Exciting Georgia Peach Award News!

First, please remember to send in your votes from the 2008-2009 nominees. The voting sheet is located on our website: http://glma-inc.org/peachaward.htm You will find it under the downloads and it is the voting tally sheet. If you have any problems with this or questions, please feel free to contact me at Amy_Golemme@gwinnett.k12.ga.us
The deadline for sending me the voting is March 13th. I’m looking forward to seeing how your teens vote!

For those of you looking ahead to the 2010 year, the attached are the 20 nominees for the Georgia Peach:

13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
Blood Brothers by S.A. Harazin
City of Bones by Cassandra Clare
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
Generation Dead by Daniel Waters
Getting the Girl by Susan Juby
Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Impossible by Nancy Werlin
Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger
Oh. My. Gods. by Tera Lynn Childs
Ophelia by Lisa Klein
Spud by John Van de Ruit
Three Little Words by Ashley Rhodes-Courter
Unwind by Neal Shusterman
Wake by Lisa McMann
Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

I know that a lot of you need to spend your money quickly, and I sure hope this gives you great titles to spend that money on! Thank you to all of you for your support of the Georgia Peach Award, please keep sending in your nominations for great books – we are now starting to read for the 2011 award and books within a 5 year copyright are eligible. There is a book nomination form on our website under the download section as well.

I’m looking forward to receiving your votes!
Amy Golemme
Committee Chair

Debatable Topic #8: Who Wins…Reconsideration Policy or Administrative Mandate?

Many of the students I teach in our M.Ed. in School Library Media program and our Certification Add-on program are practicing school library media specialists. Two of the requirements in our Selections course are the creation of a strong selection policy and reconsideration of materials policy. As we work on these projects, we discuss the need for a solid reconsideration/challenged materials policy that will bring consistency and reason to the challenge process. We emphasize that this policy should apply across the board, to any individual who has a question about an item being appropriate for the collection.

As I taught the course we offer in Selections recently, I was somewhat surprised to learn that more than a few of the practicing media specialists have had an experience where an administrator (i.e., principal, superintendent, board of education member) gave a directive for a certain title to be removed from the collection without going through due process required by the reconsideration policy. While the media specialists felt that proper protocol should be followed no matter the challenger, they also felt that the request from the superior should be upheld.

The question is: should the media specialist abide by the approved policy, or submit to the request of the superior? Most of us would immediately indicate that policy is set for all, no matter the rank or position. However, if placed in this precarious position, the directive of the superior is expected to be followed.

This type of situation is a good example of how imperative it is for our administration in the schools to be aware of, and participate in, media program development and implementation. In many cases across the state of Georgia, the media specialist is the soul voice to champion library services and policy. When the administration views the media program as a most viable and needed component in the school environment, policy set by the media specialist will be seen as authoritative and necessary. It is up to us to gain that position of respect and recognition from all of the players in our schools, including administration and superiors. When that is accomplished, perhaps such issues as this will not occur!

(Topic next month will be on document cam recordings turned podcast!)

Dr. Phyllis Snipes

University of West Georgia

Fall in Love with TweetDeck

OK, I admit it. I’m in love.  The new love of my life is my favorite Twitter app, TweetDeck. When I first got started with Twitter many months ago, I was not even in love with Twitter. I thought it was just a playground for stalkers. But after a while I returned and discovered that people were actually using Twitter for more than just to ask people what they had for lunch. They were using it to share information and to expand their personal learning networks. So Twitter and I became pals again. And then I started discovering all the fab Twitter applications that make Twitter even more fun to use and make sharing information even easier. My favorite? TweetDeck! All you have to do is go to the TweetDeck website, download TweetDeck (and simultaneously download Adobe Air) to your desktop, and then you can use it to tweet away. TweetDeck installs an icon on your desktop and your taskbar and notifies you with a pleasant little chirp and a visual notification when you have an incoming tweet. OK, maybe it’s an annoying little chirp, but you know how to turn the sound down, right? TweetDeck splits your tweets into group-specific columns so that you can see, for example, all of your tweets, your replies, and your direct messages separately. Want to respond to a tweet? All you have to do is click on the tweeter’s tiny little head and a “menu” pops up. You can reply to the tweeter, send her a direct message, retweet her tweet (it was brilliant!), or favorite her tweet (it was super-brilliant!). When you’re posting your own tweets, TweetDeck makes it easy to post a link to your own website or blog, or to someone else’s. You just click on the little button at the top that looks like a conversation bubble to post a tweet, and two boxes open. You insert your tweet in one box, and your link in the other. Then hit the button to shorten the URL, and TweetDeck shortens it using snipurl or some other URL shortening service. You can use other buttons to create groups, search for words or phrases within your tweets, or perform other tasks. Even though TweetDeck says it’s for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it works just fine with Firefox.

Ruth Fleet

Creekview High School

Legislative Alert

LEGISLATION TO WAIVE MEDIA CENTER EXPENDITURE CONTROLS AND REPEAL THE SALARY INCREASE FOR NBC WILL BE HEARD IN COMMITTEE NEXT WEEK.

On Tuesday, February 24th from 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., the House Academic Support Subcommittee will hear presentations and allow testimony on two pieces of legislation being pushed by the Governor -  HB 243 and HB 278.

House Bill 243 by Rep. Jimmy Pruett (R – Eastman), would “…repeal the salary increase for persons receiving certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards…”

House Bill 278 by Rep. Matt Ramsey (R – Peachtree City), waives the expenditure controls for media center costs for the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 school years.

Please let us know as soon as possible if you would like to attend the subcommittee meeting. The House only allows public comment on legislation in subcommittee. Once the subcommittee votes a bill out to the full House Education Committee, there will not be another opportunity to testify on the legislation until it reaches the Senate.

Be sure to email and call your local legislators to let them know how this legislation would affect your students, your school, and your position in the media center. Find your legislators by clicking here.

Lasa & Michelle

This week in intellectual freedom

Just in case you missed it the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue arrived on the scene this past week. As long as I’ve been teaching in a school library media program, the decision about what to do with this issue has been a topic of much discussion. Gail Dickinson wrote an excellent column in Knowledge Quest that addressed this topic (I’d link to it here but it seems that today is the day AASL is unveiling its redesigned web site and most of the links don’t seem to be working).

But this year there’s a new twist on the issue: Southwest Airlines has put the cover model on one of its airplanes! I think intellectual freedom is a very important professional issue but I never thought about seeing SI’s scantily clad cover model larger than life on an airplane.

I’d also like to recommend an excellent blog that one of my students found this semester. It’s hosted by the National Coalition Against Censorship and it is an excellent way to follow censorship issues in the news. I’d highly recommend adding it to your RSS feed. And speaking of RSS, if you haven’t checked out Tabbloid yet please give it a try. Tabbloid allows you to enter your RSS feeds and then it delivers them to you on a schedule you choose in a pdf newspaper format-very nifty! My Google Reader had gotten seriously out of hand so I decided to put a subset of my favorite blogs into Tabbloid.

Judi Repman

Georgia Southern University