The Daring Librarian

I was asked recently for a quote by a N.Y. Times editor for their opinion page : Here's the question: "School librarians are on the chopping block as states and cities seek to cut their education budgets. Do superintendents and principals see librarians as more expendable than other school employees? If so, why?" Here's my response: "From the Daring Librarian to Teacher Librarians everywhere with love, albeit tough love - but full on love! Times are tough all over for education. Superintendents and administrators are making some hard financial decisions. Any position that does not have constant student interaction, testing expectations, and direct grading is vulnerable. Librarians and school libraries are at a crossroads. This is one of the most exciting times to be a teacher-librarian in our country and is also the scariest. A revolution is at hand, and we need to be nimble, daring, digital and shift both our practice and the way the world thinks of schoo...

Every year I look forward to going to ISTE Island and taking a snap for my Virtual Worlds Name Tag! Yes, I blogged about this last year..but it deserves a fresh mention! It's important that those of us who learn and teach on the grid show our SIGVE allegiance! It's also important to represent my Steampunk aesthetic by wearing my most fetching Steamy Victorian tophat by famed milliner Miss Reghan Straaf of Hatpins ! I'm also wearing Miss Punktuality gown by Cutea of Grimm Bros. with out of control grid breaking metal overskirt & matching rusty clock bedecked collar. Go big or go home, folks. I also gotta admit I photoshopped my Avatar...which frankly is just a bit odd. Get your own ISTE SIGVE Nametag! "If you're heading to Philly next week for ISTE 2011, don't be left without your avatar name badge. Come on over to ISTE HQ's and follow the directions at the photo booth. Thanks and see you soon! -Louise" Here's the SLURL to the Photobooth! ...

It's that time of year again! Time to beg, cajole, tease, torture (audibly), and plead to get our Library Media materials back. With 27% of our students on free & reduced lunch I know that we have a large group of kids that probably can't pay for their lost books...and I've made peace with the fact that I'm never gonna get ALL my books, digital playaways , & CD's back. I shoot for a loss of 30 a year. Sometimes it's more - sometimes it's less. And, That's OK! That's the cost of doing business. Some of my kids might not return a book because they LOVE it and they can't buy it to keep for their personal libraries. So, if that could possibly EVER be the case I only push so far. BUT... I do everything I can to get those materials back because though I'm understanding, I'm still trying to teach responsibility, respect for property, and accountability! That's why I have lots of creative ways to get our books back. And yes, I...

Only 3 weeks until the ISTE11 conference kickoff with Mario Armstrong! OhEmGee, I am SO excited! Besides being super busy with with ISTE Board service, meetings, poster sessions, Blogger cafe hanging, and playgrounds - I'll be presenting twice on two exciting (but very different!) panels! !! Game Show Learning! Learning Tools Family Feud: Crowdsourced Edition with Geek Tribe pals my dear mentor the amazing Joyce Valenza, super cool & smart Shannon M. Miller, slick Chad Lehman, hilarious & high-energy Nick "The Nerdy Teacher" Provenzano, and the wonderously sweet & funny Matthew Winner! With our special game show host the AWEsome Steve Dembo! Survey Says! This is gonna be GROOVY! We're gonna re-visit the favourite 70's Game Show with a Twist! We've crowdsourced the survey with over 100 of our PLN answering questions using a Google Form and will be going head-to-head boys against the girls to see if we can guess what the top learning tools wi...

I have great friends! Even people I don't get to see all the time or have met only once - I'm richer for having known them! My PLN is the same - richer for (virtually) knowing them... Sarah Koski, a bright, bubbly member of our ISTE staff from our Eugene OR ISTE office - even though she's working hard on the upcoming ISTE conference sent me this from The Daily Good - a really cool site with quirky (love!) news items that is of course blocked in my district! "So you want to read James Joyce's famously impenetrable modernist masterpiece Ulysses, but you can't seem to take your eyes off the Internet? We've got the solution to your problems. This year, for Bloomsday , an annual celebration of Joyce and Ulysses, there's an effort underway to recast the novel and publish it in its entirety in a series of tweets. The experiment, called " Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011 ," will use volunteers, who will each take a section of the book (it's been divid...

As much of a Mac fangrrl as I am, I've never been a Safari fan. I dunno why, it just never *felt* right. So it was Netscape...and then Firefox & Chrome. Of course the iPad only came with Safari so when I heard that Google Diigo came out with a FREE new browser app called iChromy which offers an identical browsing experience on your iPad with a smooth user interface, free apps, and some rather nice features - I was excited! When researching this I came across a great article on Cult of Mac : (link below) " iChromy’s attempt to mimic Google Chrome on the iPad makes it one of the nicest third-party browsers for the iPad I’ve used. One of its best features is its tabbed browsing: just like Chrome all of your tabs sit at the very top of the browser and it’s simple to switch between them and open & close individual tabs." SWEET! (Correction: In my excited reporting of this new APP I jumped to the conclusion that Google came out with this but it was the AWE...

I can't help myself. I love me some JT. He brings my Sexy Back! (not that it ever left! ;-) ...But almost as much I love Justin Timberlake, I adore this new app that "plays" the vinyl records of my youth AND let's you "scratch" as if you had 2 turn tables and a microphone (Beck knows where it's at!) And...it's only $1.99! Thanks to my dear friends Joquetta Johnson & Donna Anderson - my Appolicious Queens of the i Pad I learned about this at the MSET spring board meeting last week! The pic on the right shows another cool feature! When choosing an LP you can "flip" through the albums in a milk crate of all your iTunes music! No need to import the App finds it and puts it right there for you! How cool! Another great new app is from my longtime software love, Comic Life. At a more hefty price of $7.99 this gorgeous app promises to feed my comic desires on the go! Haven't played much with this but I'll report back to you dear ...