Central Valley Cue Conference

I am spending this fine Saturday morning at the Central Valley CUE Conference. A reasonably good-sized group showed up and that is always nice.

I am giving one presentation solo - on teaching online using Moodle - and one presentation - on quick research projects - with two colleagues.

So guess who shows up for my Moodle presentation? My very large district's chief technology officer. Certainly not a bad thing; I'm glad he was there. Just a little surprised.

Back Cover Words: The Skin I'm In

Maleeka suffers every day from the taunts of the other kids in her class. If they're not getting at her about her homemade clothes or her good grades, it's about her dark, black skin.

When a new teacher, whose face is blotched with a startling white patch, starts at their school, Maleeka can see there is bound to be trouble for her too. But the new teacher's attitude surprises Maleeka. Miss Saunders loves the skin she's in. Can Maleeka learn to do the same?


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The Skin I'm In by Sharon G. Flake

Library Services Standards

For those of you who would like to read the document yourself, here it is (and a hat tip to Richard K. Moore over at CALIBK12 for providing the link).

California to have school library service standards!

By unanimous vote today, the State Board of Education authorized:

"...the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to develop statutorily required standards for school library services, as model standards."

What does this mean? I exchanged emails with CSLA president Connie Williams and her take is:

This is truly the first step towards any number of possibilities - getting standards written and approved lays the groundwork for a wide variety of legislative actions down the road.

The devil is in the details. The standards are cool, but it is those legislative actions to implement the standards that could shape our profession in California unlike anything from the past.

Technology training for your staff, part 2

The training yesterday exceed my expectations. Thus far, our technology team has received much praise.

Why do I think that is? At least at our site (and, I expect, in many places), there is a real resistance to outside folks coming in and teaching us how to do things. Since we have local expertise, we should use local expertise. Colleagues teaching colleagues.

We had people stay beyond the agreed upon 45 minutes just to get more access to the equipment and more training.

I taught a group how to create websites. I used the templates from Scholastic. Simple and effective. I originally was going to use Google Sites, but I find it less intuitive than Google Pages and the goal was intuitive. I have a sub-group that would like to continue working on their websites. That's always nice!

Technology training for your staff, part 1

We are doing break-out sessions today for technology training. Like many sites, we have teachers of varying technological abilities.

So what are we doing today? We are offering three levels of SmartBoard training and one level of website building. We do not have a history of offering technology training in this format, but we are hopeful.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Library Limbo

Library Dominoes

I have students that would probably try to do this. :)