LSTA grant recipients from 2009 are now beginning to post their updates to the WJIL site on the LSTA Grant page. Here is another sampling of what some of your Illinois colleagues have done with their LSTA grant funds.

Click on the links to download the full updates and look for additional grant updates in upcoming months. Use the link to the person who posted the grant update to connect to their WJIL profile and add them as a friend on the site.

• Brownstown Junior/Senior High School GreEnergy Grant : Mary Nelle Douglas, Brownstown Junior/Senior High School. Brownstown Jr.Sr. High School Library received $9596.00 to go green with a
  LSTA Grant titled GreEnergy. We replaced ten energy inefficient computers and one color laser printer. Eighth grade students, science and language arts teachers, Sefton Home Extension, and the school librarian teamed up to study and investigate past and current home and school energy use. The final product of their research was a children’s book which they wrote, illustrated, and presented to the kindergarten classes.
• If you Blog It They Will Come: Susan Bohn, Hononegah High School Library. This LSTA project for the Hononegah High School Library used technology to promote reading for pleasure and to encourage more male involvement in the library.
• Making a Difference with Technology: Cathy D Sherwood, Martinsville Elementary and High School Libraries. This project provided students and staff with computers, interactive white boards, and multimedia projectors to enable them to prepare and present multimedia projects.
• PHS Library–The Place to Meet!: Sarah Hill, Paris High School. PHS Library—the Place to Meet! provides a state-of-the-art technology center in the library to attract extracurricular student groups to meet in the library. By having an easy-to-use projection center and interactive whiteboard, student groups like Student Council and CAMA (Coalition Against Methamphetamine Abuse) will be able to hold weekly meetings in the library and the library will continue to be seen as the center of the school—socially, academically, and philanthropically.
• Proviso Township in War and Peace: The Digitization of the Herald, 1941-1945: Melrose Park Library. The goal of this grant is to digitize the library’s editions of the local newspaper from the World War II years. By doing so, the library will be preserving this valuable historical record while providing online access for its target audience: students, historians, and past and present residents of Proviso Township. The digitally preserved newspaper will be placed on the Illinois Digital Archives. The library will digitize these years because the newspapers illustrate how World War II affected both the local population and industry.
• Resource Sharing Project: Alayne Davies-Smith, Hinchcliffe School. This resource sharing project allows Hinchcliffe School, a K-5 facility, part of the O’Fallon Illinois School District 90 to join GateNet, the ILS consortia database administered by the Lewis & Clark Library System. All of the schools’ approx. 13,000 items will be added to the database thereby expanding resources for all of the libraries in the Lewis & Clark Library System. Students will be able to acquire material not owned by Hinchcliffe for research use. Hinchcliffe faculty will be able to request material from school or home to supplement curricular materials that will broaden instruction in the classroom.