Dear Colleagues,

I am becoming more and more concerned for our profession. 

All to often we are reading about such cuts. 

All to often I am noticing LMS not even included.  For instance, I attend Teacher's College Reunion Days- 2 times a year and I have yet heard a presenter suggest to the participants to seek out their LMS for collaboration and resource suggestions.

Recently we received an email for an upcoming event from Scholastic to be held in the Boston area.  The PD day looks great and I plan to attend.  However, as part of their promo material, they had a triangle showing the three groups who should attend- again no mention of LMS!  And yet it is a reading summit on the power of independent reading hosted by Scholastic Book Fairs!

We need to speak up, initiate, and not only get seated at the table but lead the table!

Not too long ago it was shared on this list that I was chosen to be part of the "CT Dream Team" ( a name I don't particularly care for).  It's a partnership with Learn Zillion and our DOE.  There was some discussion about the agenda of these groups.  I will tell you that it has been an incredibly rich learning experience.  AND it is vitally important that we have representation at such key initiatives.

I guess reading the announcement on the CA cuts shared by Irene, made me want to rally our group.  CASL is needed more than ever to strengthen and support our members.  We need to increase our collaboration with each other.  Opportunities through CLC Roundtables exist for such work as well as our upcoming joint CECA/CASL conference.

And we have this listserve to share and lighten the load.  We can tweak each other's resources to meet the needs of our communities.  But we need to share the good stuff!

In that light, I wanted to share with you how I "raised the bar" on the summer reading packet for our district.  I know as parents, we all tend to skim and scan the materials that get sent home. So I thought we should have a digital version for parents to access whenever and as often as they like.  But, I sprinkled in interviews with key folks in the school to make the material more inviting and engaging. It literally took 5 minutes to create all the interviews on the ipad and then embed them into the flyer I already created.  This is still a draft so I will be refining it a bit. However, I wanted to share it with you now, in case you wanted to use any of the ideas/resources.
http://goo.gl/TSQDSk

Also, here is the pdf for the upcoming CECA/CASL conference- get your district support for your attendance!

Jane

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Jane E.  Martellino
K-6 School Media Specialist
RSD6
Connecticut


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