Today’s activities go from 8 a.m. until 8:30 p.m. First off was the General Session where everyone is together. Several awards were given, sponsors were recognized and the new state officers were installed before the main speaker was introduced. Ellen Siminoff, who was involved in the early days of www.latimes.com and www.yahoo.com and is currently the president and CEO of Schmoop.com, spoke to us about “The Great Online, Where Young Minds Roam Free”.
Following some exclusive exhibit time (read “time to shop”) we had the first of the nine concurrent sessions. These are times when we each had to choose from 10-12 speakers giving presentations on topics of interest to librarians. Some common subject areas are curriculum, technology, literature, library management, advocacy (PR is part of this), diversity, and collaboration. Most of them are only offered during one concurrent session, so hard choices have to be made.
The first session I attended was “New Technology for 21st Century Libraries and Classrooms”. This was an overview and helped me refine my choices for later sessions. Some of the technologies introduced will be showing up in your curriculum next semester. Additionally, there was a brief talk on copyright as it applies to digital media.
The second session I chose was “Building a Virtual Learning Commons Using Moodle and Web 2.0 Tools”. Moodles are shells for presenting classes online. Many college courses are offered using this type of format. A student can log in anytime and anywhere there is Internet to access assignments, links to resources, discussion boards. Some of my classwork for my library credential was presented in this type of format and all of my daughter’s classes are done this way. (She has never set foot on the campus in
For the third session I went to “Using Web2.0 to Enliven Projects”. In one hour, the presenters went through an incredible number of useful (and mostly free) websites for doing great looking paperless assignments.
The day ended with the President’s reception. There was food, more awards and entertainment. Camila Alire, president of ALA, was there to bring greetings from the national organization. The entertainment was songs rewritten with library related lyrics and sung by a group of librarians augmented by a few students from Hamilton High School Academy of Music. They sounded very good. An honorary life membership award was given to a man who has been a life-long advocate for school libraries. So ended the second day of the conference.
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