Thing 1: Blogging
Hi there! I'm Karin Howansky, and I'm a librarian at WSWHE BOCES in Saratoga Springs. I previously was the K-12 librarian of a little district in Washington County for 8 years, and I feel very lucky to be part of the best. profession. ever. (Seriously.) Before children (or B.C., as I like to call it), I was an elementary teacher in Connecticut. If someone had told me then that I would one day be a librarian, I probably would not have believed them, but here I am. I've wanted to teach since I laid eyes my Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Ford, at Mayflower School (can you tell I lived near Plymouth MA at the time?) over forty years ago. I'm a 4th generation Potsdam grad and teacher...but libraries are in my DNA, too. (And engineers. But that's another story.) My mother has worked for many years in my hometown's library in Massachusetts, and my grandmother enjoyed working for a time at Crandall Library in the 1970s after retiring from her first career. I'm not sure I know what I want to be when I grow up yet, but I'm enjoying my current career and loving my new position working for the WSWHE BOCES SLS.
I'm participating in Cool Tools because...well...I'm eager to learn more Cool Tools! One of the many hats that I now wear at BOCES involves sharing technology with other teachers and librarians, and I'm excited to see what new tools I discover in this course. I've blogged before, but I tend to be sporadic about it. We'll see if I stick with it better this time around. :)
Thing 26: Notetaking Tools
My administrator and I have been struggling with finding a good, shareable, notetaking tool all year. Ideally, we'd like a tool where we can share our notes with each other. I like things simple, whereas she likes to be able to use more detail and drill down into nitty gritty. It might be why we haven't hit upon the ideal notetaking tool for collaborating...yet. The NY Times article on notetaking was interesting, and not surprising. I've been hearing over time that there's a growing body of evidence that people may very well retain information better when they physically scribe notes, rather than type them. I know that I really wished that I could have a little device to type my notes on when I was an undergrad (that was a looong time ago, when Macs were newfangled and Bitnet was this magical way that one of my dorm mates could talk, for free, to his relatives in the Netherlands), but the act of writing everything down that I could was a definite chunk of how I got th
Welcome! And thanks for sharing your journey to librarianship! Sounds like it was almost inevitable that you'd end up in school libraries. :) Enjoy the new job at WSWHE.
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