Superconference 2008

I'll make a short post about the Superconference, which was, as usual, inspiring, motivating and thought-inspiring. Even though I could only attend Friday and Saturday, what I experienced still compells me to believe that this is one of the best conferences for ANY teacher!

I volunteered to blog about some of the sessions that I attended. You can find those on the Superconference blog. To whet your curiosity, I had the priviledge to hear Vincent Lam (author: Bloodletting and Other Miraculous Cures), David Warlick (whose blog I follow faithfully), Carol Koechlin [Session 1802](who wrote Ban the Bird Unit and Beyond the Bird Unit and who I really want to come down and work with our GECDSB TLs), Irshad Manji (author: The Trouble With Islam Today. An amazing storyteller who demonstrates her couarge daily as a Muslim Refusenick), a session on videoconferencing with White Pine (Session 1703) and a session by some secondary TLs from TDSB (Session 1210) that absolutely convinced me that using the 4 stage research process is the way to go. The Superconference 2008 site will have all the presentations posted for all sessions - it's a great place to go for personal teaching resources and pd.

I also attended the OSLA's Hot Issues session and have a draft copy of the new library document. It is not a currciuculum document. What it is, is a vision document that (and this is really important and significant) was commissioned by the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat. What is completely important is that it is a vision of what education in the province should look like in the 21st century. And what is amazingly important that the LNS commissioned teacher librarians of Ontario to write it! It will be presented to Avis Glaze (head of LNS) on Tuesday and a pdf copy of the draft will be posted on the OSLA site by Wednesday. Remember that the document Many Roots, Many Voices was a vision document that now has become Ministry policy. If this vision document is accepted by the Ministry, policy will follow and hopefully, curriculum and funding. We have 3 years of this government - we must support this document so that other things can follow. Most teacher librarians at the conference agreed that this was a momentous time for TLs in Ontario. There were also representatives from the Canadian Association for School Libraries who commented that all the provinces were watching what was going on here and are eagerly awaiting the publication of this document.