Summer Professional Learning

Summer break is less than 2 weeks away and this brings my thoughts to a few things that I want to accomplish this summer that I didn't have time to do during the school year. So here's my list of things to do this summer that hope will extend my professional expertise:

• write a pantoum poem (a challenge issued by D.H. one of the editors for a student creative writing anthology, the publishing of which I coordinate);


• read a number of professional books ( Critical Thinking by Richard Paul, Adolescent Literacy edited by Kylene Beers, Linda Rief and Robert Probst and The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano);


• catch up reading my professional journals (English Journal; Educational Leadership; Teacher Librarian - this is available through our board's online databases);


• create a wiki for a research project using Wiki Templates for Super Teaching by David Loertscher et al; and


• Go through the K-12 Online Conference 2007 and 'attend' some of the conference presentations.

These will keep me busy over the summer break. I also have the usual list of cleaning my house (I don't spring clean - I summer clean. No time or energy for it earlier), golfing, biking, hiking, swimming, weekend trip to Stratford and a 2 week vacation. Not sure just where my husband and I are going - we'll do a last minute booking. As long as it is really warm and has beach with salty water we're good.

For those of you who are waiting for the summer to start playing with some of the read/write web tools, I direct you again to the California School Library's School Library Learning 2.0. They updated it for this year and you can complete the 23 things over the summer and be ready to use some of these tools with your students next year.