Stop Protect IP and SOPA

Please check this video about the Protect IP and SOPA bills now in Congress that would allow the government to censor sites from the Internet without review.



As Teacher Librarian Joyce Valenza recently wrote in her blog, these "Two pieces of proposed legislation could change the game completely for those of us who teach, write, share, and create online. And for our students. And for the sites that host our content. And for the sites that help us access media and information. And for our understandings about fair use."

For some more information, check this infographic, and visit americancensorship.org to take action and contact your legislators.

Gratitude and the School Library Community

The best part of Thanksgiving, in my mind, is the reminder to think about all I have to be grateful for. And, I have a lot. I am so fortunate: I have a wonderful, loving family, a nice home, and great friends. I'm healthy and am comfortable financially. And, I love my job as a teacher librarian. I came late in my career to this field, and and feel so blessed that I found my passion in it.  I treasure the opportunities my job gives me to work with students and teachers and share my love of reading and information literacy with them. I also love the sense of community that being a member of the school library world has provided me. This posting is dedicated to my gratitude for the school library community.

In just the last month, I have enjoyed several experiences with this community that I am especially grateful about. 

In October, I was so fortunate to be able to attend the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Conference in Minneapolis. I did a short posting about some of what I learned there in my school library blog. I still need to finish going through all the materials I collected, watch videos of some of the sessions I missed, and review videos of some of the great sessions I attended such as Buffy Hamilton's (The Unquiet Librarian) that need a second sitting to truly absorb. In the meantime, I have been working on implementing many of the ideas I learned already. I was so lucky to be able to attend this gathering with many of the best players in our field and learn from their presentations. I believe, though, that it was also just as valuable to visit and network with old and new friends and build community. I got to travel with several great friends from CSLA and enjoy spending time with them. 

Enjoying the Author Brunch with some of my great Calif. Friends at AASL Conference: Marie Slim, Rosemarie Bernier, Kathie Maier, Janice Gilmore-See, and Ellie Goldstein-Erickson http://www.flickr.com/photos/marieslim/6299738721/in/photostream

While we had fun socializing together, and had some great adventures, we also simultaneously shared ideas for good practices and worked on plans for strengthening CSLA and our service to the California school library world. I also met in person for the first time with many of the members of my online personal learning network, and thus strengthened my connections with them. 

Marie Slim and I meet Buffy Hamilton (center). Buffy inspired me to attend the AASL Conference when she invited Marie and me to participate in the "Geek Squad." http://www.flickr.com/photos/marieslim/6288898156/in/photostream

Meeting PLN friends Tiff Whitehead, Gwyneth Jones, & Joyce Valenza at AASL Conference http://www.flickr.com/photos/marieslim/6288382333/in/photostream

Meeting another PLN Friend - Kelly Brannock

Not only do these connections help improve the work I do; they also help to truly make my work as a school librarian feel like the best job and most fun anyone could have!

Just two weeks after AASL, we held CSLA's annual conference in Pasadena November 11-13, and I got a second booster shot of more wonderful ideas to process and use to improve my library program. And, as with the AASL Conference, the opportunities to visit with old and new friends was at least as valuable as the sessions themselves. My only regret during the conference was never having enough time to visit with all the great folks I saw in sessions, at events, and in the halls. It was a true treat to work with my friend Marie Slim on a session about building personal learning networks. Her energy and bubbling personality made the experience of presenting with her so much fun. 

Presenting with Marie Slim at the CSLA Conference  http://www.flickr.com/photos/marieslim/6342762305

As poster sessions chair, I got to enjoy the company of each of the presenters while they set up their displays. At the Board meeting on Thursday before the conference, I had the bittersweet experience of ending my three year cycle as Southern Region President and the honor of beginning my term as State President Elect. I feel honored to have been entrusted with the Southern Region Presidency, and, as with all I have done as a volunteer for CSLA, I have always gotten so much more back in terms of what I learned professionally than I contributed. I have also made wonderful friendships I cherish. I am more than a little nervous taking on an even bigger commitment as I embark on three years as State President Elect, President, and Past President, but I am confident I will have the support of my friends and colleagues, and that my community of school library friends will grow even more and offer many more valuable experiences and delightful adventures to be grateful for. 

With CSLA Southern Region's Board http://www.flickr.com/photos/marieslim/6342789163/

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! 

CSLA Conference and Cyber Sunday

It's conference season, and I promise soon to report about all the great ideas I learned during the AASL Conference in Minneapolis October 27-30 and the Library 2.011 Virtual Conference November 2-3. Right now, though, I'm in major preparation mode for CSLA's annual conference being held in Pasadena next Friday - Sunday (November 11-13). If you live in California, you aren't going to want to miss it. It's not too late to register onsite. Check out the conference website, and especially the conference wiki. Marie Slim is the brain behind the wiki, and welcomes all your participation. And, you don't need to be a member of the school library world to participate in the conference. On Sunday, we are offering the first ever "Cyber Sunday," a full day of engaging sessions by experts in the field of cyber citizenship, online safety, digital literacy, and empowering our 21st Century learners online. This entire event is free and open to parents, teachers, and anyone interested. Here is the invitation I sent to staff members and volunteers at my school this week. Please take it as a personal invitation to you!

Dear Staff/Volunteers,

I would like to extend an invitation to all of you to attend a very special "Cyber Sunday" event being convened next Sunday, November 13, by the California School Library Association (CSLA) at the Pasadena Convention Center from 9:45 AM - 3:15 PM.  As an addition to CSLA's regular annual conference, we are hosting a day of sessions by experts from the field - elected officials, reps from Yahoo, Facebook, the CA Dept. of Education, CA Dept. Office of Privacy Protection, and more - on all aspects of cyber citizenship, online safety, digital literacy, and empowering our 21st Century learners online. This program is being offered free of charge, and intended for educators, parents, government leaders, and any other interested parties. Please consider spending the day at this event, which I am confident will be very informative and rewarding.

Here is a link to the event Invitation.

Here is a link to the program Brochure.

Here is a link to the Cyber Sunday Registration form.

For general information, visit the Calif. School Library Association website at csla.net. And, please do contact me if you have any questions. I would love to have you attend.

Sincerely,

Jane Lofton
Mira Costa Teacher Librarian
Incoming President Elect, Calif. School Library Association

Freshman Orientations

Okay, I have to admit that I right now I am exhausted! But I'm also exhilarated. I just completed Day 7 of school, and, by distributing textbooks during Registration, I was able both to transition the library from a textbook warehouse to a full library by School Day 3, and to begin Freshman Orientations on Day 5. I just finished my first round of two-day Freshman Orientations. The first day was a lesson, using this Prezi file, in which I described various features of the library and had students guess which icon I was talking about and what the "app" would be called. Using this presentation file, I filled them in on their Teacher Librarian (me), Books and Reading, Research, Technology, Rules and Procedures, our after school tutoring program, our Virtual Library, and our Fun Activities and Programs. If you would like a copy of the basic "script," let me know.

This year, I added a second day to the orientation, a scavenger hunt, which included some questions using QR codes. Many thanks to Gwyneth Jones' QR Code Scavenger Hunt for inspiration and some of the questions. The students, by and large, were unaware of QR codes until I introduced them, but I am sure they will start seeing them all over now they know about them. I tried to make the activities a balanced combination of library culture, fun, and important skills. Now that I finished the first round today, I'm pretty happy with the results. Many of the students needing some coaching to get all the right answers, but I think they learned as part of the experience. I also think that most of them found it a positive, fun experience, which will encourage them to want to visit the library.

So, five Freshman English classes down, and 29 to go. But, round one, always the hardest, is at least complete!

If any readers are interested in using and adapting either the Prezi lesson or the Scavenger hunt form, please feel free.

What a Difference a Year Makes

What a difference a year (or, more precisely, a year and a month) makes ….

Yesterday, after four intense days of textbook distribution Monday through Thursday, I had one final vacation day before my full-time work schedule begins next week. My daughter and I took advantage of this “gift” of one more free day to do what is usually an annual trip for us – We went to the Los Angeles Downtown Apparel Mart for the “Last Friday of the Month” Sample Sale. As we arrived there, I flashed back to my last visit a year ago --- well, technically, a year and a month ago, in July 2010. While we were roving from showroom to showroom in search of bargains during that visit, I got a call from Ben Dale, the new Principal at Mira Costa High School, inviting me to come do a demo lesson. Thus began the process of demo, interview, and anxious waiting that ultimately resulted in the job offer for my current position as Teacher Librarian at Mira Costa.

So, what’s changed for me since then? . . . A lot!

My job: It’s hard to believe how quickly the time flew by, but I’ve now gained a year’s experience as a high school teacher librarian. My work as a middle school teacher librarian gave me excellent preparation for teaching library skills to high school students, but I have been learning a lot about how different these older students are and what appeals to them. In general, they are so much more serious about their work, much less needy or inclined to act up, but it is also harder to guess what will capture their attention or imagination. I am still experimenting with what works and doesn’t, and have a very long list of projects I wanted to accomplish but didn’t get to last year. Here, though, are some of the things I’m proud of accomplishing during the last year:

-Teaching information literacy, research, digital citizenship, and technology skills to many classes

-Delivering five different professional development sessions to some of my colleagues

-Building relationships Mira Costa staff and with the outstanding library media specialists who staff the district’s middle school and five elementary schools

-Encouraging many students to read books they enjoy

-Developing a lively, welcoming atmosphere in the physical library and a growing virtual library

Here’s a Comic Life cartoon I created to summarize some of the highlights of the last year.

Textbooks: Ah, textbooks. I don’t think I know any teacher librarians who consider them a fun part of the job. Indeed, it is not part of the job description for many, and I don’t consider it an integral part of the library program. It is one of my job functions I had to learn, since I wasn’t responsible for them in my middle school TL position. While I can’t pretend I love being in charge of textbooks, it is important to me to get them into the hands of students as efficiently as possible. One change I have been able to accomplish from last year to this is that we are distributing textbooks during registration this year. This means that teachers won’t have to devote class time to bringing their students in for books the first several days of school or fret about having to delay assignments until their appointed distribution day. I know that not all the students came for their books last week, but, with 5,712 books checked out, I am confident that the majority of our 2,400+ students will be arriving for their first day of school on Wednesday with their books. This is a new procedure I advocated for and am proud I have been able to implement. And, while I will still be dealing with textbooks the first week of school, I am optimistic that I can transition from my focus on them to the library more quickly this year.

Moving: The location of my new job meant that I had a pretty grueling commute last year. So this summer, my family moved to a new home in San Pedro closer to my work. We still have so much to do to get settled, and we chose a smaller house, so we faced the challenge of down-scaling our possessions, and we are still figuring out how to fit everything in. I know all of that will take a while, but I am loving the cooler climate and ocean breezes here, and having a great time exploring our new town. See my occasional new Travelpod blog for photos and brief accounts of some of my adventures. I especially love the views of the harbor and ocean from all over town and being able to get to the coast in just five minutes to enjoy a walk along it.

My volunteer life: I have just accepted a new challenge as a CSLA (California School Library Association) volunteer. This summer, I completed my term as Past President of the Association’s Southern Section. I intended to stay active in the organization, but I never planned to be State President. When asked to be on the slate as State President Elect, though, I decided that I was needed to step up to the task. I know that it will be a huge responsibility doing justice to this position in which I will be a key spokesperson advocating for school libraries throughout California. I will do my best to prepare myself for this task in the coming year as President Elect and to serve the organization and its goals well.


Now, on to Year 2 at Mira Costa and Year 1 in San Pedro. While I have lots of goals for the coming year, I’m not including blogging more often, because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t succeed. But, I will try to check in here periodically. Here’s a photo of one of the bargain outfits I found on my annual Downtown shopping outing yesterday to wear on the job and around my new town.

Wishing everyone a wonderful new school year!

Twitter Stats

This has been a very busy summer, between moving to a new house, lots of volunteering time clocked with CSLA, and getting ready for the new school year. When I don't have time to write blog postings, I still try to keep up as best I can with Twitter, which has become my #1 personal learning network tool. When I saw Rob Darrow's posting about a Twitter infographic tool from The Print Effect, I couldn't resist trying it out for my own Twitter feed, and seeing, from a new perspective, just how much of my communication has moved to Twitter. Here it is:

Developed by Cartridge Save, stockists of printer cartridges

If you aren't on Twitter, give it a try. :)

Authors on Audio from LearnOutLoud.com

I should be ignoring everything online and concentrating on packing for my house move next week ... but can't resist taking some "breaks" to check out my PLN and discovering great resources. Here's one ....

I recently started subscribing to the LearnOutLoud.com enewsletter. LearnOutLoud.com is a site which describes itself as "your one-stop destination for audio and video learning ... (with) ... over 30,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and videos." It includes many free selections, both fiction and non-fiction, along with the items to purchase. The enewsletter always features a free resource of the day. Today, for example, the selection is Harvard Professor Michael Sandel's 12-lecture course, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do. I am hoping to get to some of these offerings this summer!

What especially caught my eye today, though, was the announcement of 50 new LearnOutLoud.com Author Pages, bringing the site's total author pages to about 100. These pages offer us a rich resource of audio and video material for many major authors. Here's how the site describes its author pages:

We've hand picked the best and most prolific authors in every field of audio & video learning, and we've attempted to list absolutely everything that these authors have available on audio & video. We've also included biographies and links to these author's websites so you can learn more about them. So browse around and you'll find some of the best minds in Self Development, Business, and much more. And keep checking back because we're adding more Author Pages every day.

Browsing the full author list, you will see a large range of choices, such as philosophers like Aristotle, classic authors like Jane Austen, and scholars like Noam Chomsky. I will definitely be integrated these resources into my library website and sharing them with teachers and students in the fall. Thank you, LearnOutLoud.com.

I'm still waiting for an invitation to join Google+ and envying the tweets and postings I see about it. It will probably be just as well if it doesn't come until after my move. Wish me luck packing. :)

Great additions to the Library Store

I wrote a while back about CSLA's new California Campaign for Strong School Libraries launched by Past President Connie Williams to raise awareness about the importance of school libraries and the role they play in teaching students information literacy skills, fostering a love of reading, and building life-long readers and learners. To help support the campaign, Jackie Siminitus created a Library Store on Cafe Press. This store is truly a labor of love for Jackie, and its offerings are growing by leaps and bounds as she constantly adds new items to it. Now is a perfect time to visit for end of school gifts. The store now has a huge selection of t-shirts, cups, coasters, stationery, magnets, and more, all decorated with a large variety of wonderful library and reading related images donated by book illustrators. Here's a flyer Jackie just created to promote it:

Please do take advantage of the wonderful offerings there. And, for graduates, Jackie has even created a new image of her own, available on a whole variety of swag:

Do check it out! I just finished a shopping spree there myself, getting end-of-year gifts for my library volunteers and for my graduating student aides.

Purple Daze by Sherry Shahan

Sherry Shahan and I meet at the SCIBA Dinner

I had the pleasure on February 26 of attending the SCIBA (Southern California Independent Booksellers Association) annual Children’s Book and Literacy Dinner in Pasadena. I went home with a large pile of wonderful books to work my way through, including the ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) for Purple Daze, by Sherry Shahan (published by Running Press Teens). I was especially excited to read the book after meeting and visiting with Sherry and learning that the novel was set in 1965 in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of Los Angeles where Sherry grew up.

Sherry in her high school yearbook

While she was experiencing high school life and receiving first-hand information about the escalating Vietnam War in letters from a friend stationed there, I was growing up “over the hill” in nearby West Los Angeles. Even though I was just a few miles away and less than a handful of years younger, my personal life was in a very different world. In my little world, all my friends went straight from high school to college, and parents did everything they could to save their sons from the draft. So, while I witnessed the same historic events Sherry brings to life in her book, my only personal perspective on the war was my male friends’ efforts to avoid it and all my friends' protests against our participation in it. Even as I reached high school and college and had many male friends who feared the possibility of being drafted, I never had a close friend actually go to Vietnam.

Letter Sherry received from her
friend in Vietnam.

While Shahan’s book led me to revisit a time in my life from a different perspective than my own, it offers its target audience of young adults a vivid, absorbing picture of the challenges many teens faced during this trying time in our history. Sherry tells her story in verse, using letters and journal entries of six high school friends dealing with the war, riots in Los Angeles, the attractions of drugs, an unwanted pregnancy, friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness, as two of the young men join the war effort – one in the Marines in Vietnam and the other in the Navy in the West Indies. Interspersed with these personal accounts are passages offering valuable historical background information for the reader.  Sherry’s fictionalized autobiographical account of her experiences and those of her friends provides readers with a rich snapshot of this time and will encourage them to ponder the decisions we make, the value of friendship, and the impact of war in our own time. The book was just published in late March, and I will definitely be stocking it in my high school library and sharing it with students.

Here’s the booktalk I am also publishing in my library blog and on my library website:

Presentations, Presentations, and Prezi

I've had so many ideas for posts I'd like to write lately -- including sharing great ARCs I've read by Jennifer Ann Kogler (The Death Catchers) and Sherry Shahan (The Purple Daze) (both coming soon!) --  but I've failed to get to. Instead, I've been overwhelmed with presentations in the last couple of months. Since January 10, I've done nine presentations! One more to go this coming Thursday, and then I'll have a break, and hope to have more writing time.  In the meantime, here are links to the presentation fiIes for most of my recent presentations in case any of your would like to check them out.

• Presentation about the Manhattan Beach USD Libraries for the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, prepared by me and Debby Kalenik, Library Specialist at the our middle school, and Heidi Snively, Barbara Siegemund-Broka, Julie Jones, and Yukari Matsuyama, Library Specialists at our elementary schools.
• CSLA's Web 2.0 Tutorials for the California School Library Association (CSLA) Southern Section Workshop
• CSLA's Teen Learning 2.0 Tutorial for CUE (Computer Using Educators) Conference, with Sheryl Grabow-Weiss
• Ignite Interest and Inspire Your Audience with Prezi.com Presentations and Lessons for the CUE Conference, with Jani Nelson

Manhattan Beach USD Staff Professional Development Sessions:

• CSLA's Classroom Learning 2.0 Tutorial 
• Creative Commons, What Is It, and Why Do I Need to Know About It?  (including information about copyright, fair use, and Flickr.com as a source for Creative Commons images)
• Bring Asynchronous Conversation to Life with VoicThread (mostly a repeat of my November presentation at the CSLA Annual Conference)

If you click the links, you will see that I did all of these using Prezi.com, my current tool of choice for presentations. The only presentation I have done lately without Prezi was my hands-on session about Google Docs and iGoogle, for which I didn't have a formal presentation. Why do I love Prezi? ... I first learned about it when I was a virtual attendee at NECC session in 2009 by Steve Dembo. I was blown away by the pizzaz of his presentation. I set myself a goal of using it for a presentation. I learn more about its power each time I create a new Prezi. It offers so much flexibility in terms of laying out a presentation on a free-form canvas, presenting on or off a set path, grouping items in multiple different ways for viewing during a presentation, and zooming in and out to drill down to more detail or for surprise effect. Check my Prezi presentation for CUE above to learn a little more about why this tool has captured my heart. :) Give it a try if you haven't already. Prezi also just introduced an iPad app. When my iPad 2 finally arrives in the mail, it will be one of the first apps I'll be checking out. 

Campaign for Strong School Libraries!

I'm a member of the California School Library Association (CSLA) board, but I'm writing as an individual to share with you my excitement that CSLA has just launched the 2011 Campaign for Strong School Libraries, a public awareness campaign to increase understanding about the importance of strong school libraries for our children. See the details below in the message that went out to our membership from Connie Williams, a CSLA Past President and Chair of the Campaign. If you live in California, I hope you have already learned about this and visited the site. I also want to share this with all of you outside California for several reasons:

• We would love any all of you to support our campaign, and/or
• You can use our ideas in your own state, and/or
• You can visit our Campaign LIBRARY STORE and get great stuff for your library, you, and your stakeholders

More information:

http://www.csla.net/pdf/CSLACCfSSLAnnouncement.pdf

http://www.csla.net/pdf/CSLAIllustratorsGaloreLibraryStore.pdf

These are difficult times for school libraries everywhere. Working together, we can make them strong.

Do please feel free to spread any or all of this message far and wide to colleagues and friends.

Here's the letter from Connie:

The California School Library Association (CSLA) announces the launch of the 2011 California Campaign for Strong School Libraries, a public awareness campaign to increase understanding about the importance of strong school libraries for our children.

Through a variety of projects and programs, the Campaign for Strong School libraries is targeting areas throughout California to raise awareness about the importance of strong school libraries for our children.  Some of these projects include:

ê  Expanding the CSLA 2.0 tutorials to include:

A:  Summer 2.0 fun for teens @ their library [public library summer programs]

B:  Digital citizenship tutorial – targeted to teacher librarians and other educators so that they are comfortable teaching about and working with Internet Safety, cyber citizenship and information ethics applications

C:  Administrators 2.0 tutorials in process to provide tech learning for those decision makers in schools and school districts

ê  Campaign LIBRARY STORE:

Book and library-themed gifts for yourself and your library-loving friends!  Includes the incredible artwork of children’s book illustrators who have given us art to advocate for strong libraries. Watch for and widely share the announcement about the Campaign LIBRARY STORE.

ê  Bus Ads in targeted areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Help us spread the word about strong school libraries!

Join the public awareness campaign today by contributing your tax-deductable donation to support new ‘action advocacy’ projects as developed by CSLA members to promote library service, instruction and legislative action.  Invite your district and regional library organizations to make a donation to buy regional bus banners and ads.  Donate your time as well so that we can build a coalition of library supporters who will work together to ensure that our students have access to the strong school libraries they need to become lifelong learners.

To join or learn more about the campaign, please visit: http://librarycampaign.csla.net/.

Let the Campaign begin!

Connie Williams

Chair, California Campaign for Strong School Libraries

My Nominees for the Library Super Heroes Contest

Gale/Cengage, a wonderful library reference book and database vendor, is sponsoring a "Librarian Super Hero" contest. According to Gale's Facebook page, "Four librarians will be selected from your submissions and turned into cartoon superheroes! Winners will be featured on a metal lunch box and unveiled at ALA in New Orleans!" 


Well, there are so many, many teacher librarians who I consider superheroes! I have been thinking about this for a few days now, and really hesitated to participate in nominating folks for this award, since I knew, by doing so, that I would feel very guilty and sad to be leaving out so many other wonderful TLs who also deserve my nomination. But, with apologies to all my other wonderful and deserving colleagues, I decided that there were several colleagues who I really, really want to see as action figures on a lunchbox! So, I am going to second Jackie Siminutus's nomination of Connie Williams (in which she states:

"I nominate Petaluma, CA High School Teacher Librarian Connie Williams for being an outstanding instructor, introducing hundreds of students cyber citizenship through her Teen Learning 2.0 tutorial; chairing the California Campaign for Strong School Libraries (librarycampaign.csla.net); co-developing online professional development web 2.0 tutorials for teachers and teacher librarians; co-creating an audio journal in support of strong school libraries (csla.net/audio); writing articles for La Voz and Follett Software, and the list goes on. She and her miniature dachshund Lucy riding in the front bike basket would make great action figures. :)"

as an outstanding teacher librarian, leader, role model, and advocacy superstar, and add three nominations of my own: 

• I would love to see Marie Slim (@sraslim on twitter) as a lunchbox action hero because she is one of the most talented, energetic - and hip - teacher librarians I know. Until last school year, she was a super TL at Troy High School, correlating collaborative lessons with standards and sharing information literacy, love of reading, and technology-savvy with her students and school staff. When her district - Fullerton Joint Union High School District - cut positions and obliged her to split herself into three pieces at three different schools, she truly made lemonade out of lemons. She is now collaborating with teachers at all three schools, setting up replicable wiki sites for each of the lesson units she develops, and exemplifying a super hero setting the very best priorities - to keep information literacy instruction formost - even when faced with a difficult situation in which she is stretched way too thin. Her district is so lucky to have her! She is also an outstanding volunteer for California School Library Association: she is a member of the Southern Section Board, was social networking chair for the organization's state conference, and is a true social networking maven for teacher librarians in California and beyond.
• Joyce Valenza (@joycevalenza on twitter) - I have been getting inspiration from Joyce Valenza ever since I entered the school library field in 2002 and began using her Power Tools book. What a way we've come since then, and so much of it with her as our guide into new territory with Web 2.0 tools that now enable us and our students to become creators, not just users, of information. She exemplifies the very, very best and the true cutting-edge of the school librarian profession. Her blog could serve as mandatory reading for any teacher librarian in training. Her incredible knowledge of information literacy and technology tools, and how to integrate them into a dynamic school library program, is matched only by her enthusiastic willingness to share this savvy with other members of the school library profession. Her students and teachers at Springfield Township High School, in Erdheim, PA, must count themselves as blest to have THE #1 school library rock star as their librarian!
• Gwyneth Jones (@gwynethjones on twitter) - I've just become aware of Gwyneth in the last year or so (I'm sure I should have much earlier), but what a action hero teacher librarian she is! Anyone who reads her tweets, her blog, or her tech wiki has to be blown away by the enthusiasm she exudes for tools of our school library profession and her creativity in sharing them. And, she doesn't just share tools with students, teachers, and other teacher librarians; the tools jump off the page thanks to her incredible graphic presentation and engaging writing style. Gwynneth could be a graphic designer creating all the action hero graphics for us if she didn't already have a job - at which she is a superstar - being the teacher librarian at Murray Hill Middle School in Laurel, Maryland, in addition to blogging, tweeting, and being a member of the ISTE Board of Directors.

Check out Gale's Facebook page for these nominations! And, if you aren't already following their words of wisdom on Twitter and elsewhere, do start!

My Library Status Report & Making Friends Across the Blogosphere

After I tweeted about the recent status report I created using Prezi.com, I was honored to have Buffy Hamilton ask me to do a guest posting on the Georgia Library Association blog about why I chose this Prezi for it.  I intended to cross-post what I wrote here, but then realized that it would make more sense to just refer you to it. So, please check this link to my posting. Thanks so much, for inviting me, Buffy!

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/22177648@N06/2137735126/ from www.lumaxart.com) 

I have been following Buffy for some time, but we hadn't "met" before she noticed my tweet about my status report. [If you aren't already, be sure to check out her library blog, The Unquiet Library, and follow her on Twitter (buffyjhamilton) for lots of inspiration on how to energize your school library program.] I know I am guilty of spending way too much time online tracking down every last library link and idea I can, but connecting with her reminded me of one of the great joys of being hooked into an active personal learning network: it also gives me the pleasure and honor of getting to know people across the country and even the world. Last summer, I even had the fun of meeting another "online" friend, Sue Waters (suewaters on Twitter) of Edublogs fame, and her friend Frances in person during their visit to The United States from Australia. With all the difficult issues facing us today, we also have the huge benefit and enjoyment of being able to share and cross-fertilize ideas across the planet and to even make new friends in the process.