What School Admins Need to Know About Digital Tech and Social Media

At Educon this weekend, librarians Joyce Kasman Valenza, Gwyneth A. Jones, and Shannon McClintock Millerare discussed the future of student inquiry. Their Saturday discussion centered around  how student inquiry has changed and how the role of the teacher-librarian has shifted from one who gathers, stores, and indexes resources to a educator and collaborator who helps students ethically and effectively filter, evaluate, and use information and then do something with it, ideally to communicate in powerful ways with authentic audience.

Read and share: See Sally Research! by opening the word document. This is a worthwhile read for educators to learn how the world of student library research has evolved over the past 15 years. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 and will be published in: What School Admins Need to Know About Digital Tech and Social Media. Chris Lehmann and Scott McLeod, eds. Jossey-Bass/Wiley. 2011.

Share this with your administrators so they can truly understand how the librarian is an even more critical player in new learning landscapes where information and communication options continually shift.

NICE Mini-Conference Presentation Today

Here is my presentation on Developing Personal Learning Networks with Social Media. I used PREZI software, a free web 2.0 tool.

Using Social Media to Enhance Professional Development on Prezi

Do you know about Google Moderator?

Check out this handy tool for extension of classroom discussion.


When I checked out Linda Straube's post, I notice that Arne Duncan is taking questions for the State of the Union Roundtable/ on Google Moderator:


later, I ran across a tweet about a video tutorial for this tool which seems very simple:
Google Moderator - video tutorial


It seems quite easy to set up.  I asked the creator, Mark Wagner, Ph.D, what software he used to create the tutorial and I hope he responds because it was quite good.

Submit a Question to Arne Duncan with pbs

PBS Teachers has been asked to solicit questions from teachers about the education issues addressed in the recent State of the Union Address. A sampling of popular questions will then be posed to Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan during the livestreamed Education Roundtable event on January 27th at 3:15pm EST. Submissions and voting for questions will close at 12pm on Thursday, January 27th.

Watch LiveStreaming on Thursday, Jan. 27 from 2:15 to 3 CST.

Each Blog Post in Now Available as a PDF to Send or Share

Notice at the end of each blog post, you can look to the bottom left and PRINT PDF.


I have installed this widget right into the Blogger template.


It's a very handy tool and easier to use than the Adobe feature "print to pdf".


Give it a try:


 Go to joliprint

Enter URL of the article you want to print out 



Add the Joliprint bookmarklet to your browser's favorites bar, and make any webpage Joliprint ready.

Compare the States

Recently, a teacher sent me this information from The Economist which one of her students had shared with her:



The interactive version (uses Flash) compares states to countries for both GDP (Gross Domestic Product -- or value of goods and services produced in a year) and population.... so did you know that if a GDP was calculated for Illinois it would be about $630.4 billion or slightly more than Turkey's ($614.5 bn)? As to population, Illinois has 12.83 million people, just less than Mali at 13.67 million. Each state is shown and some interesting comparisons occur.

Fifty Years ago today, President John F. Kennedy gave his Inaugural Address.

Watch it here and ponder that famous question:




For more resources, visit the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum which recently opened an expanded Digital Archive for scholars.