The Massachusetts School Library Annual Conference WOWS!

The Massachusetts School Library Association held their annual conference at the Sturbridge Host Hotel on October 4 and 5.  I had the good fortune to attend.  In the coming weeks, my goal is to review the bounty of information that I gathered at this wonderful conference and to share it with WMRLS members via our WMRLS-One-Blog and by weaving the lessons that I have learned into upcoming WMRLS Continuing Education workshops.  ~ Sincerely, Janet Eckert, WMRLS

My first blog post, inspired by MSLA Conference, focuses on two fantastic Web 2.0 resources - Wordle and GoAnimate

GoAnimate:  Laura Beals D'Elia,  Librarian of the Fay School Library in Southborough, conducted an excellent workshop titled "My Favorite Tools".  Laura shared that at the beginning of the school year, each department was alloted 5 minutes to overview the services that they provide to administrators, teachers, students, and parents.  Laura and the team of librarians at the Fay School met this challenge by producing a 5 minute animated video (that is both fun and informative) titled The Library Gadget 3000 [Adobe Flash 10 is required]

Wordle: While I was aware of Wordle, I thought of it as an enhanced Word Art tool (and no more).  In his keynote address titled "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?  Key Challenges Today for Tomorrow's School Libraries", Dr. Ross Todd utilized Wordle to highlight its "tag cloud" function.  That is, Dr. Todd pasted one library's mission statement into Wordle which immediately showcased the library's serious flaw - the Wordle "tag cloud" clearly showed that this library was promoting itself rather than the services that it provides to its community.  (I decided to test our WMRLS Mission Statement and pasted our Mission's text into a Wordle page.  I am pleased to report that we have passed Dr. Todd's "tag cloud" test in that our services of working with libraries to cooperate, communicate, and share is dominent within our WMRLS Wordle.)