Keynote Address: Shannon McClintock Miller

Shannon McClintock Miller is the district teacher librarian and technology specialist at Van Meter Community School in Van Meter, Iowa. She encourages her students to have a voice while learning, creating, collaborating, and connecting to others within their school and around the world. Shannon is the author of the award winning Van Meter Library Voice blog and enjoys writing for ISTE's Leading & Learning journal, various blogs, and in other forums. She has had the opportunity to speak in Iowa and around the country about advocacy, technology, social media, and making a difference in education and the lives of others. Shannon serves on the School Library Monthly advisory board and is a teacher advocate for StudyBlue. In March 2011, Shannon was awarded the Connecting People Shorty Award for Twitter. Shannon can be found at @shannonmmiller on Twitter and online at shannonmmiller.com.

Shannon's address is entitled, "Be The Change You Want to See," after the Gandhi quote. She focuses on some of the tools that can help us make the changes that we want to see in our programs, our districts, our state, and our profession. Google sites help us share information. Blogs help us connect, share, and learn with others. Twitter is a great resource for connecting to what's important to us. Diigo allows us to save and share our bookmarks online. YouTube takes sharing to the audio-visual level. Skype brings the experts to your doorstep. Now we can use these tools to connect as professionals and create the professional organization we want to see. Be the change you want to see!

Be the change you want to see...

   This is going to be a lot of fun. Participants in this year's Leadership Development Conference will be offering their input about what they'd like to see their state professional organization offer. Through a creative, interactive process of rotating through brainstorming stations, we'll emerge energized  from the morning's activities with 6 presentations to offer the MEMO Board about what is important to media professionals in the state regarding advocacy; professional development; networking & communication with peers/community; technology integration; collaboration & communication within the educational setting; standards/curriculum/lessons/scope and sequence; and technology integration.The Board will set their annual priorities in Board meetings the following day based, in large part, on the input from these impassioned morning sessions.
   After lunch, we'll launch into breakout sessions built around these topics and visit vendor displays. We'll wrap it up with a motivational culminating activity. Keynote speaker Shannon McClintock Miller will open up the event with an exhilarating presentation entitled "Be the Change You Want to See in the World," the inspiration for the conference title, from Mohandas Gandhi's famous quote.
  This is your opportunity to "Be the Change" that you would like to see in your profession. Join the conversation now, and continue at the conference on July 6. You'll be glad you did.