Ha Ha Very Funny

I learned from the "New This Week" bulletin at lii.org this morning that the first Sunday in May is World Laughter Day. Seems like a great idea to me. I've added a link to some great humour under Mystery Spoots (This is not a typo, see my earlier posting "R is for Resources" for an explanation.) I was reminded of a great April Fool's joke I pulled on the kids a few years ago. I announced on the PA that library fines would be levied on all overdue books at the rate of $1.00 per day per book. The kids came flying in the door waving their books! Check out the link to Laughter Foundation. I notice there are no events listed for Canada, have we no sense of humour?
I've also added some links such as DwarfUrl (a service for supplying short URLs similar to TinyURL) and Book Review Finder. Thanks to the wonderful teacher librarians at TeacherLibrarianNing who are such an amazing wealth of information. You really should check it out!

A New Community

Finding time to explore all the wonderful things Web 2.0 has to offer is a challenge but well worth it. This week I discovered a great new teacher librarian ning. (Don't ask me what a ning is, haven't figured that one out yet.) I joined TeacherLibrarianNing as it seems a great place to learn with like-minded people. Signing up was simple and I have even managed to join in a few discussions. Once you are logged in you can post comments, ask questions or generally exchange information with teacher librarians from all over the U.S. and a few from Australia and Canada. The best thing I have learned there so far is that if you want your community (staff/school) to embrace new technology you have to use it yourself and provide them with great examples. Sort of like dangling the old carrot in front of their noses. Take a look at TeacherLibrarianNing, you can read all the posts without signing up, but what why not join?

It's Always Pro. D.

The name of this blog has changed to better reflect what it is I do in my professional world. During the past 3 weeks I have immersed myself in the world of blogs and learned so much my brain is bulging. There's a fine line between taking in useful information and total overload. I wish I had a mentor sitting with me to explain all that new terminology. But I haven't done too badly. It's good to feel the utter frustration I felt yesterday when trying to add a video clip to this blog. The template was there, the video loaded but with it came three other clips I did not want. The upside is that now I have a focus and a plan for implementing some meaningful Pro. D. Next year I'll be responsible for logging 15 hours of Pro. D. time independently. My plan is to use sites like PLCMC's Learning 2.0 - 23 Things to tap into some of the powerful teaching resources out there.