Designing Collaborative Learning Spaces — Webinar!

Join Shannon Miller(moderator), Georgia’s amazing Andy Plemmons and yours truly for a Future Ready Webinar on Tuesday, August 15th!  We’ll be talking about designing collaborative spaces for students, particularly libraries, and have lots of suggestions!  I’ll also be talking about how to involve students. More details here!  Sign up online here!

Hacking education through libraries

Schools face change Schools face issues daily as they work to change and meet the needs of students.  Some problems are systemic and some are unique to each campus.  School leaders do have a powerful but sometimes overlooked ally in dealing with these issues–their teacher-librarian.   At SXSWEdu, Joyce Valenza, Miguel Figueroa and I examined some ways that libraries/librarians can hack these problems for their schools in our session Hacking Education through Libraries. Issues like equity, access, technology adoption, information overload, and digital literacies, and trends facing schools […]

A day at the White House

What I want to say here is one simple word….yoweeee.  But for those of you who would like to know what a day is like when you get honored as a Champion of Change by the White House, here goes. Sitting in the airport in Atlanta on the way to Washington, I overheard the President’s speech at the Kennedy Honors.  He spoke of Kennedy’s love for the human spirit, both those “heralded” and “unheralded.”  It struck me that the Champions of Change program is all […]

iPads in Libraries–TXLA13

Thanks to all who joined for a discussion of iPads and libraries at the Texas Library Association conference in Fort Worth this weekend.   iPads in Libraries TXLA 2013 More PowerPoint presentations from C Foote A list of apps I mentioned are here, along with a PDF file for easy downloading to your iPad.    And the notes from the Today’s Meet chat room during the session are here. Another resource is the EanesWifi blog that we kept as we went through the pilot process; […]

Library Design with learners in mind

This week, our library’s architect and I presented a case study at the CEFPI (Council of Educational Facility Planners International) Southern Conference in Austin.  It was fascinating presenting to such a different audience (mostly architects and facility directors) who are deeply trying to grapple with issues facing education.  I attended other sessions as well and listened as they struggled to make sense of the same issues we as educators debate–standardized test scores, the impact of technology, the value of a library, etc. In our session, […]

Expanding the notion of backchanneling

At Tech Forum Austin, Paul Wood (Bishop Dunne Catholic School) and I presented “Tapping into the Backchannel”–a session on the variety of ways that backchannels can be used both professionally and in the classroom setting. We spoke specifically about how backchannels can be used by educators as: 1)learners 2)information gatherers 3)presenters (including speakers, principals, board members, etc–any sort of meeting) 4) in classroom settings As learners, tools like Twitter can be invaluable ways to tap into professional development workshops that we could never attend, and […]