessed it. But here’s what did change:

• The theme of the unit was built around a non-fiction text. 
• Bullying prevention concepts were explored not only by talking, listening, reading, and writing, but also through acting, movement, music, and art.
  
• Students used technology to share information and advice about bullying prevention by using GlogsterEdu and creating videos with iPads. 
• I used technology to assess their learning by reviewing their Glogs and videos, and by using a Google Forms survey and Wallwisher/Padlet.   

The new unit included one informational lesson, five literature-based lessons, 3 technology-based classes, and an evaluative wrap-up session. Collaborative arts integration activities – a collage unit taught by the art teacher and an acting/movement/performance project directed by a classroom teacher – built on and expanded the counseling lessons.

There’s a LOT here - I decided to put it all together so those who were interested in the whole project wouldn’t have to click to a bunch of different posts - but if you’re interested in only the lessons, or the technology or arts integration, you can find what you want by looking at the headings. You’ll find the ASCA and Common Core State Standards that the unit addressed at the end of the post.

Lesson 1: Goal, Concepts, Challenge

I started the unit by introducing our essential question: “How can we work together to prevent and stop bullying?” and explaining that we would be discovering answers to this question as we worked to understand the problem in many different ways. We talked about the question and what we had learned so far at the beginning of each lesson.  In the first lesson we reviewed and learned more about concepts that they had learned about in previous years:

• Bullying = Danger: You MUST tell an adult!      
• Definition: Bullying is done on purpose to hurt, happens over and over, involves an imbalance of power, and is upsetting to the target.    
• Four Types of Bullying: Verbal, Physical, Social, Intimidation.   
• How to maintain or regain your power instead of giving it away to kids who are bullying.
• Ignoring the bully helps you keep your power, but you should never ignore the bullying.

To help them understand that kids can make a difference, we listened to the song “Stand” by Charleigh Gere. Not only does the song give advice about standing up, the very fact that Charleigh, who attends the middle school in our district, wrote it and was sharing it with kids around the world modeled how to do so. The lesson ended with a challenge – “Think about what YOU can do to stop bullying.” The kids begged to listen to this song in every subsequent class, and a few days later three girls handed me the lyrics to a song they had written! You can listen to or download “Stand” for free here:

Lessons 2 & 3: Goodbye Bully Machine   

We spent the next two lessons reading Goodbye Bully Machine by Debbie Fox and Allan L. Beane. Why two lessons to read one short book? So that we would have plenty of time to fully explore and understand the information provided by the text and illustrations. This was important for addressing the Common Core standards around complex informational (non-fiction) text and visual literacy. (I’ll have more information about this in an upcoming post.) It also provided the foundation for the arts integration activities that were based on the book.

Goodbye Bully Machine is a must-have book and is appropriate for elementary, middle, and high school students.

Arts Integration: Theater and Movement  

Before I brought Goodbye Bully Machine into the classes, I spoke with one of the fourth grade teachers; Lanni is new to our school this year, but I knew she had a background in theater. I wondered if she could help facilitate a machine-themed theater game in her class; if it wasn’t too complicated, maybe I would bring it to the other classes as well.  All I was imagining was something simple with just her class, but you can see from the video below what we got! Wowzer! By the time we had read the first half of the book, Lanni had already come up with an artistic vision. The kids headed off to Library, Lanni and I took the idea to the other fourth grade teachers, and Boom! we had a plan for the whole fourth grade to perform in a staged version of the book. We used some of my class time for rehearsals. The fourth grade teachers miraculously found other common times for (the surprisingly few) rehearsals, which I attended when possible. The kids were so motivated to share their knowledge through movement and performance that they managed their behaviors really well. 

The Goodbye Bully Machine performance not only reinforced what the actors were learning about bullying prevention, it helped the audience members learn too. All the other K-5 classes came to see it, and teachers reported that they had great conversations about bullying following the performance. When my counseling partner and I went into other grade levels to teach bullying prevention, kids were definitely drawing on understandings that had grown out of seeing the book brought to life. We were recently invited to a school in a nearby town to perform Goodbye Bully Machine for their students, so we’re going on the road – The Bully Prevention Road! The integration of theater into the bullying prevention unit was a happy surprise, but integrating art had been planned all along.

Arts Integration: Collage    

Last spring, I showed our art teacher a copy of Goodbye Bully Machine and asked her if she would like to collaborate by doing a collage unit based on the book while I was teaching the bullying prevention unit. I sent her links to the free Leader’s Guide from Free Spirit Publishing. To sweeten the deal, I suggested that the project would be a great goal for her Professional Development and Evaluation Plan, and offered to help her write it up. She jumped right on board.

As we were reading and discussing the book and it’s concepts in our classroom counseling lessons, I told the kids that they would be making their own bully machine and bullying prevention collages, so they should think about what kinds of images and words they would want to include.  The goal was for the kids to create bully machines and something that could counteract the bully machine, which ended up becoming the Bully Freedom Quilt. You will notice that these are not as well-conceived as the bully machines. They ran out of time in art class and had to move on to another unit, so they didn’t have enough conceptual time to fully develop their bully freedom ideas into cohesive visual themes, but you can see from the words they chose that they definitely had gained understanding of actions and attitudes that can prevent and stop bullying. Here is their work:

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The collage unit in art did not take much of my time. My lessons on the book served as pre-teaching for art class, but I would have been reading the book anyway. I went into art only one time with one of the classes to help them use the computers to create the words for their collages. This was mostly to help the art teacher feel comfortable with the technology; the kids already knew how to manipulate text fonts and sizes in Word.

Lesson 4: Understanding the Perspectives of Targets, Bystanders, and Kids Who Bully  

Back in our counseling classes, we were exploring literature about bullying. For the fourth lesson, we used the books Weird, Dare, and Tough by ­­­­­ Erin Frankel. I learned about these books from a review posted on Books That Heal Kids, and immediately bought them. The kids LOVED them, and they are at the top of my list of books about bullying, as in – If you only have enough money for three books about bullying, get these! (FreeSpirit, the publisher of Goodbye Bully Machine, does it again!) The books all tell the same story, but each one is from the perspective of either the target, the bystander, or the kid who is bullying. The stories are very true-to-life and the illustrations provide additional information not described in the text; both make it easy for kids to understand and empathize with the characters. Without explicitly saying so, the books echo the central concept of Goodbye Bully Machine - that everyone’s attitudes and actions/inactions contribute to bullying, and bystanders, targets, and bullies all need to make changes in order for it to stop.

Here’s how we used the books: I divided the class up into three groups, and had each group read one of the books.  In one class I purposely didn’t tell the kids ahead of time that the books told the same story, so that they could have an “aha moment” when we discussed the books as a class. I did tell the second class ahead of time because I wanted to see if there would be any difference in their learning. Both worked well, but I chose to tell the third class ahead of time, because I thought it would work best for that particular group. (In the future I will use whichever way I think will work best for each class.)  I directed the groups to read the book through, then refer back to the text while discussing and collecting information on the form I had given them. Then, as a whole group we discussed what it feels like to be a target, bystander, and bully; how each of the characters helped build the bully machine; and what they did to destroy the bully machine. The kids were so excited about these books and asked me to leave them in the classrooms when I wasn’t using them. Almost all of them read the two books they hadn’t read in class during silent reading time! (For more great lessons to use with these books, check out Savvy School Counselor.)   

Lessons 5 & 6: Bullying Book Study

We had already read books as a whole class and in small groups. In this next lesson, kids worked individually on book studies, reading and reviewing bullying books. I brought a pile of bullying books at different reading levels with me to class. After I did a brief intro to each book, students selected and read their books, then filled out a report form on which they recorded the title and author, the type(s) of bullying that occurred, the actions that made the bullying stop, and why they would recommend the book. If they finished, they chose another book to read. For subsequent books they could decide whether or not they wanted to fill out a report form. During our 6^th lesson, students presented information about their books and recommendations to the class. (For more info about book studies, check out Book Studies: They Learn, You Assess.) Here are the book study and other books we read during the unit: 

Lessons 7, 8, &9: Integrating Technology   

Whenever possible I like to provide a way for kids to share what they have learned; it helps their own learning and that of others, and gives me a means of assessment.  In other years I’ve had the kids make posters, write, or present, but this year they each created a glog, an online poster through GlogsterEDU. The guidelines for the bullying prevention glogs were that they had to include:

• three pieces of bullying prevention information
• a book recommendation based on their book study
• a video of themselves giving bullying prevention advice

The kids had made one simple glog previously, so they were not starting from scratch, but I did need to provide a bit of help with some of the tech aspects of the project.  What they didn’t need help with was the content, even though our glog-creating sessions happened in the new year, weeks after we had finished our lessons! Their learning was so phenomenal that I only needed to provide reminders to a few kids about making sure that the info they were including was fourth grade level and not just “don’t bully.” The glogs took anywhere from 2-3 class sessions, depending on the student. When they were finished they helped others with tech issues or looked at others’ completed glogs. (We definitely could have kept it to 2 sessions if the kids were more familiar with Glogster or if I had some more student helpers.)  You can look at a couple of bullying prevention glog examples too, by clicking on the image below!

Click the image to experience the real thing. A picture just doesn’t do a glog justice!

The kids made their bullying prevention advice videos by filming each other with my iPad. We did this whenever we could squeeze in the time: before school, at snack, during group, etc. They were all so knowledgeable about the topic that it took very little time: they decided on their audience and advice (usually while we were walking to our filming location), did a one-time run-through, and then filmed – they were totally unscripted!  Here’s one of them:

I had planned for these to be used just in the kids’ glogs, but they are so wonderful that I’m working on getting parent permission to put them all together into kid-to-kid advice videos that I hope to share.

Lesson 10: Evaluation and Wrap-Up

To measure the impact of the bullying prevention unit and to get a sense of how the kids viewed each of the unit components, I had the kids complete a survey created in Google Drive and post to a Wallwisher/Padlet, which they loved. We also viewed their videos and they had some time to look at each others’ glogs. Click the Wallwisher image below to see feedback from one class about the activities we did:

Click on the image to see a full screen version.

Here are some of the results from the Google survey:

 I was very pleased to see not only that 100% of the kids reported that they would take action to stop themselves and others from bullying, but also that they identified multiple strategies that they would use in a bullying situation. Here are the average number of strategies they would use to stop bullying:

• “If I was a target”  – 2.44
• “If I was a bystander” – 3.99
• “If I was bullying” – 3.14
  

Of course, it’s helpful to ask the questions a different way. Here’s the data that I used to follow up individually or in small groups with the kids who, according to the data above, know what to do to stop bullying, but would be less likely to actually do it.

So was the bullying prevention unit successful? Well, I think so, and the SWiS data from our PBiS schoolwide behavioral program shows only one bullying incident since the unit began, and none since its conclusion. We didn’t have a huge bullying problem before the unit (we work on it all the time, every year) but the kids clearly indicated that at the very least, the unit helped everyone treat others more kindly:

One of my young friends, whose behavior towards others has much improved, told me, “I know how it all [bullying] works now. I understand how everyone feels, so I just stop myself.”  I couldn’t ask for more!

If you survived reading this bullying prevention saga all the way through, give yourself a medal! If you’re still up for more, you can check out how the bullying prevention unit addressed the ASCA and Common Core State Standards. And if you were wondering why I hadn’t posted anything in a couple of weeks, now you know why. It feels like it took me almost as long to write about what we did as it took to actually do it!

You might also be interested in:

Spiraling Bullying Prevention 

Responding to a “Perfect Storm” of Bullying

Brave, Bold First Graders

School Counselors, Meet the Common Core

One of the things I am most proud of from last school year is CareerSmarts, a new unit I developed for fourth grade, which I’d love to share with you.  CareerSmarts is a student-driven, technology-based unit in which students learn about and connect their multiple intelligences and interests with future education and career possibilities. There’s even a fun gamification aspect – students challenge themselves to move to different levels by exploring multiple careers. While on the CareerSmarts journey, students learn about their own “smarts,” and explore and analyze a variety of careers by watching videos, using a search engine, playing games, and interviewing guests at Career Day. To demonstrate their learning, they create career trading cards featuring the Career Day guests and avatars of themselves in their future careers. To see an example of how knowledgeable the kids become, check out the biomedical engineer below. (You can learn more about the avatar project and see all the avatars the kids created at Avatars at the Virtual Career Fair.)

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And guess what! The unit addresses Common Core State Standards in Writing and Speaking & Listening, as well as ASCA National Standards in the Academic and Career domains.   

I had several goals for this unit:

• to address some of the academic and career standards  
• to integrate technology in a way that would create an environment in which most of the learning would be student-driven 
• to get kids excited about future possibilities and therefore more engaged in their current learning 
• to clearly illustrate how school counseling classroom lessons can address Common Core State Standards    

I have to say, developing this unit was a LOT of work, but most of that had to do with all the time I spent gathering resources, developing lessons, and integrating the technology, which I will not have to do again. (Yay!) Coordinating Career Day (17 guests x 44 kids x 3 interviews each!) was no harder than managing any other big school event, but did take some time. But it was SO worth all the work and the number of lessons it took!  The kids were incredibly engaged, excited, and transformed by this unit. It so far exceeded my expectations, I could barely believe it!    

The kids asked such good questions – they really made the veterinarian think!

Hopefully, CareerSmarts will get you thinking about how you can add some career lessons into your program, integrate technology into your lessons, begin to think about the Common Core in relation to your school counseling practice, and/or develop units of your own. It could also be a starting place for you to approach a friendly teacher and propose a collaborative project! In upcoming posts I’ll share the details so that you can teach or adapt the lessons yourself. I developed the unit for fourth grade, but it is very appropriate for 5th grade too, and could easily be adapted for 6th.

One of the trading cards kids made about the Career Day guests. This is a great way for kids to show what they’ve learned, and it’s a writing activity! Tell THAT to your principal!

Foundation and Framework for Developing the Unit    

I started the process of developing CareerSmarts by thinking about what I wanted the kids to know. I came up with these essential questions based on the most relevant ASCA standards (in parentheses), which would focus the students’ learning and our discussions: 

• What are the different ways I am smart? (C:A1.3)    
• How can I learn about different careers? (C:A1.1, C:B1.5, C:B1.6)    
• How does what I’m interested in now relate to my future career? (C:A1.9, C:B1.2, C:C2.1)    
• What kind of education and abilities do I need in order to have the kinds of careers I’m interested in? (C:B2.1, C:C1.1, C:C2.1)    
• How can I share what I have learned about careers and multiple intelligences? (A:A3.5)    

(You can find the full text of the ASCA standards addressed inCareerSmarts at the end of the post).

I always want to make my lessons interesting and meaningful to my students, and what could be more interesting to a kid than him/herself???!!!  Egocentricity: if you’ve got to deal with it, you might as well harness it! I decided to have the kids start by learning about themselves, build from there to explore new information of their choice, and then circle back and have them apply that new learning to themselves.

It’s all about him! To show what he had learned about multiple intelligences and careers, this student made an avatar of himself as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater.

 Here are the activities I chose:

1. Learn about multiple intelligences, then identify how their own “smarts” are related
   
2. Explore a variety of careers     
3. Interview real workers at Career Day    
4. Use what they have learned through all the above activities to create trading cards of the Career Day guests     
5. Write scripts and create avatars of themselves in a future career    

These learning activities addressed a whole range of Common Core standards (see below.) When you start to incorporate the Common Core into your lessons, don’t be afraid to consult with your colleagues who are most knowledgeable about them. Our literacy teacher-leader happened to come into the computer lab when I was giving the directions for writing the avatar scripts. She was so excited that I was addressing the CCSS in my lessons! After the unit was over, she helped me confirm which standards we had covered – she even identified some that I was uncertain about.

Developing the Lessons      

How did I figure out how to create lessons out of these ideas? Well, I spent a LOT of time last summer researching what kind of career resources were out there for elementary students. I found some good stuff (thank you Virginia Career View!), but not exactly everything I wanted, so I set out to put something new together. Simultaneously I was taking a “Techsploration” class, so I put what I was discovering there to use on creating this unit! One assignment was to create an infographic, so I killed two birds with one stone and made this “map” of the unit, using easel.ly.     

Another “Techsploration” assignment required me to explore some different website development tools and create a little something. I’m not sure what actually happened (was it the humidity? All that kale I ate last summer?), but I got so excited about the possibilities that my “little something” turned into a 4^th Grade Class Councils website, which I created with Google Sites. (I know, I know. Somehow the combination of school counseling and tech brings out the extreme dork in me!) I’m not able to share the website right now because a lot of identifying student work is embedded in it, but my goal is to find a way that other school counselors can use the CareerSmarts pages to teach the unit themselves. For now I’ll share pictures of it so that you can get the idea, and all the links so that you can use any of the pieces you like.

Ta-da! The Lessons     

I’ve worked long and hard over the years to get to the place where our school’s class council (classroom counseling) lessons happen weekly. You might not have the luxury (yet!) of having time to teach all the lessons in this unit, but you could certainly shorten it up or use pieces of it. Or propose a collaborative writing project to a friendly teacher!

(Common Core standards addressed are in parentheses. Full text of the CCSS are at the end of the post.)    

• Lesson 1: Pre-test and introduction to multiple intelligences (4SL.1, 4SL.3)    
• Lesson 2: Discovering and thinking about your multiple intelligences (4SL.1, 4SL.3)     
• Lessons 3 & 4: Exploring careers on video (4W.7, 4W.8)     
• Lesson 5: Exploring careers with KidSearch (4W.7, 4W.8, 4W.9)     
• Lesson 6: Professionalism and interviewing skills (4SL.1, 4SL.3, 4W.8)     
• Career Day! (4SL.1, 4SL.3, 4 W.7, 4W.8)     
• Lesson 7: Creating Career Trading cards (4SL.1, 4SL.3, 4SL.4, 4W.2, 4W.4, 4W.5, 4W.6, 4W.8)    
• Lessons 8 & 9: My future career: creating avatars (4SL.4, 4SL.5, 4W.2, 4W.4, 4W.5, 4W.6, 4W.8, 4W.9)
• Lesson 10: Post-test and Virtual Career Fair (4SL.1, 4SL.3)           

Stay tuned! Upcoming posts include:

• Multiple intelligences, including a presentation you can use, and an MI interest inventory that the kids LOVE!   
• Student-driven career exploration utilizing videos, a search engine, games, and a nifty gamification incentive   
• Career Day planning, preparatory lesson on professionalism and interviewing
• Kid-Created Career Trading Cards to follow-up Career Day
• Kids demonstrate their learning – creating a career avatar, script writing guidelines, tech tools, virtual career fair, and unit data and evaluation.

But first, I’m taking a little much-needed un-plugged vacation from screens and devices.  My multiple intelligences will be much sharper when I share how to teach about them in about a week or so. See you on the other side!     

Here is the full text of the ASCA and Common Core Standards addressed in CareerSmarts:

ASCA National Standards   

Academic Domain    

• A:A3.5  share knowledge    
• A:B1.5 organize and apply academic information from a variety of sources      
• A:B1.6 use knowledge of learning styles to positively influence school performance     
• A:C1.3  understand the relationship between learning and work       

Career Domain   

• C:A1.1  develop skills to locate, evaluate, and interpret career information   
• C:A1.3  develop an awareness of personal abilities, skills, interests, and motivations     
• C:A1.9  develop hobbies and vocational interests    
• C:B1.2  identify personal skills, interests, and abilities and relate them to current career choice    
• C:B1.5  use research and information resources to obtain career information    
• C:B1.6  learn to use the internet to access career planning information      
• C:B2.1  demonstrate awareness of the education and training needed to achieve career goals    
• C:C1.1  understand the relationship between educational achievement and career success     
• C:C2.1  demonstrate how interests, abilities and achievement relate to achieving personal, social, educational, and career goals    

Common Core State Standards    

Writing

• 4W.2 Write informative, explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly
• 4W.4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development and organization are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.   
• 4W.5 With guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, and editing.   
• 4W.6 With some guidance and support from adults, use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing as well as to interact and collaborate with others, demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of one page in a single sitting.     
• 4W.7 Conduct short research projects that build knowledge through investigation of different aspects of a topic.  
• 4W.8 Recall relevant information from experiences or gather relevant information from print and digital sources; take notes and categorize information, and provide a list of sources.   
• 4W.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.    

Speaking and Listening  

• 4SL.1 Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions )one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly.    
• 4SL.3 Identify the reasons and evidence a speaker provides to support particular points.    
• 4SL.4 Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace.     
• 4SL.5 Add audio recordings and visual displays to presentations when appropriate to enhance the development of main ideas of themes.

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Brave, Bold First Graders   

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F is for Success, Not Failure

Wow! What amazing feedback I’ve gotten after my last post, Creating CareerSmarts! Thank you to everyone for your kind comments and enthusiasm. I’m so glad that other school counselors (and other educators too!) are excited about using the CareerSmarts lessons and that people are finding the info and resources helpful. As promised, here are the lessons about multiple intelligences. They provide a foundation for the CareerSmarts unit, but could also be used on their own for a multiple intelligences mini-unit for classroom or small group use. To find the applicable ASCA and Common Core standards, check here. There’s a lot in this post, but it includes everything you need to be able to teach these lessons yourself.

The first two lessons (45 minutes each) in the CareerSmarts unit introduce kids to the concept of multiple intelligences, or “smarts.” These lessons are important not only because they help kids understand the ways that they are smart, but also because they provide foundational information for them to use throughout the rest of the unit. For every career they explore – through video, search engine, game, or interview – they will be making educated guesses about which multiple intelligences are important to that job. In both projects they create – career trading cards and avatars – they will be including information about how people use their multiple intelligences in their work.

The trading card activity is one example of an activity in which kids use their knowledge of multiple intelligences during the CareerSmarts unit.

Lesson 1: Introduction to Multiple Intelligences

Lesson 1 provides basic information about multiple intelligences and gets kids thinking about how their own and other people’s “smarts” manifest themselves. When I couldn’t find any visual resources I particularly liked, I created a presentation in Google Drive. I had actually intended to create an interactive smartboard lesson, but for reasons which now escape me (icy snow day? home sick? just plain sick of being at school?), but which definitely included a time crunch, I had to create the presentation at home, which meant I had to go to Plan B.  “Oh well,” I thought, “it won’t be great, but it will be good enough. I’ll fix it next year.” Little did I know that the kids would really like it, and because I embedded it into the website I created for the unit, they – of their own accord – went back to it and used it as a resource when they were trying to figure out which multiple intelligences matched up with careers they were researching! See, mistakes and running out of time can be good!      

Here is the presentation:

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As an introduction to the lesson, I ask the kids for their thoughts about  what this statement means:

“The question is not ‘How smart are you?’ It’s ‘How are you smart?”

We check out the first two slides for an overview of multiple intelligences, then look at the information on the slides that explain each of the multiple intelligences. While we read the slides, I ask the kids to think about how they use each of these multiple intelligences, then have them identify some other students in their grade (not themselves) who they notice have a particular strength in this intelligence. I also ask for them to give evidence for why they think this is the case. After we have gotten through all eight of the intelligences, I ask students to identify what multiple intelligences they have seen in the kids that haven’t yet been named.      

In the next phase of the lesson I introduce the Multiple Intelligences Song video by Les Multibrios, which highlights eight animated kids – one for each “smart” – and which happens to be in French. Yes, in Vermont we are fairly close to Quebec, but, no, my students do not speak French! But that’s okay! I tell them that they need to use their word smarts to read the subtitles and their picture smarts to look for clues about the characters so that they can identify which one represents which multiple intelligence. The kids LOVE this video and the song, which (sorry!) gets stuck in your head – we had a lot of mumble-y fake-French singing over the next couple of weeks!

We also look at a cartoon about multiple intelligences by the great teacher/cartoonist/musician Marek Bennett, which helps them gather even more info and which they use as another resource later in the unit. To close the lesson I tell them that they will be discovering a lot of information about their own multiple intelligences in the next class. They get all kinds of excited about this! Everybody’s favorite topic – Me!

You should really check out Marek’s work! He does school-based workshops too!

Lesson 2: Discovering Your Multiple Intelligences

In Lesson 2, students use an on-line multiple intelligences inventory to learn about their own “smarts.” I really like this inventory because it’s quite thorough and the results come back as a colorful, animated pie chart in which each of the smarts grow out from the center – such an exciting reveal! It also allows for a range of ages, so the kids get a chance to check out your (and possibly their classroom teachers’ and parents’) “smarts” too.       

I start the lesson by asking the class what they remember about the eight multiple intelligences. As they start sharing information, I tell them they can also look back at the multiple intelligences slides from the previous week. This really gets everyone engaged and helps them better learn the material while feeling successful, because they can find answers to share. (I ask what multiple intelligences they are using to find the info!)       

Yup, this is me. Luckily my people smarts are strong, so I guess I’m in the right career! Whew! The P.E. teacher thing was probably not ever going to be a possibility, as you can clearly see.

After the review, I show the kids my inventory results and ask them:

“When you think about what you know about me and the work I do as a school counselor, are you surprised, or do my “smarts” make sense to you?”

This makes for a great, lively discussion as I ask them for evidence of how they have seen my multiple intelligences at work. It also allows me to give examples of how, when I’m trying to understand or figure something out, I am much more likely to use my word smarts (to read about it), logic smarts (to research and make hypotheses), and self smarts (to draw on my experiences) than I am to use my picture smarts (to draw a plan) or my body smarts (to use manipulatives). When they inevitably notice my relatively paltry body smarts, it gives me a great opportunity to model that we all have and use all of these intelligences, even though some are stronger than others. I tell them that even though my body smarts are small compared to my other smarts, they are still there and I use them regularly. I point out that even though I rarely learn by using my hands, and moving around a lot doesn’t help me concentrate, I do use dance as a way to clear my head and de-stress and I am a pretty good actor when we do role plays. I also ask them for advice about how they think I could strengthen my body smarts. I have gotten offers to join in on basketball games at recess, and an invitation to attend P.E. with them – Hah! I’ll have to do a little work on the leftover trauma from old-school, gym-suited days first! This lays the groundwork for them to start thinking about some smarts that they’d like to strengthen.

The rest of the class time is taken up with the kids completing the inventory. Before they start I let them know that they will see that it is called a “test,” but that it really isn’t a test-test. They will be sharing what they know about themselves (in a Likert scale that ranges from “This is not like me at all” to “I am always like this”), so they will definitely always have the right answer. It is important to explain that the results pie graphs are not a measure of how smart you are, they are a measure of how you are smart.  The fullness of each section will have to do with how much “like me” they thought the statements were. The results only make sense if you compare each person’s different smarts with each other. It doesn’t actually work to compare one person’s pie graph to another’s.

I give them a heads-up that there are kind of a lot of questions on several pages, but that all they have to do is click on a response, and since they will know the answers, it will go pretty quickly. I also let them know in advance that as soon as they finish they will see their own pie chart grow before their very eyes! A few kids will need some clarification on a couple of questions, and if you have any students who have difficulty reading, you may want to have them complete the survey with you ahead of time (and then help you teach about it) or make plans for yourself or another adult to read the questions aloud to the few who need it.

The first page of the multiple intelligences survey.

Be prepared for lots of excited exclamations when the results start coming in! The kids LOVE checking out their own smarts and showing them to their friends. As this great learning hubbub is going on, I ask the kids to think about what they’re seeing about themselves and others makes sense to them and why. The results pie chart comes with a code, which will allow you and your students to retrieve the data any time. I had the kids submit these codes to me via a Google Form that I embedded in the webpage. I then inserted the results into a web page so that they could access their results more easily and look at their friends’ and teachers’ results too. (Our teachers got almost as excited about the inventory and their results as the kids did!)

One class’ (and their teacher’s) results.

The Time Glitch

I had originally planned to have another two class sessions devoted to multiple intelligences, but a snow day and field trip meant that we had to move on in order to be prepared for the already scheduled Career Day. I ended up using the lesson in some small groups, which worked well. I will definitely build this back into the unit, because I think the learning from this activity is important, and just leaving off where we did felt unfinished to me. The two lessons we completed prepared them enough to make educated guesses about the smarts required for the careers that they later explored, but I would have liked to have them all make better connections about how they use their multiple intelligences in their daily lives. I’m hoping to be able to pick up and do the third and fourth lessons with the same kids this year, perhaps as a way for them to introduce themselves as learners to their teachers. I’ll keep you posted. Here are the guidelines for the lessons, so you don’t have to wait. They’ve been tested in a small group setting, but I think they will also work well in a classroom setting.

The Tech Glitch

My original plan was to have the students use the iPad app Haiku Deck to create slide shows about their smarts. This was a great plan, but was a bit difficult to execute – Haiku Deck is rated for ages 12 and up, so I couldn’t load it onto our classroom iPads.  The reason for this rating (and one of the reasons Haiku Deck is so great) is that it comes loaded with thousands of photos. Most of them are completely harmless, and none of them are completely inappropriate, but unfortunately, some of them are of things like wine glasses and bikini-clad beach-goers, which elementary school students could potentially stumble upon. I thought that maybe it would work if I had the kids take their own pictures instead (a better idea, anyway) but the nice people at Haiku Deck told me there was no way to block the included photos, so the student iPads were a no-go. (Teacher iPads used under supervision are fine, which is what we used in the small groups.)  When I do this lesson this coming year, I think I will allow kids to choose their own tool from a list, which may include Book Creator, My Story, Scribble Press, Vine videos, Glogster, iMovie, etc.  Another option would be to do it old school and have kids make posters or collages, but the technology piece is so engaging that kids often put more into their work. It’s really too bad that I can’t use Haiku Deck in the classroom, because it really is quite elegant, and perfect for the project.    

Here’s the example I made about myself using the pictures within Haiku Deck.

[slideshare id=24820761&doc=mysmarts-1375316031-130731191324-phpapp02]

Lessons 3 & 4: Creating “My Smarts” Presentations

The first step of the project is to have kids do some planning: come up with examples of how they use each of their multiple intelligences, decide how they could show themselves doing so in a series of photos, and write captions for their photos. I encourage kids to refer back to the multiple intelligences presentation if they need help with ideas. Here’s a link to the multiple intelligences planning worksheet. 

The next step is to take the photos and add the captions. I had kids work with partners to set up and take the photos and then type in the captions. It doesn’t take long at all, especially if you partner the kids cleverly.  The kids really enjoyed making these, showed a lot of creativity in figuring out how to show their different multiple intelligences, and were proud and excited to share them. Here is one of the presentations:

[slideshare id=24822524&doc=jssmarts-1375321975-130731205229-phpapp02]

Stay tuned! Upcoming posts include:

• CareerSmarts Task 2: Web-Based Career Exploration: Student-driven career exploration lessons utilizing videos, a search engine, games, and a nifty gamification incentive
• Coordinating Career Day : Planning, preparatory lesson, interview script, and all the details about how to organize and run Career Day. 
• Career Trading Cards: Students create trading cards featuring their Career Day interviewees.
• Kids demonstrate their learning – creating a career avatar, script writing guidelines, tech tools, virtual career fair, and unit data and evaluation.  

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Creating CareerSmarts 

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The Wildflower Effect   

SuperCounselor is Thankful For . . .    

School Counselors, Meet the Common Core!

Well, the school dreams have started, and I’m feeling a new urgency to get organized. I’ve even been going to bed a (tiny bit) earlier. The first day of school must be right around the corner. Yay! Ugh! Ack! Yup, definitely experiencing some mixed emotions! One thing that has made going back to school easier over the past couple of years is the knowledge that I take an invisible host of supporters with me. No, I’m not delusional – I’m talking about all of the school counselors all over the world who share their great ideas, encourage me on the tough days, crack me up with their tales of kid hijinks and bureaucratic ridiculousness, and just all-around inspire me. Yeah, I mean YOU!   Fellow bloggers Andrea Burston from JYJCounselor and Danielle Schultz from School Counselor Blog have come up with some great ways for us all to connect as we head back to school. (These two really should be named the social “cruise directors” of the school counseling world!)

Image credit: JYJ Counselor & School Counselor Blog

Here are three ways for us all to get together as we go back to school. (Descriptions and instructions are courtesy of Andrea and Danielle.)

Elementary Level:

• Andrea Burston (JYJ Counselor)
• Rebecca Lallier (School Counseling by Heart)

• Tabitha Panariso (Scrapbook of a School Counselor)
• Danielle Schultz (School Counselor Blog)

• Jeremy Goldman (Pikesville High School Counseling Department)
• Darrell Sampson (From the Counselor’s Office)

To view the School Counseling On Air Back to School Chat live from YouTube visit the School Counseling On Air YouTube page. The School Counseling On Air Back to School Chat will also be broadcast live on JYJ Counselor Blog and School Counselor Blog.

You can tweet questions on Twitter using the hashtag #SCOA. You can also ask questions on the School Counseling On Air YouTube page.

Tech Phobia Intervention Time: Never done anything like this before? Not sure how it works? Don’t worry, just follow the links and try it. I’ve never done it either, and I’m part of the line-up! It’s probably easier than you think and it’s okay if you make mistakes. Although it’s probably better if you don’t make this particular mistake!

Photo credit: http://doblelol.com/1/computer-broken-funny-animal-pictures.htm

Confession Time: I despise setting up my room! It’s not the actual work that I object to, it’s the fact that I just barely spent half a day taking it all the way apart (for no good purpose – see bureaucratic ridiculousness above.) The reality of another un-airconditioned, windowless summer day spent pushing heavy furniture around and untangling and reconnecting more cords and cables than I know what to do with, when there is actual, meaningful, helpful work to do makes me crazy. Okay, it will only be half a day – but still!  Also, inevitably the office mice who are the all-too-often bane of my existence will have pooped in my dollhouse over the summer.  So let’s just say I haven’t embraced the excitement of taking pictures of my newly set-up school counseling office in the past. But now those days are over! I’m going to try to remain sunny while pretending to be the furniture mover-IT-specialist-pest-management-professional that I am not. I will take so many pictures that when the maintenance guy with the furniture dolly finally shows up (hours too late) he’ll think I’m a tourist! I promise not to post pictures that shows evidence of the mouse vacation.  No, I don’t promise that at all! Let’s just share the wealth, people! We’re in this together, right????

Rodent + device with cord = room set up nightmare!
Photo credit: http://fanny-pictures-site.com/funny-animal-shut-your-mouth/

Even this Grumpy McGrumperson is going to take pictures of her office and share them, so you can too! Lots of people have already done it – go check it out!

Redeem Myself Time: Despite my Scrooge-ish attitude about putting my room back together, I am totally Tiny Tim on the first day of school! Bless us, every one! I wake up super early, without the alarm, get butterflies, and am practically dancing with excitement when the buses start arriving. Here’s my advice: Take your First Day of School Picture early in the day. By the end of the day, you might look something like this:

Photo credit: http://www.lolwall.co/lol/259554