Sometimes, when you’re really lucky, you get to spend a day with some of your favorite face-to-face librarians and some of your favorite national librarians at the same time. For today’s MAME Summer Institute, Kathleen McBroom and I held down the fort in Michigan while Susan Ballard and Melissa Johnston used Elluminate to provide great information via Webinar.

You can click on the links below to access any of the resources (thanks, co-presenters!).

What was each presentation about, you ask?

Kathleen gave us an amazing overview of the Common Core Standards.

Sue talked about how the need for change and how her Londonderry district had used the AASL Planning Guide to deepen their program development.

Melissa talked about the AASL Building-Level Toolkit, with a strong emphasis on librarian-as-leader.

I looked at five elements of Common Core and talked about how we could use those standards to impact our practice.

Meanwhile, our intrepid Michigan colleagues shared their ideas for flipping the essay, working with primary sources, how they could use the free webinar hosting provided by LearnCentral.org back at home, and more. You can access the webinar archive of any of our presentations (just know that Kathleen and I were often wandering around far from the microphone, so our sound quality ain’t too ideal).

Remember the old TV commercials that used to say, “I’m a lucky dog”? That’s me.

mameleadership2008 / MAME-July-2011 via kwout

Hope y’all have been learning great strategies for working with Common Core while you’ve been at ALA, ISTE, in workshops, or just thinking about it in your down time. We’d love to share what you’ve been learning with other librarians for the first “Nudging Toward Inquiry” column of the year — and the deadline for submission is today!

(Plus, think of what a great way it’d be to start the year if you could hand your principal a copy of the article with your name on it, showing that you’re on top of the whole school’s curriculum game!)

In the meantime, here’s an interesting editorial from Education Week on the need for media literacy standards to be part of Common Core. Enjoy!

Tonight, I have the privilege of speaking to school librarians who are part of the Michigan Chapter of the Catholic Library Association. Slides are here. Some familiar slides, and a few new ones!