At this time last year, I had lots of training travel plans for the winter months, all of which came to an abrupt halt when I broke my knee in February. Even with that in the back of my head, I didn’t really plan to stay put this winter. But it turns out I am and that’s a good thing, because I have a ton of projects on the go.
Here’s what I’m working on and what I’ll probably be writing about during this week of Library Day in the Life.
- WordPress eCourse for ALA TechSource – Amanda Goodman and I put together a 6 week class that filled up quickly. This class is now in week 3 and has over 100 students. We’re hoping to schedule a repeat later in the year for people on the waiting list.
- Cool Tools for Schools – This is a “23 Things/Learning 2.0†course running over about 8 months. Instead of doing a Thing a week, we’re spacing them out with a new topic every 3 weeks. This program involves 90 school librarians from 5 BOCES SLS regions covering a big swath of eastern NY from south of Albany to the Canadian border.
- Building Your Base Online – Another “23 Things/Learning 2.0†project, with a slant on tools to help library staff communicate and connect with their communities. This is part of a larger grant being run by the Mid-Hudson Library System. The project launched this week and I think we have about 80 or 90 people registered for this.
- Transformative Learning and Technology Literacies –  And while we’re on a 23 Things kick, I’m pleased that Michael Stephens asked me to offer some assistance with his SJSU grad class. The students will be running Learning 2.0 projects as part of their course work.
- NYS Digital Literacy project – Jill Hurst-Wahl is heading up a team that is writing a statewide digital literacy curriculum as part of NYLA/NYSL grant. This is a BIG project. I’m one of the team members.
- NYS Summer Reading Program website – A perennial favorite project. I get to look for fun games and activities related to the summer reading theme and build the web site. This year we’re migrating the site from ExpressionEngine to WordPress with the hope that maintenance of the site will be far simpler.
- WordPress for Libraries webinar – The Carterette Webinars is a wonderful series of free programs sponsored by the Georgia Library Association. Thanks to Sarah Steiner for asking me to participate. My webinar is being rescheduled after my unfortunate battle with a nasty computer virus caused this computer to crash for several days.
- Book edits – Kyle Jones and I expanded our ALA Library Technology Report on WordPress into a book that ALA Editions will publish later this year. The manuscript arrived Friday for editing.
