Professional development

Ongoing:

I also attend meetings of the Independent Schools Media Association, a group of librarians and media specialists from Minnesota independent schools, and other meetings with librarians from similar schools in our area.

My time at Blake included workshops in a variety of areas as part of faculty and staff ongoing professional development. These included designing course assignments to avoid plagiarism, an extensive multiyear focus on pluralism and diversity issues (including work with Dr. Heather Hackman and Dr. Carlos Cortés), and a variety of technology workshops, including with Dr. Scott McLeod.

In-house workshops included learning about supporting mental health needs in adolescents, a range of technology tools, and material related to curriculum mapping and the reaccreditation process.

Additional professional development:

Serving 21st Century Patrons: WebJunction online conference : December 1-2, 2010
This was my first experience of an online-only conference, and I learned a lot. (You can see conference materials on the WebJunction site) I particularly liked Pat Wagner’s presentation on staying committed to great customer service, and the presentation on changing reference services to meet the needs of library users.

Ethics in the Real World: Library Case Studies: October 4th, 2010
Online course via Webjunction/Le@d on ethics in library settings, focusing on privacy, transparency, fairness, and access issues.

You Can Do It: A Recipe for Designing Web-based Instruction : July 12th, 2010
Online course via WebJunction on designing online instruction, best practices, and other advice for creating quality user instruction using the ADDIE model.

Library Technology Conference: March 2009
Attended this great conference hosted at Macalester College in St. Paul – a wonderful chance to hear about integrations of technology and information resources.

More Things On A Stick : Spring 2009
I am again participating in the Things On A Stick program put together by a number of Minnesota libraries. In this, participants work individually (but in a shared online community) on different Web 2.0 tasks, exploring how they might be useful in library settings. You can read my posts on these tasks here.

TIES conference: December 2008
As in 2007, I attended and presented at the TIES conference, which focuses on technology in education. My presentations are discussed over here. I enjoyed Daniel Pink’s keynote, as well as a presentation on online networking education for students, and the use of games and other related technology in the classroom.

ISACS conference: October 2008
This conference for independent schools in the central states (our accrediting body) was held in St. Paul in 2008, and the entire staff and faculty attended. The workshop I found most helpful was from Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls as various pieces fit nicely into my thoughts on education around online interactions and community.

Cataloging workshop: June 2008
One of our local library consortia offered a cataloging workshop for librarians who wished to improve their skills. This focused on the details of MARC records, common practices among local libraries, and where to find resources for items that were complex to catalog.

23 Things on a Stick: Spring 2008
Participation in the 23 Things on a Stick Library 2.0 project run through the Minnesota library multi-type systems. This project asked participants to work through a set of tasks related to Web 2.0 technologies, and blog about them. You can see my comments on each Thing on my former blog under the label 23Things.

Nancy Pearl’s Doorways to Reading: March 2008:
I attended Nancy Pearl’s presentation on Doorways to Reading (her Reader’s Advisory approach – or how to help readers find things they want to read) at the College of St. Catherine. This 2 hour presentation discussed how some traditional reader’s advisory methods sometimes fall short, and why the four doorways (story, character, setting, and language) may work better to find books readers will be interested in.

TIES 2007: December 2007
As mentioned elsewhere on this site, I presented at the Technology in Education conference for K-12 schools. I also attended 3 other presentations (all of them focused on online safety and literacy education). My thoughts are discussed on my former blog.

Reader’s Advisory: Fall 2006
In the fall of 2006, I took an online course in Reader’s Advisory through the University of Wisconsin at Madison online library training office. Reader’s advisory was a large part of my former job, but it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to fit it into my MLIS coursework.

I found the course useful (although I wish we’d had time to go deeper, especially in genre reading), but also very helpful in seeing how an entirely online course works.