Social/Professional Networking Tools for Teacher-Librarians
March 30th, 2008 Tagged collaboration
Collaboration is a hot topic among school librarians. Teachers and librarians never seem to have a enough time to meet. But unless we meet how can we help each other effectively serve our students’ needs?
Well, maybe we don’t need to meet in person. What online tools can we think of that could allow librarians to collaborate with colleagues and patrons?
–Sean
collaboration | Comments (4)4 Responses to “Social/Professional Networking Tools for Teacher-Librarians”
Leave a Reply
The Washington Library Media Association’s (WLMA) Sasquatch Award Committee recently used Shelfari to announce the new 2009 award nominees.
See the new list at http://www.shelfari.com/sasquatchaward/shelf#firstBook=0&list=6&sort=dateadded
Just my two cents: at this stage in my teacher/librarian career (been a teacher for 20 years, just finished my first as elementary school librarian) I am very focused on improving how I do my job. While that most certainly involves collaborating with other staff and with parents and students, I’m particularly interested in having conversations- online and otherwise- with other librarians who are similarly engaged in the process of figuring out how to do what we do. Er, better.
Carter,
I’ve also just finished my first year in the library after several years of teaching. The teachers at my school had grade-level “teaming time” while I was with their kids. So, by default the specialists were excluded from the team planning and collaboration.
We tried to do a lot of this before and after school or by email. I felt, though, that Blogs and similar tools could have made our collaboration more efficient, but our District’s filters were blocking all blog sites, including this one.
Communicating with other librarians poses similar problems. We’re each in our own buildings, so we need to make an effor to reach beyond our walls.
Which library issues, Carter, are you interested in discussing?
–Sean
Hunh. Honestly, while I enjoy discussing ‘issues’ and look forward to doing so here, my need for professional interaction is mostly borne of a need to calibrate myself, to check my instincts and tendencies with colleagues who can point out to me where I may be making poor decisions. OK, that was vague– how about:
• ‘Weed books that look old and tired.’ How does one determine that a book looks old and tired? How do we codify an abstract concept like this? (Frankly, we don’t have to- I just need to develop the sense that my gut feeling isn’t far off what a respected colleague might think)
•’Use circulation statistics to help make weeding decisions’. I’m too new to really interpret my stats effectively- if a book was circulated twice last year when other books went out 12 or 15 times, is that enough? What other factors (genre, length, age, etc.) factor into that decision?
I don’t mean to give the impression that I’m obsessed with weeding- it’s actually one of my less pressing concerns. I just offer these thoughts to illustrate how I’d like to do a ’self-check’ of my impressions with other folk who grapple with the same stuff.