Feeling Very Productive

Wow!  I have to say that I feel very good about today's professional development for Monongalia County's library media specialists. Wow!  I don't think I have ever felt this good after a day-long meeting, especially one that ran over the end of our designated work day. Wow!

I was pleased by the combination of library media specialists and technology integration specialists in today's meeting.  Although our job descriptions differ, we share overlapping roles.  Certainly there is ample need for sharing support for integration of resources in each school.  By bringing us together, county technology director Nancy Napolillo highlighted our shared and complementary responsibilities.  Unfortunately, time did not permit each school's library media specialist and technology integration specialists to collaboratively plan for the upcoming year, as Napolillo had envisioned.  Hopefully the common ground broached today will encourage further collaboration as the school year proceeds.

[Just as an aside, isn't this great?  It is as if we are no longer isolated in our buildings.  I am sure our TISs will appreciate a collaborative approach to meeting our common goals!]

What was on our common agenda?  The National Technology Plan, reading promotion, copyright issues, acceptable use and cyber safety, EdLine, Discovery Education, Thinkfinity.  In other words, library issues.  No piece of information shared today was irrelevant to today's library media specialist.

The afternoon session was only attended by library media specialists.  We discussed ebooks, our online reference sources and looked at ways of editing our Destiny webpages.  We discussed how we could implement Destiny Quest as a substitute for book reports and looked at how we could enable our database to give students review writing privileges.

Our afternoon concluded with a discussion of resources to use to build our professional learning networks.  We discussed Elluminate and Classroom 2.0, Teacher Librarian Ning, Elementary Library Routines wiki, and TL Virtual Cafe.  We discussed how we can learn together and made plans to inform future library professional development sessions.  Nancy Napolillo stated she would test the waters as to official support for our staff development efforts.

I am so excited.  We have so much to learn and so much to teach each other.  I can't wait to be in touch with my Monongalia County Library Media/TIS tribe!