The Daring Librarian

Sure, I usually blog about technology, geeky stuff, and libraries... but beneath it all the Daring Librarian is a girlie girl who likes bling & beauty products!  So, in the spirit of this holiday season, if you don't know what to get your gal or if you love getting pretty stuffs in the mail each month, let me introduce you to Birchbox ! Basically, for only $10 a month, you receive a collection of beauty products (some sample size & some full size) and it's always a surprise. The fun in this? You never know what you're getting AND it allows you to try a product before you invest a ton of money in something without knowing if you'll like it or not.  Genius, I know. There's also a subscription for the guys in your life! So get that metro-sexual dude of yours great grooming products! From the site: "Birchbox delivers the best products and the best insider secrets, without any fuss. Every month Birchbox members will receive a curated box of luxe beau...

Gotcha Back!  I want to share this amazing video that one of our outstanding, talented, amazing, adorable - ok, I'm a bit of a fan grrl for Denise Adams our new MHMS Guidance Counselor. (Ms. Shuman's pretty cool, too!)  She did this video all by herself! W00t! (With a little help from her kids!;-) Starring our awesome Murray Hill Middle School kiddos. She used a stop action sports setting on her camera to get the step-effect of the photos. We have an anti-bullying PBIS campaign going in our school and this video supports it wonderfully - and it gets me a little choked up..."I'm all farklempt! " Here's the video link on the SchoolTubes and the embedded vid below in case the YouTubes are blocked in your district or the embed doesn't work for you!     If it's important, FIND A WAY - to be a How to be a Ninja Warrior Filter Fighter ! Imma B Another GREAT video for PBIS is this inspiring one from Nashville, TN!  It espouses a real positive mes...

Ain't it grand? Freedom of speech, blogs... opinions? The ability to mouth off & share? Buckle up dear readers, this is a wordy one...I'm gonna opine! Whether one person or one thousand reads it - I think very fact that we can publish to the WORLD freely our thoughts & ideas without license or permission... THAT my dear friends is a true definition of Web 2.0h,  the read write web. And I reckon, THIS is what we should be celebrating not hating on the nomination & voting process of Edublog Awards OR #Eddies12 ! I've gotta say being recognized for what ya do feels grand. It would be a load of BS to say otherwise, right? And though being included as a finalist after being nominated by your peers is heady stuff - it's the very fact that WE CAN EFFIN WRITE whatever the hell heck we want to write is the real winner. For a matter of fact the Edublogs is quite democratic & anyone, anywhere in the world can nominate any blog! It's not an American aw...

  Please join us Monday, December 3rd at 8PM Eastern, TL Virtual Café hosts our 2nd annual FREE EduTech Smackdown/Open Mic night webinar.  Please plan on visiting or participating! "You don’t have to be a librarian to play!  We welcome classroom teachers, tech directors, administrators, enthusiastic partners of every persuasion! It's  more fun when we can learn from each other!" Joyce will be sharing her trend list and some of her favorite discoveries and so will several good friends.  The event will be ably moderated by yours truly and the lovely & talented  Tiffany Whitehead, aka The Mighty Little Librarian . We highly encourage moving beyond listening to sharing ! "If you’d like to take the microphone with your own exciting discoveries of the year, please grab a slide/slides and add to our crowd-souced presentation/book in advance. Share your best recommendations for tips, resources, etc. and help us build an intera...

When it comes to the Edublogger Awards, I've "always (been) a bridesmaid and never a bride" but surprisingly (for me!) that's...OK.  Because I get SO much more from the Edublog Award process learning about and from new teachers, librarians, administrators, etc. than I can ever explain. It has been a super game changer and PLN builder for me. NEXT year for this I've got a new idea...I've created a new Sqworl group to save all those amazing blogs & educational sites I run across that I'm keeping an eye on to make next year's noms EASIER and hopefully faster! LOL Individual Blog - Free Technology for Teachers Group Blog - LevelUpBookClub New Blog - The Mad River Librarian Class Blog - Campbell 156 EdTech Blog - Mr G Online  Teacher Blog - The Nerdy Teacher Library/Librarian Blog - Mighty Little Librarian -Tiff Administrator Blog - The Principal Of Change - George Couros Influential Post - Game Based PD for an Epic Win In...

With Search Hash & Google Apps! The Backstory: Taking our TLVirtual Cafe webinar series and Twitter chat #TLChat one step farther a few months ago we started #TLChat Live! (For some reason I always have to type the word LIVE! and Science! with an exclamation - don't judge.) Spearheaded by Joyce Valenza, Nikki Robertson, and a core group of or TL Geek Tribe (volunteer moderators listed on our TLChat Live! front Wikispaces page! Add your name to the list! ) we were so jazzed to get this ball rolling! We meet the 2nd Mondays of the month at 8pm Eastern time , we chat for an hour on a crowdsourced topic , share ideas, grow our PLN, make new connections, and enjoy each others company! It's grand! Our first Live! discussion hour was on September 17th and thanks to Library Girl Jennifer LaGarde we have a cool infographic created with Easel.ly to share about it! Wow! Pretty outstanding, right? The Archive from the chat is embedded on our wikipage . (come right back I w...

Teaching tech in isolation never works. When a reluctant tech user learns how to do something with a project about which they're personally passionate, they're gonna be instantly engaged, work hard at it, and feel super exultant when it works!  For example, when I teach iPhoto , I have the teachers bring in 10-15 pictures of their vacations, hobbies, pets, or yeah...their families and kids. OR if they didn't bring them in, I hand them a digital camera with a grin and say "Go take a 15 min digital safari - lay down, lean over, step on chairs, and take pics of your classroom or the school from freaky angles and come right back!"   From there we teach how to import, edit, crop, enhance, adjust, and then export those photos in different sizes. That way when they email that photo of "little Johnnie on the pottie" the recipient doesn't have to scroll to see one eye...then the other, etc.  In the second session we use those same pics to make an iPhoto s...