October 5, 2009 - May I be excused (again)? My brain is full!

Sometimes I do not have enough time in the day to read everything I need to and want to. One of my professional learning community groups is meeting tomorrow and I had to read Chapter 1 of "Beyond Retelling" by Patricia Cunningham and Debra Renner Smith. I also squeezed in two chapters of "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" by Will Richardson. In my print pile - "The New Learning Commons: Where Learners Win!" by David Loertscher, Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, "Start Where they Are" by Karen Hume, and articles sent to me by my board's professional library to help me with my research essay for the Twilight anthology. It's times like this I wish I was a Cullen - I know exactly how I'd use those nights because I'm a vampire who never sleeps. (Yes, the Twilight references continue - next time I won't make it so obvious - I gotta appeal to my audience.)

There are so many things I want to comment on from Will's book but I actually wanted to go back to something I read yesterday. A colleague of mine in the secondary panel, one that I admire a lot, sent an email to our board's teacher-librarian online conference with this link in it:

http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2009/09/19/nostalgia-is-not-going-to-save-libraries/

I was so appreciative of her sharing this blog post. Naturally, I had to comment on it. (Can't keep my opinions to myself, it seems!) I love it when smart people I know send me good links. I also realized that LD's email actually was more a "true blog post" than mine have been (according to Will's book). I need to put more links, reflect and converse (but, in my defense, I think I wrote something about the delight in more than one-way conversations, which related to his point about the power of blogs being in the collaboration and joint talk). I'm trying to start a student blog for my junior division students - wish me luck on it, and pass me any advice you've had doing it yourselves.

With all these thoughts swarming my head, I feel excited but exhausted. Can't go to bed yet though - the pets still need to be cleaned, anchor charts made, committee budgets organized, and blogs created.