All posts by Angie

Academic, Check this out:, CMLE, General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special

Strategies to Simplify: Tip 10: Tackle teamwork

“Work simply. Live fully.”  This week CMLE focuses on the following work productivity tip from Work Simply, Carson Tate’s popular book.  At CMLE, we’ve boiled down Tate’s wealth of knowledge from Work Simply to a few key points; please see the book for more detail and resources. At the bottom, see links to earlier tips in the series! Let’s all be our best selves….

This week’s activity: Learn effective ways to work together

Working as part of a team can be both rewarding and at times, frustrating. According to Carson Tate’s book Work Simply, this frustration is often the result of conflicting Productivity Styles. In order to overcome these conflicts and the resulting misunderstandings, it is necessary to take into account the different strengths and blind spots of each Productivity Style.

Recently, you discovered your Productivity Style with a simple assessment. Encourage your co-workers to take the assessment to determine their Productivity Style.

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Work Simply

Find your team members’ Productivity Style(s) to gain further awareness about their strengths and potential blind spots: 

Prioritizer: Strengths include having a clear purpose, understanding budgets, maintaining focus, and meeting deadlines. Blind spots: Tendency to be controlling, too much competitiveness, and valuing speed over excellence.

Planner: Strengths include strong organization, finishing work ahead of schedule, staying focused, and locating necessary resources. Blind spots: May be inflexible, lacks spur-of-the-moment thinking, may lose opportunities from being unwilling to change procedures.

Arranger: Strengths include following a daily plan of tasks, inclusive and interpersonal working style, and experienced at delegating. Blind spots: Takes on the problems and concerns of others, misses details, and can get distracted from the end goal.

Visualizer: Strengths include being able to complete large amounts of work quickly, thrives under pressure and deadlines, experienced multitasker, and open to taking risks. Blind spots: May miss details, be reckless, and may miss deadlines due to lack of planning.

Previous tips in this series

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AASL Recommended Apps: Humanities & Arts: Spies of the Mississippi: The Appumentary

spies_mississippiIn June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.

The app Spies of the Mississippi comes from a book by Rick Bowers, which was made into a PBS documentary. The app is filled with primary resources that tell the story of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was founded in 1956 to preserve segregation and spy on the civil rights movement. The app has videos, a timeline, interactive map, as well as lesson plans and discussion questions.

Cost: Free
Level: Middle and High School
Platforms: iOS

Watch this video to get an idea of how the app works:

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Do you know about Imagination Library?

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We love our Imagination Library books! Especially since they are board books and therefore chew-safe 🙂

If you are a book-lover and have small children at home under the age of five, you should definitely know about this program! Imagination Library was founded by country singer Dolly Parton to promote literacy and an early love of books in children by mailing them a book each month, no matter the income level of the household.

The United Way of Central Minnesota has been taking part in this program, and if you live in the area, here is where you can sign up! (Tip: it does take several weeks until you receive your first book, so don’t procrastinate!) Each child from birth to their fifth birthday will receive a book in the mail each month. The program has become so popular that it has continued into Canada and the U.K.

You can get more information about the program from their website, or keep up with the book selections and other news on their blog. Also, check out CMLE’s previous post about the program when Imagination Library was donating their 1 millionth book!

Academic, Check this out:, CMLE, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Thanksgiving at CMLE!

thanksgiving-3 As you may be starting to appreciate, we like to be festive at CMLE Headquarters. Since Thanksgiving is soon approaching, we decided it was time to hang up the turkeys! (We have decorative turkeys on streamers floating from the ceiling. There’s no good way to photograph them, so stop by or use your imagination!)

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We just wanted to share our decorations with you, and perhaps you have some festive November or Thanksgiving themed decorating going on at your library or media center? Send us a picture! For more glimpses of our exciting office happenings (often including Orville the Bear and the Office Plant team) follow us on Instagram.

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Academic, Check this out:, CMLE, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Sixteen quotes about loving libraries

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Libraries are great for so many reasons!

We all know libraries are fantastic, and good places to spend your time. Just in case you’d like a reminder though, check out this article from the Book Bub blog that features cool photos and quotes about the joy of libraries.

Here’s another article, this time from Buzzfeed, about people appreciating the importance of libraries, and this one even has lovely pictures of famous libraries!

Do you have any quotes from people that have said how much they appreciate your library or media center? Or, do you have a special shout-out to a particular library that is great? Share with us in the comments!