Professional Development at the ITEM conference

Every year for the past 25 years minus a year or two for having my children.  I have attended the ITEM (Information and Technology Educators of Minnesota) conference which was formerly called MEMO ( Minnesota Educational Media Organization).  

  

This is one chance where I get to collaborate and meet other educators from around the state who do the same thing  I do.  This conference also gives me an opportunity to go to sessions about current library trends and technology practices.  

This year was a special year for me because I have been chosen to be one of the co-presidents of this organization along with my friend Dawn French pictured above.  Pictured below is my friend Cathy Knutson who was one of the conference chairs and a fellow Lakeville media colleague. During the conference we had a few responsibilities like announcing details of the conference and leading the membership meeting, but mostly it was just a time to connect with others, see what new products our vendors could show us and go to some sessions on relevant topics.

During this conference we were fortunate to listen to a well known author Jen Bryant who gave us and interesting speech on her background research for her books. We also heard Shannon McClintock Miller give a great presentation on student choice and voice.  Lastly we heard from Jen Hegna a local guru on technology who presented on diving deeper into our subject matter.  All were awesome keynotes!

The last part of the conference was an unconference where you brainstorm a list of topics that you want to spend some time discussing  and then put the topics into a schedule. The next 90 minutes is spent with a group in a couple of  discussions.  If the topic is not what you thought you can get up and move to another group.  A great way to reflect on your own personalized learning

Overall great learning, great ideas and great people

Timelines in Reading!!

One exciting part of my new job has been the opportunity to work with the middle school students.  Mrs. Anderson recently has had some classes in the media center working on the chromebooks. She and I collaborated on a project that had the students creating a timeline of reading.  What a great idea! She wanted the kids to come up with the ideas of what books kids have read that were important in their reading journey. So I suggested she use an application called piktochart and have the kids make an infographic/timeline.  They turned out great the kids came up with a list of books important to them.  We then found pictures of the books and used the pictures and text to create the timeline.