Taking Chances: Moving Out of Your Comfort Zone

Blogging does not come naturally to me. Given the opportunity, I'd rather not write about what I'm doing and post it for anyone with a search engine and a strange penchant for reading about librarians to find. You want to know what's been going on in my library? Stop down any time, my door is always open. You want me to find a new program or app that will help you accomplish something? I'm your girl. Have a problem you need solved? I will relentlessly research that problem until I have an answer for you. Feel free to ask me 900 questions. Ask me to come teach your class all about that new software that you're scared of. I'm happy to do it. Ask me to document all of that on a regular basis? Yikes. Talking about myself is just not in my comfort zone.

However, my world is changing. Libraries, and librarians, are often an endangered species in the current educational (and budget) climate. We're seen as expendable, or used solely to provide prep time to classroom teachers, regardless of how many services we provide. So what's a librarian to do? Get out of her comfort zone and start showing off the cool things that are happening in her library. Hence the website. For example, this week I've solved multiple tech problems for the classes I'm working with (who are using Audacity and Windows Movie Maker to talk about energy sources), found a solution for recording audio on Chromebooks, figured out what software we needed to make a copy of a DVD (legally, of course), helped two teachers with our room reservation system, and showed another how to use the biography database, and it's only Tuesday. All of this comes in addition to my "traditional" library duties like helping students write proper citations and recommending books, and exactly none of it was seen by my principal. If I don't find ways to highlight all of the services that I provide, it's going to be difficult to justify my existence. So I've decided to take that jump out of my comfort zone, and start documenting all of the cool things that happen in a week that help make my library a hub of learning in our building.

#digitallearning #library #blogging #comfort