Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Dear Jane (and anyone else interested,) My school email is wonky, not allowing me to “send” from it tonight, so I wanted to use my gmail account to reply. You say you read my blog, so hopefully you’ll read why I cannot respond with a personalized message tonight. But hello, and I miss very much [...]

Today I did a session at our annual principal’s conference on social networking. Since the vast majority of tools like MySpace, Facebook, and even professional networks like Classroom 2.0 are blocked, I took the stance that we as educators must educate ourselves and our parents, especially in light of how issues stemming directly from student [...]

I read this quote today and thought about making a motivational poster to display in the library. It seems to go hand-in-hand with what we in the library world are all about. This one shows reading or researching print resources. I may make a matching one that shows a library patron using online/digital resources too. [...]

The other day I shared an article by Marc Prensky that I ran across in my reader with a listserv that I am a member of. I was hoping it would stir a response, and I was not disappointed. I do believe “T” admittedly was playing devil’s advocate for the sake of the conversation, but [...]

For the last few years I have asked annually three times during the school year to attend Alan November’s Building Learning Communities Conference. I would ask in August near the beginning, just before Christmas break, and again in March.  Each year I was turned down due to lack of funding.  I didn’t overly complain b/c [...]

Today we had Career Day at school and I had industrious plans, which you can read here. Snafus from the get go ensued, as the guest speakers physically present had been invited to a breakfast, which unbeknownst to me was in the library. It took quite a bit of encouragement to get the “project director,” [...]

Recently my school underwent a migration from Novell networking software to Microsoft networking software. It was pretty painless and I’m surprised at how easy we all made the transition. There have been a few snafus: Our keyboarding lab had the oldest computers in the building, and they are struggling to accept the new script. We [...]

Today on our SCASL-listserv, a fellow teacher-librarian asked about how schools are dealing with students who bring their own laptops to school. The posted question also inquired about how schools are using webcams, with the follow up statement “couldn’t they be used to help our homebound students.” Of course we had quite a few respond, [...]

I’m still reeling with the knowledge that my wonderful advisor from the University of South Carolina, Dr. Donna Shannon, is reading my blog. This just blows me away! Look at the bottom of this email she sent me: W00T! Best of all she wants me to “virtually” join her SLIS 761 class to talk about [...]

Do Ostriches really bury their heads in the sand when frightened? According to “Phrase Finder” this is a myth. Ostriches basically when frightened lay down and flatten their heads along the ground, so as to disguise themselves from possible predators. But this reminds me very much of how our schools and IT deal with content [...]