This past weekend, I had the great pleasure of teaching a workshop for school librarians in the Dutchess & Ulster BOCES School Library Systems. 14 librarians gave up the weekend to be locked away in a training room! We had some great discussions about technology and schools. And everyone went away having learned about some new tools and with plans in place to share what they learned with students and other teachers.
Everyone set up a delicious account and had instant network of colleagues. Throughout the weekend they all added links to their accounts. And they tagged them all with a unique tag for the group so they could create an RSS feed for that later in the day.
The group now has a wiki where eveyone introduced themselves and shared their plans and ideas that came out of the weekend. And they also set up a personal homepages using iGoogle and learned how to add RSS feeds from many different sources.
Amazingly everyone stayed awake for an after dinner session where we did some karaoke with Sims On Stage to get our blood flowing again. And everyone then joined Twitter! I was just going to demo some social networking tools and suddenly everyone was twittering! Again, they had a built in instant network.
The session ended on Sunday with time for everyone to explore the resources in the class wiki, time to work on their own projects and to share ideas with each other.
I don’t know about everyone who participated, but I came away excited (AND exhausted!) Thanks so much to Danielle Boyea (Ulster BOCES SLS) and Rebecca Gerald (Dutchess BOCES SLS) for organizing the weekend. And to everyone who attended. It was an inspiring and fun weekend.
