Happy New Year!

We hope you’ve made a New Year’s resolution join an online professional learning community in 2012.  It’s a great way to meet new colleagues and get new ideas you can immediately put into practice.

This month we’re launching a new community on Mobile Learning Explorations – co-hosted by edWeb.net and CoSN and sponsored by AT&T.  We now have free professional learning communities that cover a variety of topics from New Teacher Help to Implementing the Common Core State Standards. Many thanks to our presenters, sponsors and partners for helping us create this new model for online PD.

 Cathy Swan, Michelle Luhtala, and Lisa Nielsen
at the "I Love My Librarian Award" Ceremony

We launched our first edWeb PD program – Emerging Tech - with Michelle Luhtala, the head librarian at New Canaan High School.  Michelle was just honored in December as one of the 2011 winners of the New York Times/Carnegie Corporation of NY “I Love My Librarian Award.” The ceremony was a moving tribute to the critical role that librarians play in our schools and communities – especially in hard times.  We see that on edWeb every day.  We launched our first PD program with librarians because we knew that if it didn’t work for librarians, it wouldn’t work for anyone.  In our professional learning communities, librarians are often our most active and engaged participants, always seeking new information to help their teachers and students.

Thank you to all of you who are part of our growing community for your generous contributions, and for your willingness to provide helpful information for your peers.

We hope you make many new friends in 2012 – whether online or offline – and that your life and work are enriched by these connections!