Elements of Social Media

Elements of Social Media
Originally uploaded by buzzersation

This is a GREAT image to use when describing social media.

Advocacy Webinars

Earlier this month I attended one of ALA Washington's Grassroots Advocacy Webinars live. The webinars are archived as well. The description for the webinar I attended is below:

In this session, we look at one simple action you can take each month to get elected officials not only to understand library issues, but to actually do something about them.

How One Advocacy Action Per Month Can Change the World from ALA Washington on Vimeo.

Advocacy "guru" Stephanie Vance presents sugegestions for an advocacy calender. The calendar allows for planning and organizing one's advocacy efforts for an entire year and keeps those efforts continual rather than only at the time that budgets are being developed, or when a position and/or program is being considered for reduction or elimination. The advocacy plan is broken down into monthly segments that move sequentially from one activity to another and build upon previous activities. Ms. Vance is very down to earth throughout the presentation and includes examples to illustrate the activities each month. I really enjoyed the presentation and think is would be useful to try.

There are many other grassroots advocacy webinars that focus on a different aspect of advocacy, as well as a three-part online course, "Messaging and Talking with Congress: An Interactive Workshop" offered free to ALA members.

The ALA Washington Office website includes lots of great information and a link to the Legislative Action Center.

It's that time of year again

Edublog Awards nominations can be made through Friday, December 3rd. There are many categories, not only blogs, but tweeters, podcasters, audio and video users, webinar series, wiki creators, and others.

Here are my nominations in some of the categories:

Best individual blog: Larry's Loon Blog

Best individual tweeter: Shannon Miller

Best group blog: School Library Journal's Battle of the Kids' Books

Best resource sharing blog: Free Technology for Teachers

Most influential blog post: You know you're a 21st century librarian when... from Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog

Best teacher blog: Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Best librarian/library blog: The Unquiet Library

Best educational wiki: Pathfinders Swap

Best webinar series: Using Emerging Technology to Advance Your School Library Program

Best educational use of a social network: edWeb.net

October's Posts

Experimenting with Wordle, creating a word cloud, using the url of this blog.

Thanks to EdTechUNcon for directing me to 6 Ways to Use Word Clouds in the Classroom, a SimpleK12's 2 Minute EdTech Talk for this week.