The school year has officially begun, and I am grateful for the swarms of eager students and teachers who have inhabited the library this last week. If it wasn’t for them, I may have become the cranky, reclusive, hypersensitive shrew that surfaced here and there during our long and fruitless inventory. The children have worked as a tonic for me, reinvigorating my sense of purpose and inspiring me to, once again, crack a young adult novel and begin to read.
I find, however, that reading as many books as I can will no longer satisfy my current job requirements. In this second year of my life as a library media teacher, I am beginning to see why the word media is stuck there in the middle. Some of the projects I am currently developing are a library website, a murder mystery podcast, a school-wide wiki, a personal blog (duh), a library blog, and a library student worker wiki. I am actually going to give a workshop on using blogs and wikis in the classroom, which seems like a strange thing for anyone to expect me to do, except for the fact that I think I can actually do it.
When I was 23 and working in a used bookstore in Madison, I didn’t think I would ever even stoop to use a cell phone regularly. I imagined myself living a low-tech existence, because I believed (and strongly!) that books and technology do not mix. That was the foundation for my personal philosophy for almost a decade. If you love books, you couldn’t possibly care less about techno-babble. If you are a tech-dude, then you must not read much more than magazines or crap. I believed it. Not only that, I preached it.
I was a fool. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly (or to the 3 of you who read this) renounce my position as a tech-hating bookworm. It’s taken some time for me to get here, and I’m nowhere near finished, but I can now say that I am becoming friends with the wiki-wacky-web and all that it brings.
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