The Daring Librarian

Sometimes, when you're sharing the benefits of a professional Social Media presence, it can become a bit bewildering and overwhelming. I get that! With so many choices, it can make your head swim and quickly turn intimidating, and it's easy to say "no way, not yet, not now, no how!"  And you let it slide for another week, month, or year! I've been there! So, I wanted to create a cheat sheet, an At-A-Glance Worksheet that would demystify the steps to crafting your Social Media presence with continuity across several platforms, making it easy to follow while still making sure you're not missing anything important. I wish I had this when I was starting out 10 years ago!  Yes, this is a Paper Handout, What? I created this as a PDF to share even as a .....now, don't be too shocked, a printed hand out . Honestly, I admit I like to check off things on a hard copy when I'm working on a project. It makes me feel like I'm accomplishing stu...

 How to be a Teacher Librarian Rock Star - Branding Tips & Tricks First thing I gotta say, I don’t know that I really love the term Library Rockstars because I think ALL Teachers, Librarians, Teacher-Librarians, Educators....we're all rock stars or each of us has an inner rock star just waiting to come out.  I also think it sounds a wee bit elitist. OK, a whole heck of a lot of elitist.  But who doesn’t want to rock it at their job? (BTW, I was asked to write this "Rock Star" article for another publication and using the Rock Star theme was their choice - So, I'm answering their questions - I did the best I could! They highly edited my responses, and I think I ended up sounding like a total prat, but here they are in their entirety.)  To what do you attribute your success? I try to...... Work hard Be Reliable Be Reflective Be Positive Hard work, a sense of humor, tenacity, and a stubbornly fought for positive mental and professional attitude. Yes...

(This is a mirror post to the NEA Today Magazine article online and on  Pages 18-19 ,  under a shorter title - why did they change my title? I thought it was charming! They also only used one of my graphics, don't worry, I'll cry later- silent slow tears on my pillow) In technology (and in life!), sometimes you’re the teacher and sometimes you’re the student - and it’s completely normal to always be a bit of both. One day, you help a colleague learn the joys of the copy and paste keyboard shortcut, and the next day you’re learning how to create and edit a YouTube video or a Gabsee 3D animated Avatar ! So, whether you’re teaching or learning, or a bit of both, here are a few practical tips to make it a little easier for the reluctant tech user.   1. Make it Personal Teaching technology in isolation never works. But teaching tech with a personal twist works most every time.  When a reluctant tech user learns how to do something with technology cen...

Happy New Year!  It's that time of year that I do my Geeky house cleaning, so it's another year going over my past posts about this topic and thinking how to improve them! At first I thought I could leave out the password comic & tip and then the Sony thing happened. WTHeck!? It was recently released that some Sony employees had a password of s0ny123 and the worst, "password!" Also, with brute force hacking making the rounds, I decided to update a few of my tips. "The only person you can rely on to keep your password secure is yourself. And let me tell you, you're probably not doing enough to keep number one safe. The reason: Your special lump of letters, numbers, and symbols are likely spread over too many sites, are not long enough, and are probably too personal. Most of our passwords suck. And it's kind of a big problem." - Gizmodo   1. Craft a Perfect Password & Dump Your Cache OK, so there IS no perfect!...