Advocacy for the library is a never-ending collaborative effort. My partner librarian Kristel Behrend and I reach out to teachers to offer lessons and find out what they need. We conduct surveys and ask for input from subject teachers on the Media Technology Advisory Committee to identify areas where we might provide support. We make sure the media center is a vibrant, visible part of the school community by having flexible scheduling, opening both before and after school, conducting school-wide events such as Banned Books Week, Computer Science Week, and Literacy Week, and making announcements to alert students and staff to happenings in the Learning Commons. By request and by our own initiation, we have participated and presented in Professional Learning Team (PLT) meetings for other subject areas and grade levels, such as the PLT meeting on digital portfolios in the agenda below. Together with our instructional technology facilitator and two other Google Certified Level 2 Educators, we led a whole-staff professional development opportunity on Google Tools during one half-day in February. The session began with a scavenger hunt that introduced teachers to tools and resulted in the slideshow below before we broke into individual sessions, as described in my entry on the Google Tools In-Service.

Kristel and I are both active on Twitter, which is encouraged by our principal. We share news, retweet literacy-related and high-interest information for our students, and we engage in conversations with both our faculty and the wider community. We also engage in smaller but significant ways, by attending performances and events to support our students, supporting Donors Choose grants set up by our teachers and coaches, and making sure to share events and news with people in the community. We are constantly looking for ways to improve our outreach and accessibility, and we recently added an "Ask a Librarian" Google Form and a chat box to the Learning Commons website. We are partnering with one of the public libraries to do a public library card drive, which has strengthened our ties with them and broadened the scope of resources available for our students. Additionally, we are boosting our visibility throughout the Wake County Public School System by presenting at Convergence, which is attended by all WCPSS media and technology personnel, and by delivering our Google Tools for Education training at a local elementary school by request.

Throughout the year, we have received positive feedback on these efforts, including being invited by Lake Myra Elementary School to facilitate Google training and being recruited by the WCPSS Convergence team to facilitate a second session on digital portfolios this spring after our presentation last fall. I plan to continue making connections throughout the community and working to improve the visibility of our library as an essential learning space in the school.