I still believe in 398.2

Istillbelievein 398.2

398.2

Last week our county Media Services department hosted our end of the year meeting and the theme was Fairy Tales in honor of the Beauty and the Beast remake. We met at the Instructional Support Center at 8am. I arrived and walked in and I could immediately feel the positive energy! Everyone was so excited to see each other. Every time we get together it is like a family reunion. It is wonderful to talk with others who do the same job as you. Being the only one of you in the school can be a little lonely.

The focus of the meeting was to honor our Media Specialist of the Year, share news, celebrate retirements, and to learn new practices. Our guest speaker for our breakout session was Andy Spinks from Cobb County. He presented some great ideas and ways he is using Google in his media center.

Next, we went to a session on Breakout EDU. My group actually unlocked the box first! Yay us! It was really exciting and I look forward to incorporating this into my media center.

When we reconvened at the end of the day, it was announced that our school district had donated a bus to Media Services to be used as a bookmobile this summer. The bookmobile will make spots through neighborhoods where kids don't have access to books. The bookmobile is one attempt to answer that need for students in one cluster. But there are many more students who may have very limited access to a library. One study showed in "Do Kids Really Have Summer Learning Loss?" that reading just four books over the summer will significantly limit the reading comprehension loss that students experience over the summer. (Paul 2013) I even presented with a fellow media specialist on how we are using social media to advocate for our media centers. Our social media presentation was a huge success as many media specialsits had not created accounts. As I was leaving many of them said they were going to create one.