Welcome to a New Blog!

Rethinking Media Centers

Our Central Ohio bloggers' group continues to grow! Welcome Jamie and Cheryl, and congratulations on taking that big scary step to bring your thinking out into the world -- WRITE ON!!

Welcome to the Kidlitosphere!

Join us in welcoming our friends and colleagues Karen and Bill in the launch of their co-blog, Literate Lives. Because Karen, Bill, Franki and I have all taught in the same district for lots of years, our paths have crissed and crossed many times depending on what buildings we were at, what grades we taught, what committees we were on, and what teacher (or now, librarian) hats we were wearing at the time. And now we're sharing this blogging path. Very exciting!

New Blog To Check Out

Megan is a 5th grade teacher just down the pike a bit from us who reads, reads, reads. In fact, that's the name of her blog: Read, Read, Read.

Her blog debuted in the kidlitosphere in June, and already she's skipping across the stage in scene three of Act One of The Play's The Thing (July's Carnival of Children's Literature)!

I can't wait until school starts and we get a chance to peek into her classroom and see how all these books she's been reading are received by her students!

Welcome Katie!

We are pleased to announce the birth of a new blog, Creative Literacy, authored by Katie, a primary teacher at Franki's school. Katie is also the mother of three boys, known on her blog as Mo, Larry and Curly. Her blog's mission is "Nurturing the lives of primary readers and writers while searching for my own reading and writing identity."

Last Saturday morning, Franki and I met Katie at Caribou Coffee to answer some of her blogging start-up questions. Because I am just a little ahead of Franki on the technology end of blogging, that makes me the "blogging guru" in her eyes. But the thing I love about blogging is that there is a huge continuum of blogging skills/abilities/tricks. I'm nowhere NEAR the high end of the continuum with my skills. (Just ask Tricia, who this week taught me to make a link in comments using html code!) But it is enough for me that I am even ON the continuum. I know that what we do with our blog is an approximation of what could be done, but right now, I can do most everything I want to, and when I need to know how to do more, I know where to go for help. (In teacher lingo: scaffoding.)

Katie was bemoaning the amount of time she already found herself devoting to her blog, and to finding and reading other blogs. In my eyes, this is not wasted time. It may not yield a product as visible as a weeded garden, a clean house, or a knitted sweater, but it is time spend MAKING something, rather than just consuming -- watching TV, shopping, etc. And invariably, blogging leads to LEARNING as well.

I think as teachers, we must MUST MUST keep ourselves on some kind of learning curve. It doesn't matter what we are learning to do, we need to keep learning. The craft of our teaching will automatically improve if we can share with our students not just the memory of, but the real and present joy of learning.

Welcome to the party, Katie!