Thursday, November 25, 2010

Navigating the New and Building a New Site

The CSLA/CLA "Navigating the New" conference was wonderful! All three sessions I participated in went without hitches, and the audience participation and feedback was very rewarding. Here is the Google Docs slideshow link for the Teen Learning 2.0 session Sheryl Grabow-Weiss presented and here is the Prezi for my VoiceThread session. While neither of these stand alone without commentary, feel free to contact me with questions about either of them.

My only problem with the conference is that I promised myself I'd spend part of my Thanksgiving week off digesting and organizing what I learned, and, here its already Thursday (Thanksgiving Day), and I have so many miles to go. However, I made one resolution while I was there to scrap my new library wiki, which, for whatever reason doesn't seem to be working for me, and create a new library site. I kept fretting about changing gears after I have been trying to "sell" the wiki, but I figure it is better to change early if I am sure I need to change. Yesterday, I got down to it, and now have a "beta" version I would love feedback on. Here's the link. I still have lots to do, but am putting it "out there" now, since I would love feedback. So please do check it out if you can. Also, I really need to give it a rest and get going on my Thanksgiving dinner! I am so thankful this Thanksgiving for my family, my wonderful network of library folks and teachers, and to my school for hiring me and supporting me in my new job.

I am determined to get through my conference thoughts and post more soon, so stand by. :)

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Navigating the New

I just arrived in Sacramento tonight for CSLA's first "Navigating the New" joint conference with CLA. I'm very excited to be here and to experience this first collaborative event. Tomorrow, I will be attending the CSLA State Board meeting, and the conference starts on Friday. I am a panelist for the "Smackdown! Fast and Furious Web 2.0" workshop on Friday at 1:30, along with Moderator Marie Slim, Janet HasBrouck, and Deb Stanley. I am also presenting two concurrent sessions. The sessions are on "Bring Asynchronous Conversation Alive with VoiceThread" at 3:45 Friday and on "CSLA’s Teen Web 2.0 Tutorial: Blogging to Build Web 2.0 and Digital Citizenship Skills" with Sheryl Grabow-Weiss on Saturday at 3 P.M.

Here's a ZooBurst I made that we will be using to introduce the Smackdown:



This is my first ZooBurst, and it was a lot of fun to make. I hope to learn more about it and use it for digital storytelling myself and with students.

Please come to the Smackdown and my concurrent session presentations if you can.