Banned Books Week 2010

Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the impact of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

Find more information and ideas on how to celebrate the freedom to read here, here, here, and here.

The Banned Books Week site has a cool map showing where censorship is occurring.

The National Book Festival at the Library of Congress is another venue for information.

If you are Second Lifer, check out Banned Books Week in Second Life.

Look for READOUTS happening at your public library or favorite book store.

The Reform Symposium

This electric conference was an outstanding example of a what can be accomplished with the help of one's Personal Learning Network. The entire conference took place via Elluminate sessions which have been archived. Podcasts are being made available as well.

My favorite was the keynote by Shelly Blake-Plock. He gave many examples of practical and everyday uses of online tools such as Twitter, wikis, blogs, and more. How his classroom was converted to function as a 21st century classroom is amazing!

Two others that I enjoyed and recommend are Richard Byrne's Back-Channeling in the Classroom and Joe Bower's Abolishing and Replacing Grading.

The links for the archived Elluminate sessions are found on the ABOUT tab, MEET THE PRESENTERS. Each presenter has a separate page with information and a description of their presentation with links to their website, Twitter handle, and the archived Elluminate session.

A Google doc, Links-Reform Symposium 2010 , was collectively created to gather links discussed by the presenters or shared in the chat by the participants into one great resource.

Back to School Special

TL Virtual Cafe's Transformative Conversations for the 2010-2011 school year have begun. The first webinar has already occurred, but don't worry, the Elluminate session will be archived as well as the text chat, slides used during the presentations, and other resources will be available on the TL Virtual Cafe wiki.

The first webinar, Back to School Special: Making You and Your Library Indispensable, was presented by three different teacher librarians. Keisa Williams talked about what she does in her elementary school, Gwyneth Jones discussed her middle school program, and Shannon McClintock Miller shared what happens in her secondary program. Lots of great ideas were presented as well as discussed in the text chat.

Plan on attending next month's October 4th webinar with Doug Johnson presenting on the Changes in the Physical Library.

Newspaper for Twitter

Paper.li is a site that creates a daily newspaper for links shared on Twitter by user/s, list, or #tag.

Now I don't have to feel like I'm missing anything when I'm not logged into Twitter. I created my own Twitter newspaper and I receive an email with the link to today's paper. Paper.li collects the links, photos, and videos, then categorizes the information into subjects. Just a few are shown on the front page for each subject with the option of viewing all.

Look at mine for an example. Here are some others that I also like: #tlchat Daily (teacher librarian chat); #edchat Daily; and #edtech Daily.

Hiatus OVER

It's been awhile!!!

I've been using Twitter, attending webinars, and reading, not sharing or writing.

My plan is to restart the blog and make sure that the post are short and to the point.