Tales from a Loud Librarian

The BLC conference has been amazing. So much information and not enough time to process it. Here are some random trends, ideas and thoughts: Don't be afraid to let the kids fail. We need to ask the questions that google can't answer. There are three choices when a teacher hits a barrier at school: quit, complain or innovate. No one learns through lectures. Students should be problem finders not problem solvers. The door to the classroom can lead to the world with simple technology. Twitter, blogs, wikis, skype, etc are not going away. We need to embrace them. We need to keep learning.

A friend of mine loves to travel and has a song that she sings for all her travel days. You really don't want me to sing it. Tomorrow I jet off to Boston for the annual Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference hosted by November Learning . If you want to know which sessions that I am attending, you can follow here: http://blc2011.sched.org/TaylorLibrarian "The Building Learning Communities Conference is designed to have an immediate and long range impact on improving teaching and learning" through use of technology in the classroom. This conference is for all K-12 educators and beyond, so I won't be in rooms full of librarians. I will post any interesting tidbits during the week. By the way, I can taste the lobster roll as I write this. Love the New England seafood almost as much as Louisiana's.

Just checking in. With school closed and ALA behind us, I have little to report. However, I am reading like crazy. Tomorrow my adult book group is going to meet to discuss, The Help . I started it ages ago but put it down after a few pages. I grew up in the 60's in New Orleans with "help." My family had a housekeeper five days a week and a person who ironed and cooked for us five days a week. I lived the help. I don't think they were treated in the same manner as in the book, but I really don't need to read it. It was not a pretty time, and I would like to put it behind me. So luckily I have a dining room stacked high with ARCs and new books that I picked up at ALA. I read Where Things Come Back by Corey Whaley. I loved this southern summer tale of a found woodpecker and a missing teenage boy. I wanted to take the characters home; I loved them so much. I read Possession by Elana Johnson. I wanted to like this futuristic dystopian story where the government b...

This blog post gives a detailed account of the panel at ALA on which two of my students spoke. You can find the post here:  http://bit.ly/n8KIrz . I was so proud of them.