Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Most Social Attendee: Sue Waters!

Meet Sue Waters all the way from Australia; the true EduBlogger

Sue was everywhere, trying to meet as many folks from her PLN as she could.  Sue’s bubbly personality was infectious and Sue looks nothing like herself in her PLN or avatar pictures.  She had the most fun of anyone I know in the Blogger’s Cafe.

Biggest change in the conference for me: Audience Interaction/Participation

Promethean provides the audience a way to participate.

A tier sponsor (Promethean) porvided handhels at various sessions.  This one is from the debate during Tuesday’s keynote.  We got to decide which side justifed their stance best.

Top Edublogger’s of the Conference (IMHO): Joyce Valenza & Steve Dembo

Joyce and Steve

These two provided me with the best fun and the best sessions.  Of all the sessions I attended, Steve Dembo’s (which I blogged about a few says ago) was my favorite.

The BEST NECC09 LMS Honor goes to: Keisa Williams

Keisa Williams, Rock Star Teacher-Librarian, June 2009

Keisa was a member of the Library 2.0 Smackdown.  With one skype call, and the creation of a wiki, we managed to plan and implement a plan for how to have the smackdown.  (we = me, Joyce Valenza, Karen Kleigman, Wendy Drexler, and Keisa) Keisa almost single-handedly populated our wiki with great examples of the tools we wanted to showcase, and floored us all with the ones she chose to share in the session.  I’m in awe of the elementary school teacher-librarian, a TRUE media specialist.

Award for causing the biggest stir at the Blogger’s Cafe: Lee Lefever of CommonCraft Fame

Lee Lefever, Lisa Thumann, Liz Davis, and another conference attendee

The badge says it all! Introducing Lee Lefever

The Worst WIFI Award: ISTE NECC 2009, or around the conference known as #wifi fail.

Wifi Fail

Monday of the conference seemed to be the worst for connectivity, and that was the day for our panel discussion, the Library 2.0 Smackdown.  Of course everything we were using was on a wiki online.  Yes, we were frantically trying to get a connection to make our back-up plan just before the session began. Luckily, it seemed to come back about twenty minutes before the session, and we were bale to get our session (with audience participation) up and showcased.

Favorite Presenter: Chris Harris at the SIGMS Forum

I wish I could find a picture of him presenting.  He was probably the most passionate speaker I heard, and I was floored by his enthusiam and demand for better “cloud” services for school libraries.  Most memorabale quote: (to vendors) Where is the api for that?

Tags: NECC09

Earlier today (12:30-1:30PM) a group of us presented a Library Web 2.0 Smackdown. We were given five minutes to share a couple of tools, and then hand off to one of our neighbors for the session to continue.

This was a first for many of us, and I must say it was successful. Here is the intro to the wiki we used to put our session together:

Welcome to the NECC Library Tools BYOL Smackdown!
BEM03 LibraryLearningToolsSmackdown: A Sharing Session for Teacher-Librarians
Monday, 6/29/2009, 12:30pm–1:30pm WWCC 151 A
No sitting on the ropes! You will need to participate!

Joyce Valenza, Cathy Jo Nelson, Karen Kleigman, Wendy Stephens, and Keisa Williams invite you to share your best library-tech finds in a number of categories.

We had a great time, and there is a wiki for you to reveiew what we spoke (or intended to speak) about, as well as room in the wiki for you to add content–even still!!

We are planning a similar session like this for AASL2009 in Charlotte, so plan to join us, and come ready to share and create content.

Tags: AASL, CathyNelson, JoyceValenza, KarenKleigman, KeisaWilliams, Library20, NECC09, NECC2009, TeacherLibrarian, WendyDrexler

I am flabbergasted at the content shared in this session.  Steve Dembo did his very own “smackdown” competing with no one but the clock!  His session is located here, and it’s done in Prezi, one of the tools he showcased. I have GOT to really check out Prezi because its capabilities are amazing!

Please take a chance to go through it, and if you want to red my notes, email me at cathyjonelson -at- gmail. I’m doing my notes ina  google doc.

Tags: NECC09, NECC2009, Steve Dembo, Teach42

Tonight as my husband and I finish our packing for the NECC 2009 trip to DC, we were marveling over the Prius we bought last August.  You see, after living three hours away from home for my job, and traveling practically every weekend home (for church, to visit with hometown friends and family, and more) we decided a wise investment would be to trade in my Chrysler Sebring for a Toyota Prius. I wrote about my car once before here and my new one here.  I can’t rave enough about the car, how it drives, the cool gadgets, and even the roomy feel inside despite being a small car. Tonight we sat down and looked at our gas bills over the last 2 years.  Now mind you, we have 3 cars in my family: a Jeep Wrangler, a Scion TC, and the Toyota Prius.  So all three of these cars are filled with gas. We strictly use a “gas” card, and no other types of purchases are made using the gas card, which is paid off monthly.  So let’s compare gas expenditures over the last two school years since getting the Prius, the time I spent driving back and forth to the beach 3 hours away.

August 2007 – June 2008 = $8343.46

August 2008 – June 2009 = $5481.50

Wow, how incredible is this? This is also factoring in the freaky surge in gas prices that haunted us from late summer through early winter this past year! And we have driven my car to Alabama, Tennessee, and Chicago during this time frame for family trips as well! Getting the Prius, despite the gas woes in pricing this pastyear has saved us   $2861.96

Yes this was definitley a wise investment.  And I have found I love this “George Jetson” style car too.

Tags: NECC2009, Prius

My friend and confidante–Chris Craft, teacher extraordinaire, advanced doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina, and just an all ’round great guy, father, husband, and believer, gives his inaugural keynote address.

I must say, NOT BAD for a true rookie.

Tags: Chris Craft, Keynote, UTC2009

I have a month long marathon of craziness!  I very well may have overextended myself.  Here’s  a rough peak at my calendar:

• Wednesday, June 17:
  Another visit to DHS to drop off boxes and personal items used at school–who knows where they will be stored there, but they cannot stay here in the midst of a move and the potential to mix up boxes. Something is always lost in a move, and the fewer boxes to deal with, the better.
  Then an SC DEN Leadership Council online meeting at 7pm to workout my role in the group and plan future online and f2f meetings! Next f2f? I think it will be NECC.
• Thursday, June 18 Webinar  Panel Discussion: “Is There a Place for Media Specialists Who Don’t Know Social Media?”
  Steve Hargadon is hosting a group of School Media Specialists as we hash out the question “Can a media specialist still be relevant and not use 21st century tools? There was a stirring twitter conversation that was loosely threaded around this question some time ago in Twitter, and some really big hitters like Karl Fisch, Darren Draper, and others were pushing the debate full fledged.  I got in on the conversation too, and what has happened as a result is the Classroom 2.0 webinar for June 18.  I’m one of the panelists, along with my LMS friends Buffy Hamilton, Carolyn Foote, and Joyce Valenza.  Here is the planning wiki and here is the session link for 8PM June 18!
  Date: Thursday, June 18th, 2009
  Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day) (international times here)
  Duration: 1 hour
  Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed
• Tuesday, June 23
  SCASL Summer Institute 2009: Gaming for Learning! presented by Jared Seay, College of Charleston and Bob Noe, South Carolina ETV (Retired) Bob Noe is considerd a personal friend and online mentor of sorts, so I just HAD to come to this session, which is offered as a preconference workshop at the Upstate technology Conference.
• Wednesday – Thursday, June 24-25 - Upstate Technology Conference 2009
  I’m attending and co-presenting (with Fran Bullington) at this conference which is quickly becoming a favorite in my state of South Carolina.  Best, it’s free.  Icing on the cake for me, a good friend and mentor, Chris Craft, is keynoting the event.  I will be surrounded by other friends like my co-presenter Fran Bullington, and friends MaryAnn Sansonetti, Heather Loy, John Woodring, Jeff McCoy, among many more. I just do not have room to list everyone, but I am so looking forward to our f2f gab sessions and tweetup.
• Saturday, June 27 – July 1
  Saturday my family leaves with me to head to Washington, DC for NECC 2009. I am sitting on two panel like sessions–one a “Library 2.0 Smackdown” of sorts, where we will launch a game of one-ups on implementing 2.0 in our libraries by sharing the many ways it is so doable.  The other panel is for the SIG-MS meeting, and I was asked to replace Sarah Kelly Johns on the panel who had to bow out beacuse of a conflict. I recently found out David Loertscher, Christopher Harris, Marlene Woo-Lun and MaryFriend Shepard are on the panel, which is extremely exciting. I hope to hookup with the DEN folks at NECC as well, and hangout with vendors (like Gale’s Jim Ulsh) that I met at the SLJ Summit last November.  I will miss EdubloggerCon this year, but family time is coming first for once.  They are coming with me to make this our family vacation as well!

When we return, we will focus on a move.  Where, we don’t know yet.  Will it be permanent? Nope.  It will be another transition for all of us.  Oh and lest I forget, I will move my youngest (and last) into his dorm as he prepares to be a USC freshman and work with the football team as a trainer or something like that.  The nest will become rather empy by August, when I start my new high school LMS job.  Summer is certainly flying by.

Image: ‘Someone’s Lost Schedule Book‘
www.flickr.com/photos/88723106@N00/51024419

Yesterday marked the last day of school for our students.  So all this week it was not unusual to pass by the assistant principal’s office and see textbooks laying on the floor outside the closed door.  The assistant principal has seen very little of his office this week, as he has camped out in the bookroom doing textbook inventories and taking up books in a very organized manner. (Note: Destiny and a Panther scanner make it go relatively smoothly.)

So it was not surprising to see the note pop up on his door one morning this week.  Also it was not surprising to see the books seem to suddenly appear anyway, despite the admonition with extra exclamation marks.

So one of our teachers with such dry wit decided to write a note of thanks for the job that gets done each year (giving out and taking up books) and give it to our assistant principal.  But he chose quite a dramatic fashion to present it.

Too bad the asisstant principal only got to enjoy it with the picutres I made (pictures that are not all that great–sorry.)  He never made his way to his office yesterday morning to see the display. He never did get to appreciate the special way his card was “presented.” Afterall, what school perosn in charge of textbooks doesn’t spend their last few days, particularly the last day of school, up close and personal with the textbooks in the textbook room?

The rest of the staff and students thoroughly enjoyed the irony of this display though!

Just in case you can’t read the note, here is what it said:

Hey Mr. R.,

I was afraid if I just put a note in your box you wouldn’t really appreciate it. I already packed my tape so I created a platform to hold the card. Now remind me, is it okay to stack books by your door? Anyway, thanks for all you do, and I have boxes ready to clear the books when you are ready to get in our office.

Mr. W.

P.S. Before you fire me Mrs. C, approved it.

It’s that time of year again–time to do inventory, track down late books, and weed the old books.  I have a theory on weeding:

If a principal walks through the library and sees full to brimming shelves, they can rationalize no funding for new books.  If a principal sees empty shelves in a library, they leave thinking OMG we need to make sure there is funding for new books.

I wish I could say this works all the time, but it does indeed make a statement.  Principals, teachers, parents, and students will walk through and bemoan the lack of books.  The visual reminder is just a nice way to keep in the principal’s thoughts that some of that annual budget should be allocated to the library, especially when we in SC work in for the most part site-based management that determines funding and such. Oh, this picture here is actually one of my weeds from last year. Notice how full the shelves are behind it.  I can say now that not one single shelf in the library is even remotely full like that anymore.  During the school year, I use the empty space to display books. But around May 1st, all the books are shelved, exposing (gasp!!) empty shelves.  It’s amazing how many walk through and make the comment “Wow we need some new books.”  It’s an evil ploy, but hopefully it will work.

Now to get the books still checked out turned in before school is said and done this year.  My list is still too many pages long to share a number.  Ouch.  Speaking of getting books returned, did you see this creative plea for returning books and “clearing thy name”? (Special thanks to Joyce Valenza at the NeverEnding Search SLJ Blog.)

Find more videos like this on springfieldvideo

Image: ‘Nice incentive‘
www.flickr.com/photos/73798453@N00/3009059684

Tags: Collection development, Library funding

I’ve stumbled across this image in a few places (Tame the Web, Twitter/HeyJudeOnline, and now Lucacept).

There has been some recent conversations of late about the relevancy of the media specialist, particularly if they are not media savvy.  So I think this is a great question to ask media specialists?  Where are you on this ladder?

Tags: media specialist, School Librarians, Social Networking

I’m in the middle of creating my NECC planner.  So many sessions I want to see and participate in, many choices to make. Tough choices.  In all likelihood I’ll be traveling alone this year–my family not with me. Usually we wrap our vacation around NECC so I can attend, and that has worked well for several years. The only one recently they did not attend was Atlanta, and only because we live close enough that it wouldn’t feel like a vacation (even though Atalanta is just over four hours southwest of us.)  Here is a preliminary peek at my planner. Not carved in stone yet though. Wonder how many times I will change it before the actual dates arrive? Wonder how many I’ll switch last minute on the fly as friends sway me to do something else, like hang in the blogger’s cafe or attend the informal sessions that tend to suck me in going on in the hallways or vendors area… Either way, it will be so GRAND to hang out and network with all my virtual friends I only get to see f2f one or twice a year.  This is the latest I’ve ever waited to solidify plans for NECC in terms of housing and such–I guess I’ll know that sometime in the not so distant future.  Anyone looking for a roommate at NECC?

My current planner includes:

• Best Practices in Fair Use for 21st-Century Educators
• ISTE Member Welcome & Conference Orientation
• The 10 Best Free Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers
• Library Tools Smackdown: A Sharing Session for Teacher-Librarians (I’m participating in this one!!)
• Leslie Fisher’s Gadget Class: Now with Web 2.0 Freshness!
• Open Source Software in Education
• SIGMS Forum: The School Library 2.0 and Beyond
• Winning Strategies to Conquer Information Overload
• Here Comes Learning!
• Literacy Isn’t Enough: 21st-Century Fluency For the Digital Age
• Second Life as a Professional Learning Network!
• Designing Rigorous and Globally Connected Assignments
• SIGMS Annual Meeting
• Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm
• Beating the No U-Turn Syndrome: New Approaches to Copyright Compliance
• Classsroom 2.0: What Is Web 2.0’s Role in Schools?
• A Day in the Life of a 21st-Century High School
• 21st Century Media Center PlaygroundImage: NECC09 Ning Banner Head

Tags: necc, NECC09, NECC2009