Monday, April 21, 2008

Goodbye Athena, Hello Destiny, etc.

This week, our media center is making the switch from Sagebrush's Athena to Follette's Destiny. We're doing a lot of check-outs by hand due to the fact that Track 4 returned today and they all need new books. We hope to get onto a remote check-out tomorrow so that we won't have so many circulation records to manage once we're back online. We're excited about the changes and hope all goes well tomorrow.

I'm reading The World is Flat version 3 by Thomas Friedman - no actually I'm listening to it on CD. The book discusses globalization and how successful businesses have changed how they do business to keep up with the demands of the market. What a great wake-up call for all of us - from the Bush administration to educators in the classroom. Friedman presents the staggering numbers of just how far behind China and India the US has slipped. What this book does is give us reason to think, act and understand the collaborative ways of the global community and how we will need to work in the future. I recommend that if you haven't read any of the versions, please get the latest one and read it so that you can learn more about why we need to embrace the collaborative new tools offered on the web. Not only do we need to take them on for our own knowledge but we need to lead the way in our schools to make sure that the teachers are informed.

Last week on Friday, the learningteammiddle group met for our monthly meeting. We learned about the WCPSS's ESL program and heard a great presentation from their department. How does this impact our LMC programming? Lots of helpful information that we will all take back to our schools to address the needs of the LEP and ESL students. Next, we ventured out for a brown bag lunch at the Friday Institute on the NCSU's Centennial Campus to hear Donald Leu speak about literacy, reading and the different ways that students learn to read webpages vs. reading print texts. His research has shown that many proficient readers struggle with reading on the screen where as struggling print readers many times can manage reading on the screen/web better than with print text. The discussion was interesting and I hope to continue to follow his research with reading and new technologies.

So long for now. Happy Earth Day tomorrow, April 22.