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Confessions of a Twitter Chat Lurker
As I’ve been exploring Twitter over the past few months I’ve come to value it as a professional learning tool. I will admit, I’ve become semi-addicted to checking my twitter feed to see what’s going on in the world and the lives/work of the people I ‘follow.’ A course I’m taking this semester, Digital Literacies…
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The Principal Story
The Task As part of an educational leadership course, groups were challenged to create a rubric for evaluating educational leaders based on readings from the course. Our group identified ten areas that we felt were necessary components of an effective school leader. Categories included: Organization Communication Action-based/follow-through Relationships/rapport-building Instructional expertise Situational awareness Visibility Data-driven/evidence-based practice…
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Recap-PLA Virtual Spring Symposium
Photo Source: 2013 PLA Virtual Spring Symposium This week I had the opportunity to ‘participate’ in the Public Library Association (PLA) Virtual Spring Symposium. This was a very interesting experience to sit in rooms with other local public librarians yet connect with and ask questions of presenters along with a nation-wide audience. Conference hashtag #plavss13…
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Lessons Learned from L.E.A.R.N
For the past few months, I’ve been involved with planning parts of the L.E.A.R.N Annual Conference, this year entitled, The Debate for America’s Future (#LEARN2013). Panel discussion topics included: restructuring school systems, teacher evaluation systems, district-charter collaboration, technology, & school intervention/turn around models. The overall goal of the conference was to assess ‘solutions’ currently being…
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High-Tech vs No Tech
In working on my thesis & an upcoming panel on technology in the classroom-you could say I’ve been tech-obsessed lately. However, I think it’s important to stop and consider the difference between viewing technology as a shiny new tool versus a means of enhancing student learning. Adults get so caught up in focusing on the…
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The One Best Systems
No, it’s not a typo. This post is intentionally titled ‘The One Best Systems.’ This semester I’m taking a course that looks at schools from an organizational/management perspective. We’ve recently been discussing Tyack’s One Best System (1974). In looking at the evolution of the American education system, I could not help but draw parallels from…
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The Power of Picture Books
Lately I’ve been thinking about picture books, and the collective power of children’s literature. Having semi-recently switched jobs from children’s to reference librarian @ local public libraries, I’ve missed being surrounded by kids, their books, excitement, curiosity, and yes, sometimes reluctance. About a week or so ago, I had the opportunity to meet with the…
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Web Literacies (vs. Fluency)
This weekend I had the opportunity to attend Educon 2.5. A fabulous conference/set of discussions about the future of innovation & technology in schools. One of the sessions I went to was ‘Web Literacies: Redefining the Continuum of “Literacy.”‘The conversation was jointly facilitated by Mozilla & the National Writing Project. Notes from the session show the general direction…
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“And I will love words for their own sake…
…like hyacinth and piccadilly and onyx.” So today begins my journey into the blogosphere. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while but never seem to find the time. A digital literacies course (#diglits) I’m taking this semester involves blogging, delving into multimodal texts & uncovering some new (at least to me) Web…
Christy Brennan 