Quotes from Joyce Valenza's blog, April 25, 2010:
Speaking of transparency, Judith Comfort, teacher-librarian at the Dr. Charles Best Secondary School Library (Coquitlam, BC), says that her library’s blog-based site is not so much a virtual place, as an evolving expression of everything that takes place within my daily professional practice.
She explains her choice of platform,
Choosing to start with easy-peasy blogging software (because I knew nothing about HTML) turned out to be the luckiest decision I ever made, for two reasons. Not having a learning curve allowed me to jump right in and also the spirit of a constantly changing front page, stuck. Every technological improvement has enhanced what I can do: embedding books & videos, feeding the latest news, linking database articles to assignments. My rule of thumb is that my site must cater to the very specific needs of my students and teachers. No boring lists of links, no matter how tempting the source. Specific to general, is the rule.
Judith publishes nearly everything on her elegant library site: collaborative lessons, workshops, pamphlets, etc.
And the answer to the question How do you have the time? is – The time it takes is easily compensated by time saved not moving paper around.
She is rightly and especially proud of the site’s online instructional offerings. As just one example, Judith points to a collaborative teaching unit on Chrysalids in the Twenty-first Century, in which students examined 14 themes in the book by analyzing fear-based societies in 14 different embedded videos.
Media literacy expertise is an increasingly critical strand of Judith’s practice and her professional development offerings. The workshop she designed for social studies teachers quickly became a resource for participants, and one that she frequently reuses.
Consider also this media literacy lesson which takes kids right into the world of the advertisers who place products.
Judith points to her News for the Classroom page, which gathers wide variety of feeds for content area learning, as a strategy toward furthering her major goal of increased accessibility.
