371.22 Good YA Books Workshop: Social Networking in Action

We have spent a wonderful day talking about books and the web!
The participants say:
"fantastic!"
"one of the best..."
"I am excited about learning how to blog"
"I want to try podcasting"
"Playaways!"
"I learned a whole new language...digital immigrants who can speak [Web 2.]!! "
"I learned that we need to get our district to let our students do some social networking...AT SCHOOL."
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I spent the day with 15 teachers, librarians, and a library assistant (yes!) talking about YA Books in the Web 2.0 setting. We talked about some great books, some fun books, some reference books...that meet the needs on YAs on many levels!
To assist them in promoting and using these books we looked at websites from publishers and educational entities, we looked at author sites and blogs, we looked at blogs for books and FOR kids! We looked at kids' writing online!

We dealt with the typical issues that are attached to YA books and adult books read by YAs. There are no easy answers, but we all agreed that all the books presented or mentioned had value and purpose, despite what objections may be raised. We looked at ways of preventing controversy and still benefitting from the essence of the books.

We took a few minutes to look behind the scenes of a blog and did a quick post (the comments above were shouted out and typed and posted within 5 minutes.)

Perhaps, the most poignant (and even saddest) moments of the day were spent discussing HOW important all of this IS to and for the kids...and how much work we all have ahead of us in convincing the adults who lead and direct us, or even work beside us, of all this social networking, whether it is about books, math problems, current events, or life in general.

We shared, we networked, we bonded. And we laughed...a lot!