Category Archives: Special

Academic, General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special

Strategies to Simplify: Tip 2: Set your READY goals

“Work simply. Live fully.”  This week CMLE focuses on the following work productivity tip from Work Simply, Carson Tate’s popular book.  At CMLE, we’ve boiled down Tate’s wealth of knowledge from Work Simply to a few key points; please see the book for more detail and resources. At the bottom, see links to earlier tips in the series! Let’s all be our best selves….

This week’s activity: Set your READY goals and work to achieve them using your Productivity Style

In her book Work Simply, Carson Tate suggests setting goals in four main areas of your life: Professional, personal, health, and spiritual. Keep the acronym READY in mind – it is the first step of the READY, Aim, Fire method that will “not only assist you in getting very clear on your goals and priorities, but also ensure that you achieve those goals in the most efficient and effective way possible”

R – Realistic, E – Exciting, A – Action-oriented, D – Directive, Y – Yours.

Recently you discovered your Productivity Style with a simple assessment. Find your style to use these tips for fulfilling your READY goals:

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Work Simply

Find your Productivity Style for some personalized tips:

Prioritizer: When setting your goals, challenge yourself to look at the big picture – think about the action steps required over the next several months (instead of the next several weeks). It may help to keep in mind why this particular goal is important to you.

Planner: Similar to the Prioritizer, try to move your focus beyond short-term action steps, and focus on the big picture. Focus on what the final outcome is that you are hoping to achieve.

Arranger: While it’s helpful to keep in mind the people that are able to encourage you to meet your goals, don’t forget to also focus on how you will complete the actions required to achieve the goal.

Visualizer: Seeing the big picture comes naturally to you. Try to also think about who else needs to be involved in making your goals a reality.

Previous tips in this series

 

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Stay tuned for Banned Books week!

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Defend your right to read!

Banned Books Week 2016 is next week! Beginning September 25th – October 1st, celebrate your freedom to read and tune into CMLE’s website for more ways to participate in this important event!

ALA explains the significance of Banned Books Week: “It highlights the value of free and open access to information. Banned Books Week brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.”
You can check out ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom for more information on the dangers of censorship.

CMLE is excited to help celebrate this special week, and we have been gathering information to share with you, some of which include ways to get involved and what to do if a book at your library gets challenged. Make sure to check back with us next week!

In the meantime, get into the Banned Books Week spirit and watch this video below on the Top Ten Banned Books of 2015:

Academic, General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Services, Special, Tech

Continuing Education from CMLE!

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Learn new things!

At CMLE we take our commitment to providing our members with information and continuing professional training opportunities very seriously. We will continue to build on the courses and seminars we have offered, and hope to expand things for you. The library field is fast-moving and ever-changing; and we are here to help our members to keep their skills sharp, and to be able to better serve patrons’ needs.

We have set up a Continuing Education page on our site, with a Google calendar of all kinds of events that might be interesting to you. Most of these are offered as webinars, or online classes; and a few are in person seminars or conferences. Many are free, and some require payment. We will also include professional conferences, so you can keep up with the ideas being shared in your area of the library world. No individual person, or library, will be interested in all of these; but we will have a broad range of topics, to be sure you have all kinds of possibilities for building new skills and making yourself more valuable! And, seeing some of the things other libraries are discussing – even if you do not want to participate in the class – may give you some ideas about new things to try, or new people to contact to talk further about a topic.

We will also be offering regular continuing education programs through CMLE. We want to be sure our members have a chance to talk about topics of specific interest, or frustration; and to be able to gather and connect with their local colleagues. So, we will offer monthly training at the CMLE Headquarters, as well as streaming it through Go To Meeting for members to attend virtually.

To build on the training we will offer each month, we will offer additional material on our blog posts on the same topic. In October, our Topic Of The Month will be the broad subject of Hiring, including recruiting plans, succession plans, writing successful job ads, and motivating staff once they have been hired. In November, we will cover Advocacy. In that month, we will look at connecting with your funders, identifying stakeholders, writing an advocacy plan for your library, and provide templates for you to use to contact people to share your good library news. And in December, our monthly topic will be Stress Management. By the end of the year, and in such a busy season, we know everyone will need some tips on stress and relaxation, avoiding burnout at work, and ways to increase your professional satisfaction in your workplace.

Take a look around the calendar, and feel add it to your own Google calendar for easy viewing any time! (Just click the blue plus sign in the bottom right corner of the calendar.)

Do you have other suggestions for training? Email us! We always want to hear from our members!

Academic, General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Services, Special, Tech

Learn to build your own Android app

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Look how cute he is! Let’s build an app!

There are many interesting apps available for library use, and we are looking at some of them this week. But what if you want something that is unique to the special needs of your library? What if you want to stretch yourself and your tech skills by trying something new? What if you just don’t want to pay for an app??

You might be the perfect audience for this (free!) Udacity class!

Android Development for Beginners How to Make an Android App gives you some training in Java and programming for Android. “This course is designed for students who are new to programming, and want to learn how to build Android apps. You don’t need any programming experience to take this course. If you’ve been using a smartphone to surf the web and chat with friends, then you’re our perfect target student!”

Your library may want to reach out to patrons in a way that works for them, and speaks to them with tools they are already using. “Android powers over 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, and represents an incredible opportunity for developers everywhere. The next billion people coming online will interact with the internet for the very first time on a mobile device. Building for Android gives you the best opportunity to reach these users and make an impact — both in your community, and on the world.”

You may not need to connect to everyone in the world – but you do want to connect with as many of your potential users as possible; and an app you create may be one tool to help make that happen!

 

Academic, General, Public, School Media Specialist, Special

Local author and SCTCC professor gives Tedx talk

Jessica LoureyJessica Lourey is a successful local author and professor of creative writing and sociology at St. Cloud Community and Technical College. She has a new book coming out next May, titled Rewrite Your Life: Discover Your Truth Through the Healing Power of Fiction. The book is nonfiction and aimed at helping people work through difficulties in their lives by fiction writing. The book was inspired by Lourey’s discovery of the therapeutic ability of writing fiction while  working through an extremely traumatic event in her life.

She recently gave a TEDx talk about the experience, which you can watch below. TEDx “is designed to help communities, organizations and individuals to spark conversation and connection through local TED-like experiences.” Learn more by visiting their site.

Interested in learning more about Lourey? Read about her in our Author Spotlight post, or check out our review of Lourey’s first book in her Murder by Month series, Mayday. She even gave an engaging presentation during a CMLE event last year.