At least week’s MLA Conference, I had the privilege of presenting with Minnesota School of Business Librarian, Krista Jacobson, on using Pinterest to market your library. This seems to be a topic of interest to a fair number of people as the session was pretty well attended! If you’re interested in using Pinterest to market your library, you may consider viewing our conference handout materials at http://mnlibraryassociation.org/uploads/conf12/handouts/B8.pdf. Here, you’ll get a nice sampling of the topics we covered. We hope to also present on this topic at the LibTech Conference in March, so if Pinterest catches your fancy, be sure to checkout the LibTech Conference program to see if our presentation made the cut! Oh, and between you and me, I’d love to just talk about Pinterest with you too! — Kate Bessey
Category Archives: General
CMLE Pilot Shadowing Program
CMLE provides support services to 319 libraries/media centers in twelve counties of Central Minnesota. We work with college librarians, special librarians (hospital, prison, historical socities) and public librarians. It is probably no surprise that the largest group are our 265 media centers. All libraries have a variety of services and focus areas, but it is within the media center group that we see the most variety. Some schools have district level media directors in addition to media specialists in each school. Some schools have no media specialists. And, in some schools, the media specialist has a tight focus within the media center only, in other schools, the media specialist is taking the lead on moving the district into the one-to-one (1:1) computing world! And, as you can imagine, we have everything in between too!
CMLE is in a perfect position to understand these variations and identify meaningful relationships and partnerships between our different library types. And we strongly believe that all types of librarians have similar goals, yet different ways of going about the work they do. This academic year, we will be piloting a shadowing program. We believe that there is power in walking in someone elses shoes for a day; shadowing them to see what is entailed in a typical day. We will help arrange opportunities for librarians to spend a day with a different type of libraian. We believe these shadowing experiences will help us understand what we all have in common, and enable us all to speak about libraries using one voice. We believe it is possible that all librarians may very well have the same goals; falling along the lines of education! Are you interested in a shadowing experience? Let me know at papost@stcloudstate.edu
Schools Use Online Fundraising Methods
Is your entire school district in tight financial straits? Is everyone weary of cookie dough, wrapping paper and magazine sales? Read about some new tools to assist your school in online fundraising. Four specific tools are mentioned to help your school get set up, and one, Adopt-A-Classroom, even allows fundraising for specific areas of the school, like the media center! The article is in Education Week and is available at http://tinyurl.com/9zazujd. Has your school already tried this? We would love to write up and share your story….comment on this post to flag us on your success or lessons learned.
Recommended App: Splashtop Whiteboard
Splashtop Whiteboard allows teachers and students to turn their Android tablet or iPad into an interactive whiteboard. Once connected to their computer over Wi-Fi, they can watch Flash media with fully synchronized video and audio, control PC and Mac applications, then annotate lesson content from an Android tablet or iPad. Splashtop Whiteboard offers users of existing interactive whiteboards—such as Mimeo, Mobi, Promethean, Polyvision, or SMART Technologies—a way to extend their investment by accessing their tools from anywhere in the class (all four corners of the room!) without using wireless slates. This app costs anywhere from $2.99 to $9.99 and can be used with iPad iOS 4.0 & up and Android 3.1 & up.
What Should I Read Next?
Have you checked out the all new “What Should I Read Next?” http://whatshouldireadnext.com site? Fresh for fall 2012, this is a fun way to get your reading list in order for all that cozy reading time you’re planning! Type in the title or author of your choice (preferably one you loved!) and up pops a list of suggested titles. The list of suggested titles populates from user’s favorites lists – and the more times the titles appear together on user’s lists, the higher the title moves up on the recommendation list. Pretty nifty… but, will never beat reader’s advisory or book talks! 😉 Use it with your patrons and students, too!