Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Welcome!

If you're here I hope it's because you have decided to give the "23 Things" a try. We will be following the California School Library Association's adaptation of the Learning 2.0 program, which was initially developed by Helene Blowers for the staff of the Charlotte and Mecklenburg County Public Library. CSLA encouraged their participating members to work together and we'll do that too--thorugh our blogs, emails, (and maybe some frustrated phone calls in the middle of the night?) Remember--it's a challenge, not a crisis!

So begin by reading CSLA's About page. It's very well done and I'm not going to try to reinvent anything for our program.

Give yourself some Credit Even if you decide not to go for the continuing education credits offered by Fresno Pacific, you can probably still get some credit for your efforts by discussing this with your LPDC. Remember to add this to your IPDP before you get too far along, as some district LPDCs are picky about that.

Timelines You can shoot for finishing the program in 9 weeks as is suggested (and required by Fresno Pacific) or you can take until the end of the school year. Then at conference in the fall we can have a party!

Since we'll be a much smaller group than CSLA's, we can be less formal and less structured, but please keep up your blog and label each post with your week and "thing" number. And, of course, share your blog's address with Louise who will post a link to it on this page. Larger groups have cheerleaders assigned to a number of participants, but I think we can count on each other for help and encouragement.

CSLA has a "Curriculum Connections" wiki. Members who are following the program use it to post ideas they have for using any of the '23 things' in their library programs. Since OELMA already has a wiki set up that is accessible from oelma.org, we'll just add a section for our bright ideas.

Finally, this program was created in 2006. There are new applications that we can and should be learning that aren't covered here. Please keep that in mind as you work through the program and add any ideas you have about other web applications or tutorials that you think we should look at.

Suggestions are always welcome!