Tales from a Loud Librarian

When I go to a conference, I hate when someone hands me a sheet of paper with a list of links. What do I do with that paper? Usually, during the presentation, I will mark the sites on the paper that might be useful to me, my teachers, or my students. Then I have to bring the sheet of paper back home or to school and sit and type out all the URLs so that I can see if the sites really do interest me as something that I want to save. If I like what I see, then I save them in  Diigo   and add lots of tags to each site so that I can find them again  at a later date. This is time consuming, and I have found that it may take me months to find the time to sit and go through all the websites. What a waste of time for me. I appreciate when you walk in to a conference session and are handed a paper or card with a link or QR code that points you to a website with all the resources that the presenter will discuss during their talk. I can open the resource site on my iPad during...

I am not going to bore you with the stress that I have had over the last three weeks. Just suffice it to say that life can hit you with some very difficult curve balls. What makes it nice is to have a collaborator who watches your back. In September when I decided to present at the annual conference for the Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators (LACUE), I had no clue that time would get away from me. Kelly Maher and I have presented together before, and we planned to do it again this year. I like working with Kelly because we are very different and each of us are able to make unique contributions to our presentations. So I am writing this and offering a HUGE shout out to Kelly for probably pulling way more weight on this presentation than I did. I really appreciate it because I think that we nailed it.  This time around we wanted to inspire, share some of what we have done by telling stories and introduce some new web tools. We wanted to emphasize that mos...

On Wednesday, November 30th, Kelly Maher, Lisa Valence and I were scheduled to present at the LACUE conference. We titled our presentation: Preparing Students for the Future: Tools for Teachers and for Teaching Teens. We were to begin at 1PM which was the last hour of the conference. When we walked into the room for the noon session right before ours, there was one person sitting at the presentation. UGH! We really didn't want to present in front of a party of one. When I began to hook up the computer and get ready for our marvelous multi-media powerpoint that we created, people started to walk in. Whew! We were going to have an audience after all. About 20 people attended our session. Kelly began the session by thanking them for joining us for the very last hour. We got several compliments when we were done. We put together  a wiki with all the sites that we mention in our talk and more . Open it up and check it out, you might find something new to try with your stud...

Region I winners for LACUE I am standing on the far right On Tuesday, November 29th, I accepted an award from the Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators. They gave me the Region I Educator of the Year Award. There are 8 regions in the state of Louisiana. I applied for the Leader of the Year Award which is designed for non-classroom personnel who exhibit exemplary use of technology for teaching and learning. The best candidate overall is selected as each region's Educator of the Year. I was excited to win that, then one person from each category is selected as the state winner. Okay, I wanted to win state, but you can't win everything.  I won the lovely certificate that you see me holding in the picture below and bragging rights too.