Welcome everyone to using emerging technology to improve your school library program. This is session 8,where we will discuss Visibility and advocacy for you and your program.

I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Follett Software Company and our host, edWeb.net, not only for this and all other edWeb.net Emerging Tech webinars, but for providing us with an online community in which to converse and exchange ideas in between sessions as well. We’ve had several dynamic conversations this month, and I will take some time to talk about them today. If you have a Twitter account, and here is my opportunity to plug next month’s session, because we will be talking about Micro Communication, and you are Tweeting about this session, please include #edwebet in your message. If you don’t understand what I just said, be sure to tune in next month on Wed. March 9 at 4PM Eastern time right here at InstantPresenter.com/edweb2.

Last month, we talked about social capital, which is one approach to attain visibility and advocate for your program, but there are others. The last thing I want to convey is that if you don’t have access you can’t promote yourself and your program.

I want to give a quick shout out to Lisa Nielsen who joined us during the webinar last month. Lisa is the Technology Innovation Manager for the New York City Public Schools. She didn’t come today, but she said she might pop in next month.

Her blog,The Innovative Educator: Way out of the Box, has nearly 2,000 followers. She has written a book. She Keynotes. She used to be a librarian in Harlem. Did I mention that her blog caption is “Way out of the box”? Lisa doesn’t always follow the rules. She was a librarian ten years ago and now she is an administrator for a formidable school system. But believe me, she is no bureaucrat.

We connected on Twitter, on January 7, just before our last webinar. I was working on the edWeb presentation, she Tweeted something about a show on CNBC called The Facebook Obsession, I thanked her, explaining what I was working on. I looked up the show. Watched it the next night. Tweeted her a thanks, and invited her to the webinar. Voila! There she was. I mention her not only to thank her, but, since we are talking about visibility and advocacy, to feature her as an exemplar. She was a librarian in Harlem, not New Canaan. She fights the status quo at every possible opportunity. Remember, she was the one with the cheat-sheet of things to say to lawyers and naysayers about CIPA and other legal rationalizations against opening schools to social media. She has risen far and fast by advocating for not just reform, but for innovation.

Last month, I featured a survey we posted on our library website. Now, I am collecting responses from non-New Canaan students. So far, I’ve collected 135 responses, but only 14 of these are from out of state. I am looking for more. It would be great if you could ask some of your students to take it and pass it on. I am hypothesizing that responses from students in censored schools will vary significantly from those in free-range schools. I use the terms “censored” and “free range” in terms of access to social media. If you are worried about doing this at school, your kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, neighbors, youth groups would be fine. If every kid passed it on to three others, we’d have meaningful results, and hopefully some compelling evidence to stop all this social media censorship in education.

If you have not already done so, please be sure to join the edWeb.net/emergingtech community – that’s where we continue the conversation throughout the month. We talked a lot about eReaders this month, how to publish book trailers, and using online social interaction to engage students with reading. Remember, membership is free!

So I have some announcements today.

I am pleased to announce that I wrote a little piece on hybrid programming for an article by David Loertscher and Carol Koechlin – the creators of Learning Commons. It should come out soon, and it will be available on line at TeacherLibrarian.com. Yesterday, I agreed to write another article for their April - the Best of the Best issue.

I have been working with Violet Harada who teaches library science at the University of Hawaii on a chapter for a book she is editing with Debbie Abilock and Kristin Fontichiaro. The chapter is all about edWeb.net, and this series. Lisa has helping me with this project. We’re pretty excited that our collective experience here at Emerging Tech will be shared. If there is anything you think I should include, please message me at edweb or shoot me a Tweet.

I will facilitate a week-long workshop at the Taft Teacher Education Center during the last week of July 2011. It is open to educators in all disciplines, with special emphasis on librarianship. Participants can earn 3 graduate credits through the University of Hartford (there is an additional fee for this). The cost is $850 for commuters, and $1,100 for boarders. It is beautiful, the food is great. Bring a laptop and we'll have lots of fun. I added a page to my blog about this, in case you want to find out more. I had to push pretty hard to get on the schedule at Taft. The program’s faculty is well entrenched. So they’ve told me that they’ll cancel the program if they don’t have enough participants registered by May 1. I’ve been a participant in several workshops here and I love it. People come from all over the world. It’s pretty cool. 11E15 Send in the Clouds: Technologies for Tier 1 and 2 Response to Intervention (RTI) Dates: July 25 - July 29, 2011 Location: The Taft School, Watertown, CT The pressure is on. The new federal mandate for RTI requires educators to ensure that all students are demonstrating measurable growth, and to provide documented interventions when they aren't. It's a daunting task, but there is a plethora of free Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies that can help engage learners, develop their 21st century learning skills, and help teachers build top-notch assessments and interventions into their instruction. In this workshop, teachers, librarians and administrators will explore practical, and arguably necessary K-12 applications for social and collaborative technologies. Related topics will include district filtering, instructional use of portable electronic devices, and online professional development. In this hands-on workshop, participants will build universal screenings and set up an inventory of interventions that address their own instructional objectives. Time will be divided between presentation, discussion, and collaborative and independent work. Instructor: Michelle Luhtala, New Canaan High School, New Canaan, CT

I know I mentioned this last month, but the election doesn’t even open until March 16, so I just want to let newcomers know and remind returning participants that I am running for AASL Region 1 director elect. Region 1 is CT, MA, ME, RI, VT, so if you are in those states… You certainly know my platform, but just in case, I created a page on my blog to articulate it further.

I will be a co-panelist at the New England Association of School Librarians Leadership Conference. It’s a conference I have referenced in almost every webinar – that’s how much I love it.

The conference was originally scheduled to take place this coming Saturday.

BUT, due to absolutely INSANE weather we have been experiencing in New England…

The Conference was postponed until April 9.

Please mark you calendars and come! Hopefully, it won’t look anything like this.

Also, if you are coming, please Tweet about it often.

Just for the record, these pictures were taken Thursday after last week’s mega storm. In spite of the 2’ mother nature dumped on us that day…

…I was able to get down to Philadelphia and attend EduCon – an amazing unconference held at the Science Leadership Academy last weekend. Try to go next year. It is incredible, and they need more librarians! Here is the catch: My district won’t pay for my conference expenses if I don’t present, and I hadn’t signed up to present at EduCon.

So I asked to chaperon our students’ Model UN excursion to Philadelphia, which coincidentally fell on the same weekend. The club and the district split the bill for my travel expenses, I was able to bounce between conferences, sharing meals with students and attending EduCon while our kids were in committee.

I documented our students’ activities on the Model UN facebook group wall.

And I planned all our meal excursions after consulting them for dietary restrictions and food choices in the club’s facebook group. A great time was had by all.

I set up two blogs during the past month – one for school… and by the way, it was pretty cool to see it referenced in the edWeb.net/ET thread! I wasn’t sure if that was a coincidence, or if was intentional. Either way, I was pumped to see it turn up there. It was obviously helpful! Yeah! I call it THE ANNEX@ New Canaan High School Library, because it is, in all likelihood, going to replace our courseware. We are using blogging software because it can be linked to facebook and Twitter, students can comment directly on posts and they don’t have any issues with log on. It is open for them, parents, teachers, administrators, and you! Actually, that was the primary incentive. It was too complicated to get “spectators” “in” to see our courseware, then I realized that there was no reason to keep most of it behind “closed doors”. I blogged about this on Friday.

I also started my own blog. I’d been mulling this over for a long time. I’d blogged on and off for two years. Then when I started at edWeb, I figured I would just blog here, but there are some things that a) don’t belong in edWeb, b) I can’t technologically post in edWeb, or c) will help “outsiders” learn more about edweb. So I opened a blog.

Are wondering when we will get to the crux of today’s program yet?

If you are thinking along these lines right now, I get it. I am definitely uncomfortable. I have started every single slide with “I” today. It reminds me of my daughter when she was a little kid and every third thing out of her mouth was, “Watch what I can do!” But I just want to remind you of one thing…

We are here to talk about visibility and advocacy. These are tough economic times, and if you can’t do what I just did, it’s a little like failing to keep up with your insurance payments. Not that you have to do the specific things I just mentioned, but you have to be able to toot your own horn. A lot.

At Educon last weekend, David Loertscher called a #TLWar Council after Saturday’s conversations. Joyce Valenza, Gwyneth Jones, Shannon Miller were there with other terrific librarians. We discussed strategies for saving school libraries. We talked about promoting grassroots unconferences like edcamp for libraries – tlcamps and TEDxTL – videos that promote teacher librarians and school library programs. They called for a nationwide rally to support libraries and it starts with you – you talking about what you do well, how you help kids, how you are indispensible to your school, district, community, state, nation, world.

So how do you do this? However you want. However it works for you.

My colleague and I approach advocacy differently, but effectively.

Together, we make a great team. Now I know many of you are on your own, and in some cases you are covering more than one school, or splitting your library job with another instructional commitments.

I am reiterating that you should get out there however you can, however you feel comfortable. Showcase your strengths, whatever they are, as often as possible.

I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Follett Software Company and our host, edWeb.net, not only for this and all other edWeb.net Emerging Tech webinars, but for providing us with an online community in which to converse and exchange ideas in between sessions as well. We’ve had several dynamic conversations this month, and I will take some time to talk about them today. If you have a Twitter account, and here is my opportunity to plug next month’s session, because we will be talking about Micro Communication, and you are Tweeting about this session, please include #edwebet in your message. If you don’t understand what I just said, be sure to tune in next month on Wed. March 9 at 4PM Eastern time right here at InstantPresenter.com/edweb2.

Using Emerging Technology to Improve Your School Library Program Session 8: Visibility and Advocacy

Thanks to sponsor & host #edwebet

edWeb.net: Using Emerging Technology to Improve Your School Library Program Session 7: Social Capital LIBRARIAN & WEBINARIAN MICHELLE LUHTALA

Lisa Nielsen

Lisa Nielsen

http://bit.ly/yfilter

Join edWeb/emerging tech! http://bit.ly/edwebet

Announcements Teacher librarian article Chapter for Violet Harada Summer Workshop AASL Region 1 Director-Elect NESLA postponement EduCon/Model UN Blogs

Teacher Librarian: Feb 2011

Chapter on #edwebet Debbie Abilock Kristin Fontichiaro Violet Harada @mluhtala

Summer Workshop Taft Teacher Education Center July 25-29

AASL Region 1 Director-Elect

NESLA postponed

NESLA postponed

NESLA postponed

NESLA postponed

NESLA postponed

#NESLA

NESLA postponed

Blog

Blog

Announcements Teacher librarian article Chapter for Violet Harada Summer Workshop AASL Region 1 Director-Elect NESLA postponement EduCon/Model UN Blogs

http://calcdn.artcat.com/images/exhibits/12868_1295921309.original.jpg

http://tonyadam.com/blog/blog/wp-content/uploads/search-and-social-media-visibility.jpg & Advocacy

#TLWarCouncil

No right or wrong way

Tale of two librarians Christina Russo with Austen and Fanise Me with Emily and Sydney

We are different, but complementary Christina Russo Morning person Excellent time management Organized Diplomatic Thorough Data collection Research Grant writing Michelle Luhtala Night owl Procrastinator Scattered Blunt Idea driven, but weak on follow through Broadcast information Technologically adept Strong on innovation

A solid team Crisis Team Professional Development Team Resource Committee Tech Council Curriculum Leadership Council Teacher Evaluation Plan and Leadership Committee

No right or wrong way

Thanks to sponsor & host #edwebet