Saturday, August 13, 2016

A New School Year ...Another Opportunity to Make a Difference

So, here I sit, in my favorite purple overalls, getting ready to go outside on this Carolina blue-sky Saturday, to work on the farm.  I am helping get the pond house ready for a special HST staff development outing HERE, on Wednesday!!  Some team building activities are planned for a fantastic start to the new year.  I LOVE new school years!  To me, each August is another opportunity to make a difference for my students, to begin again, try  new strategies, further develop and improve the HST library and to expand my PLN.

Which brings me to the focus of this blog!  What a week of connecting with others!  @EdieCrook and I had the privilege of sharing with a group of educators on Tuesday at the Gaston County Schools Teaching & Learning Conference #gcstlc2016!  We shared ways to "Get Connected with Books and our wonderful PLN friends on Twitter helped make it possible.  The power of being a connected educator is immeasurable!  Special thanks to Stony Evans, Terry Shay, Kyle Wood, Peter Reynolds, Julia Claiborne Johnson, Craig Smith and all the others authors, illustrators, teachers and media specialists who gave us feedback and shared insight into the importance of digitally connecting our students with others locally, nationally and globally!  What a powerful network of support we have!  I can only hope the session was as entertaining, purposeful and helpful as it was fun to prepare with Edie and all our Twitter PLN collaborators!


As I reflect and prepare for the 2016-2017 school year, I want to make it my goal to grow my PLN, in a purposeful way, to make connections with other teacher-librarians, so that we can impact our students and provide meaningful instruction and library programming that meets their needs, and to try new ways to connect.  I am intrigued by #MysterySkype and want to collaborate with my teachers to give it a try.  There are so many ways to connect our students with others and I am excited to share these opportunities with the colleagues I work with each day!  So, International Dot Day, Global Read Aloud, Mystery Skype, Book Club, Rock Our World and all things reading-related...here I come...#HSTreads is ready to begin again and to make this year a fantastic one for my amazing students!  

If you are starting back to school soon, I wish you all the best!  If you want to collaborate with a high school librarian in North Carolina, find me on Twitter @LauraBLong or email me at lalong@gaston.k12.nc.us!  Oh, and meet Blue, the newest addition to Long Family Farm!  He is making the end of summer so much fun!  I am sure you will see him again soon!