Tag: Leader

I spent some time in the media center with my school media specialist, Kelly, this past Friday, and after watching her, I learned the many roles that the media specialist plays in a school.

1. Media specialist: Kelly would check books out to students and check them in. She taught me how to do this, so I was checking students in and out. I liked this part because I got to use the scanner. It was easier than I thought it would be, but I had to make sure I was on the correct tab in Destiny.

   

2. Advisor: Kelly is also the yearbook advisor and teaches the yearbook class. When I was observing, she was teaching the students how to use the camera and sent them off with a checklist of the pictures she wanted them to practice taking.

   

3. News Show Creator:  Kelly is in charge of putting together our news show for each morning. She enlisted the help of the yearbook students and taught them the program to use for the news show. Once the students had the show completed, she would double-check that they weren’t missing anything and would show them how to add graphics to make it more interesting.

   

4. Classroom Supervisor: On Friday, we had several teachers out due to sickness, so the library had to house two different seventh grade classes. The tech coach was also in the library helping to supervise these classes, and each class was in a different section of the library. Kelly still had students coming in to return and check out books and the yearbook class was going on during one period, so there were technically three classes in the media center at one time. She had to keep track of all of these students and complete her normal duties.

   

5. School Leader: Kelly has a walky-talky that she needs to keep on her at all times because sometimes administration will request her to go cover a class or to come to the front office or to be aware of anything that is going on in the school.

   

   Kelly explained to me that a media specialist has to be like Gumby because you have to be able to adapt and be flexible to what the administration needs you to do for the day on top of performing your regular duties within the media center. She said that you never know what type of day you are going to have because it is different every day.

   

I knew that being a media specialist included more than just your library duties, but I didn’t realize how chaotic it could be. I was a little overwhelmed with everything going on in the library. Students were constantly coming up for help with checking out or asking to use the restroom or ones that had questions from her yearbook class. I don’t know how Kelly manages it all with just herself and her assistant since we have over 1,100 students in our school!