Blogs

Have a laptop and wireless in your home? If so you are probably so tech savy already (or someone in your house is) that you don't need to improve your tech skills, but you can if you want to - even in bed! If you have a desktop at home, you can still improve your tech skills as well and you can do it in your slippers and pj's. So says a recent article from eSchool News: " Teachers gain tech skills while in their PJs ". Check it out. Sounds like this Louisiana district started out with a concept for homeschool professional development for teachers that has expanded to students as well and they are having record successes.

"As the teachers have done, students took tests to see how IT proficient they really were, and the same test will be given next May to measure their progress. Students also have been offered incentives such as meal passes and theater tickets for completed courses." They like it so much "one group of students has logged in over 128 hours during their summer vacation".

Susan Dupre, technology facilitator for the St. Mary Parish School Board said: "We're seeing an amazing jump in numbers in tech literacy, in teachers, admin, and students."

If you have investigated this resource, I'd love to hear your feedback on the pros' and con's of InfoSource Learning's Learn It! for use with teaching teachers as well as students.

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"Teachers gain tech skills while in their PJs. Home-based professional development is big success for La. district" By Meris Stansbury, Assistant Editor, eSchool News. http://www.eschoolnews.com August 24, 2007. Contents Copyright 2007 eSchool News. All rights reserved.

There is always so much new to learn! How exciting and how overwhelming at the same time. At least I have accepted the fact that I will never catch up and I am learning to be adept at "treading water" :) And we are all "in the same boat".

What at time we live in today and how wonderful are the opportunities to communicate on whatever level of depth we choose and/or can handle.

The world is ours for the taking. I feel powerful and weak all at the same time.

I've heard about blogging but never really understood what it is. I've perused what a few people had to say in the TeacherLibrarian Ning and their comments were interesting and food for thought. As one completely new to blogs, my initial concern is that there is so much to say and millions of opinions to be heard! I also feel like I did when I first went online. There is sooo much information and so many people, it is difficult to navigate through everything.

I'm trying to figure out how I could use this particular forum in a classroom or library setting. I like how UCD has the discussion going; that is particularly helpful. In the classroom, I suppose I could post a question about a particular reading and have students respond. But I'm still trying to figure out how I could use blogging in a library...

Having attended the Building Learning Communities conference two weeks ago, I've determined that, while I'm nominally in charge of technology at my school, I am terribly naive about social networking and what it means to my students. My experience with MySpace has been mostly attempts to see what our students are doing/saying on their pages. At the same time, our school blocks MySpace. I'm beginning to see a disconnect between what we (the school) teach, allow, and encourage and what our kids are experiencing every day.

MySpace provides a community for our kids that offers something we just haven't tried to understand. Well, my school is in for a surprise. We are going to try to understand the value of MySpace to our students and, perhaps, harness their enthusiasm for online communities by creating our own. Wish me luck!

Just spent some time perusing the forum and have come away with a refreshed sense of what I want to accomplish before the end of the year. My colleague is retiring and was speaking with me today about how she can make things easier on me through the end of the school year as she won't be here through the end (and I don't blame her for not wanting to lose some of her sick days, especially expecting a grandson around that time!). I just can't believe that the end of the school year is so close upon us. I was caught up with completing the yearbook until it was over and done with in March. Since then, I've been consumed with helping to plan the prom, but after tomorrow, that'll be over. I recently redid the school and library websites and now am just trying to maintain them and keep them current. Add to that the equipment inventory and state-mandated annual media and technology report and all the "normal" duties of a lms...

It's one project after another without a breath in between, unlike my first year here at this school. I was the only Media Specialist in a different, much smaller building of only 18 classrooms with every teacher floating, and I wasn't getting too much use of the Media Center. I came across some of the digital pics from that first year that I took of displays I had made and can't believe that I had the time to put so much work into them. I started wondering if administration cares that my creativity has gone more digital since then, but of course now we have library science students to do the displays!

After showing initiative and a desire to do more for the school, I've also taken on other hats and stay pretty consistently busy. Though I'll be soon taking classes for something that will take me out of the school environment, I really want to focus next year on continuing the build the library program. The ideas are there, I just need to 1) write them down so I don't forget them (!) and 2) create a great rapport with the new media specialist joining me in August so we make a great team to accomplish these goals!

Please join Plymouth Whitemarsh High School (Plymouth Meeting, PA, USA) on May 17th from 7:00 p.m. EDT to 9:00 p.m. EDT as we share our talents with other communities around the world. This pilot event will be an opportunity to meet artists and see their work. We don't yet know exactly what to expect, but are hoping for happy, amazing and inspirational introductions to creativity around the globe. If you can't participate, we do hope you'll at least watch the stream --Erika

In true Karol Sacca style- today we held our final book buddies of the year. Since this was our last one, I made the kids read frompart of the world I chose.

For the last few years it has been authors from IRAQ,but this year since so many teachers in our building were working on Africa- we chose that. I'll bet we had 30 folkssigned up and they were reading some really good titles. I was a little disappointedbecause several students had to stay in class because of exams...bummer. But wehad some great student led book talks (after the nachos of course!)

All in all – it was just fine. I also missed it though, because I was teaching with the Health teacher. I guess this even just remindsme that the year is winding down. We start collecting books soon and I have toget ready to do inventory.

Irene and I decided to work on a library guidebook. It is now available on the common drive. We are having our LAG committee look and make suggestions. Actually, since it is the end of the school year, I don't think they are looking right now.

Anyway, I wanted to make a PDF file because you can have chapters on the left. That way, people could click and jump from section to section. I explained to one of our tech teachers what I wanted, and he suggested using Word, saving the document as a html, and setting bookmarks and hyperlinks. Now, I have done something similar when I was handcoding webpaged. It is funny how I never thought of doing it in Word. If anyone wants to know how, leave a comment, and I will post the gory details. It is not hard.

So, now I have a document with a Table of Contents at the top. Click on each name (like Copyright), and you will be taken down to that section. We put information about study halls, classroom use of the library, lab (lab is part of the library), circulation, copyright, textbook room (yes, we deal with that, too), and equipment. We probably have more sections, but I can't think of them right now.

We have permission from the principal to speak at the regular teacher meeting for five minutes and the new teacher for ten. We will mention the handbook and go briefly over copyright. For the new teachers, we will print out a copy of the handbook. They get so much information in that one meeting, we thought it was best not just to mention the common drive version but to also give them a hardcopy version.

Dear TeacherLibrarianNing-ers,

This is to invite you all to join this newly formed group at: Building a Culture of Collaboration Group

It is my belief that as teacher-librarians we must continually develop and refine our collaborative skills and strategies in order to serve as effective instructional partners.

Share your successes. Share your challenges. Share your ideal of what you believe classroom-library collaboration can mean for you, your classroom teacher colleagues, and the students, families, and communities you serve.

Join us!

Best,
Judi

I was just catching up on David Warlick's blog, 2 Cents Worth, and realizing that there's a conversation going on about people feeling they have nothing to contribute to current conversations (he was speaking regarding the Classroom 2.0 ning, but I've actually heard this comment in a few different places lately), especially with those who have much to say on those topics and who do speak out. I've been thinking that way recently, as well, though I also haven't had the means nor the motivation to really do something about it or well, really WANT to get my voice said... if only I had something to say.

When I was in high school, I taught myself html and made a website. I got a huge response and began communicating with people online - either via my website, irc, mailing lists, message boards (wait - what were they called? Not the "message boards" now where they live on a website and you post and others post, etc, but the ones you actually called into with your modem... why can't I remember this?!). I was really involved and active and met a ton of people and always had a conversation going. In college, I created a web journal before I knew about "weblogs" and then once that terminology started coming around, I realized that's what I had been doing all along. I had friends in Australia I talked to daily and lots more elsewhere in the United States or elsewhere in the world. It was an awesome feeling to know that I was so connected with these individuals and that we had something to talk about! After college, I became more and more disconnected, though I kept my blog going and still had a few key virtual friends.

Now, in a professional position, I feel I don't have much to write about. I don't want to write about what happens at school day-in and day-out. I don't have huge insights, but I do love to explore new ideas and ways of doing things and that's what really has me excited right now. Unfortunately, I haven't put myself out there to converse with anyone else about them. I do understand what people are saying, though, about not having anything new to add to the conversation, and I'm right here with them. I do love me some conversation, though, and wonder sometimes where that person I was fourteen years ago went. How amazing that I experienced what I did and in that time in internet history and to see how far we've come!

I'm going to spend my first blog talking about two tools I like. The first is Bloglines.com. If you are new to RSS, this is a great place to start. I follow about ten different blogs from this site. It makes it easy for me to keep up with my favority topics without having to look in different places.

Another tool that I'm really starting to like is Moodle. Moodle is an open-source classroom management system that allows you to offer classes online. I'm still developing some information literacy courses for my school using this tool. If anyone has used it, please let me know.

Blog postings are here.

I wish there was a way to embed my blog in Ning.