Goal setting: of distractions and staying yar

Joyce Valenza’s recent post on NeverEnding Search, A Belated Confession, really resonated with me and I appreciate the courage it took to share her thoughts.  She wrote about her challenges balancing her work and the ensuing guilt at not being able to do everything she wanted. “I don’t think we can really rock every aspect of our jobs at once, however much we aspire to do it.  And if you don’t realize this, it can drive you kinda crazy. It’s a tough job.  It’s a […]

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 […]

Celebrating 10 years of Edublog awards!

The Edublog Awards are here and it represents a decade of celebrating educational blogs.   Why are the awards important?  Because in the days when we used to have to fight to have blogs even allowed in our schools, Edublogs was there, encouraging us to write.   And now students and teachers and librarians are blogging and celebrating sharing their work and ideas, and Edublogs has helped nurture that community.  So thanks, Edublogs! I only have time to make a few nominations but I want […]

So, what can we do?

In the last few days I’ve been following the simmering discussions that spun off of work by Joyce Valenza and Doug Johnson, eminent librarians and leaders in our field, about the issue of 21st century librarians and what responsibility we all have to embrace new technologies. It’s been fascinating reading the excellent blog discussions that have ensued, and reading subsequent blog posts by Joyce, Buffy Hamilton and Doug Johnson, among others. But still what resonates most with me is Doug Johnson’s question–“How can we give […]