It's Back to School!

Today is our first day back to school, and the butterflies are fluttering mightily! But I came into my office with some flowers on my desk (I suspect the principal), the children seem both nervous and excited, and the day is bright and sunny.

I don't see classes today, but I am in charge of the Bubble festival on Friday. Yikes! I will post pictures when I have succeeded (or at least survived).

Happy first days of school everyone!

On Line DNA

Okay, I am a sucker for the fun and colorful. What can I say? Today, thanks to Helene Blowers, I calculated my online DNA based on my name. I figured out that I had to add my middle initial to get the profile to focus mostly on me and not others with parts of my name. Here is the image I ended up with:

I love the colors it came up with and I am tempted to use it as a header for any number of documents or on-line stuff I am doing. But I am going to wait and see what calmer heads might consider reasonable.

If you want to find out your online DNA, here is the link to Personas at MIT.

SMART boards and the Library Lady

My school got its first SMART board, and yesterday was my first day in training. At first I wasn't sure if installing it in our media center was the best choice, in part because our upper school science teacher wanted to use it a great deal.

But now that I have had enough training to become dangerous :-D , I think our principal made the right choice. While I like the potential that I see in the board, and think that I would love to play with it, I also think it is good that it is in the Lab instead of in a particular classroom. Not only will a greater variety of teachers get to play with using it, but it also prevents a teacher from using it when a different sort of lesson would be better. As Richard Byrne says in his blog, Free Technology for Teachers, if a teacher simply uses technology to present the same notes in a different way, it really isn't integration.

Plus, the librarian in me wants to make sure that we don't become so hooked on bells and whistles that we forget the fundamentals of teaching. We need to draw on as many different ways and platforms to present material as we possibly can, so that we can reach as many students as we possibly can.

At least that is my opinion for today. We'll see what my attitude is after I have played more with it. Maybe it's just that I am reluctant to share....

Trying a new endeavor

For all those librarian types out there, I am starting a site for reviewing books for school-aged children, with an occasional foray into the grown-up books I read for fun. In part I am trying to put to use the skills I learned in my 23 Things and More Things classes. I put together a static (relatively speaking) front page as a web site, and then added blog pages for the reviews themselves. Some aspects will be varying, because, as we have learned, most things on the internet are works in progress. (I typed "woks in progress" first, which made me hungry for Asian food....) I want the reviews to be useful to teachers and librarians in particular.

Anyway, I would love you to look at the site and to offer any suggestions, feedback, ideas for books to review, whatever. I have come to value our community of learners, and would love for you to share your opinions.

The site is Book Frontiers and hope to hear from you.

Fun Avatar Generator

Just made a new avatar using a model based on MadMen (thanks to School Library Journal feed!). It was fun to play with and I like my stylish new look! See what you think.


Mad Men Avatar