Drinking and Tweeting

Just kidding, but had to give a nod to one of my guilty pleasures (RHOBH, anyone?)

In addition to exploring blogs in the classroom, I started to dabble a bit with Twitter this week. I worked in Marketing in my past life, so I'm familiar with it, and would send out tweets on behalf of one of my clients but I've never felt the need to use it for my personal use (a. no one needs more than daily updates on my comings and goings, and Facebook fills that need, and b. I don't need any additional time wasters that would inevitably come from following any celebrities!).

But, in the name of scholarship, I decided to follow a few notable Teacher Librarians, to get a feel for how it could benefit someone professionally. The most useful hashtag I've found so far is #tlchat as it provides perspective from a much wider pool than me trying to figure out who are the most useful people to follow and managing my stream that way.

In doing so, I found this.

And this.

And this.

Suffice it to say, I'm convinced. In just 5 minutes, I found 3 thought-provoking, useful pieces of information that I otherwise would not have found in my daily web use.

Now, I'm still not sending my own tweets but soon. And I'll tell you all about it. 

What I'm Reading

A happy byproduct of pursuing a career that involves books is giving myself "permission" to read more often, something I didn't always have time to do when I was working. And another happy byproduct of pursuing a career with middle school students is that it gives me a built-in excuse to check out some new YA literature, as well as revisit some of my old favorites.

My goal is to read at least one book targeted to the middle school population (give or take) as well as whatever other books I happen to be reading at the time.

Without further ado...

Week 2: Blogging in the Classroom

Our key focus this week is blogging, and how teachers can use classroom blogs to enhance collaboration, communication, and transparency among students, parents, and really anyone who has an interest in what is going on in the classroom.

One of the most interesting places I visited as part of this week's exploration was the 2013 Edublog Award winners. I particularly liked the winner for the Best Library/Librarian blog, as it's such a great example of the value that a Media Specialist can bring to teachers among all subject areas and grade levels.

We were also asked to experiment with Twitter and how it could be used in a school setting and I came across a classroom blog of a 1st grade teacher in Canada.  In addition to having a very inviting, engaging blog, I thought it was interesting how her students interact with other classrooms across the world using Twitter and Skype (just in January, they've worked with other 1st graders in England and Italy). While they could certainly learn the same concepts without collaborating with the other classes, I think it's so cool that, at age 6, they are "meeting" people from different countries/cultures. It also makes future lessons much more meaningful - for example, if they are learning about Italy in a social studies context, they now have a personal connection that can only make them more interested and invested in the lesson. 

Welcome!

I am a marketer turned SAHM turned Library Media student. I have created this blog for my Emerging Technologies for Libraries course at Salem State University and plan to use it not only to chronicle my work this semester but also to follow my journey as I pursue this career change.

Hopefully, this isn't really what I am getting myself into!