Inching our Way Back to Normal

Wow! It is truly great to be back! We are excited about many new developments. As week one winds to a close, we feel great about the start of the 2021-2022 school year. 

ClassLink:

Most students learned about ClassLink this week. The launchpad provides authenticated access to resources our students need, including PowerSchool, Schoology, Naviance, Google tools, and much more. The library has a ClassLink presence too. Over the weekend, we will replace the link to the library's website with a folder that includes several links:

• The library's website
• Destiny - the library's print catalog
• MackinVia - the library's catalog of ebooks and audiobooks
• The page that cross-searches most of our databases (see screenshot below)
• The list of database links
• The link to the virtual library

This folder should help students access essential library tools and services

The Page That Cross-searches Our Databases

Library Learning Zones:

We converted the upper library into a lounge area. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors are invited to decompress in comfortable chairs during their free periods. The upper library is equipped with plenty of power outlets for students to charge their devices. Ninth graders will have the option to use the lounge second semester. 

The New Library Lounge

The makerspace is back! Teachers have already begun brining their classes to work on projects. We love the block schedule for innovating. Students have ample time for design thinking and even a little clean up time as well, which helps each new class find all the materials they need with ease. 

Working on the Growth Mindset

ColLabB is back to serving as an instructional space for the library (it was a health classroom last year). This week, it was used for student collaboration on the growth mindset and also for booktalks. We are thrilled to have access to the adaptable learning space this year.

Booktalks in ColLabB

The virtual reality lab and podcasting studio will reopen shortly. We will write more about that in our next post. 

The rest of the library is divided into two sections:

• Collaborative learning
• Quiet independent learning

9th Grade Orientation in the Collaborative Learning Zone

9th Grade Learning Modules:

Over the summer, the Information and Communications Technology team developed learning modules for the ninth graders to complete during study hall. The modules help our newcomers familiarize themselves with high school services and technologies, including

• Tech for success (BYOD, and high school specific technology)
• Asking questions and getting answers (library services)
• Digital citizenship

Summer Reading & Booktalks:

We collected our summer reading books from the town library this week and have rolled much of that collection into the high interest reading collection (Vide), which we promote throughout the school year through our ongoing booktalks. We started these this week. It was a pleasure to see our learners making their selections, and sending them off for a long weekend with a book in hand. 

Summer Reading Books

Co-Teaching:

Booktalking is a co-teaching experience. Our teachers survey their students and share the survey results with librarians so that, as a team, we can recommend titles for each individual student. We love starting the year this way. 

Sophomores will begin studying absolutist rulers over the next few weeks. Through collaboration, we are adapting research projects to optimize our use of extended periods with a focus on strengthening higher order thinking skills. 

We are working with health teachers on upcoming freshman and sophomore instructional units as well. 

Textbooks in the library:

We populated the lower library, which is dedicated to quiet, independent learning with copies of department textbooks. We have new shelving that will help students keep these materials organized. 

New to New Canaan High School:

In case you missed video we made for the incoming 9th grade parents last spring, you can watch it below: 

MLA 9:

Last spring, the Modern Language Association released an updated manual for researchers, and we were slightly concerned that our instructional materials on citation would have to be updated. But, surprisingly, the guidelines are the same. The 9th edition book is an improvement, as it features deeper explanations and more examples, but the citations themselves are essentially the same. We will add a folder of resources about that to the students' ClassLink launchpad as well. 

Well that will do until next time. We are thrilled to be back. Have a great weekend!

A tour of the new library website

A quieter library means that we can divert some of our attention to improving our virtual library services. Since November, we have been working on the library's new website. 

We recorded a tour of the site for the 2025 students and parents' virtual open house on March 4, 2021. It follows. The video is too long, we know, but just for the record, it was originally 26 minutes long. Halving that was a minor accomplishment.     

There were a number of reasons our old library website needed a complete overhaul.

• We needed to switch to responsive web design. Most of our web traffic visits our homepage to navigate from "the top navigation menu", which is comprised of a dozen "tiles" linking to instructional resources. On the legacy (old) website, this navigation menu failed to resize on mobile devices and led students to the wrong sites when they clicked on the right tile. Now, pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes (we think?).

• Much of the legacy (old) website information was migrated to the new district platform in 2016 by Senior Internship Program participants. What they migrated came from from our 2006-2016 iteration of our library website. The interns were charged with migration, not content revision, and thus some of the content on our legacy website was over 15 years old! To say this overhaul was overdue is an understatement.
• The web platform itself improved some of their navigation options and we wanted to take advantage of that. 
• Our legacy (old) website was cluttered. We wanted to streamline it. 

We want to give a shout out to Felice Russell, a graduate student in the Southern Connecticut State University library science graduate program. As a course assignment, she interviewed Ms. Sheehan and wrote up a case study of our library's instructional program. In the report, which she shared with us, there were several recommendations for a website update. It was clear from Felice's narrative that the content on our legacy website reflected an outdated version of our program. This was what prompted us to tackle the overhaul project. 

While we are pleased with what we have done so far, there is still plenty of room for improvement. At this point, we could use some guidance. We think that the new library website is responsive, simpler, cleaner, and easier to navigate, but we want to hear from our visitors, so we are inviting you to compare the old site to the new site and provide us with both warm and cool feedback. Simply click on images below to open both sites in new tabs.

Once you have compared the two websites, please feel free to complete the form below:

Thank you so much for you input!