It’s hard to believe that summer has slipped away and it’s time to get back to school. It’s always exciting, hectic, and a little overwhelming this time of year, but it’s also a great time to reflect on summer learning and make plans to try something new.
I’ve been Bitmoji obsessed for a while now. My awesome library assistant and I communicate almost exclusively via Bitmoji communication on SnapChat. Seriously, we’ve kept our Snap Streak alive all summer!
This summer has provided me with some great professional development opportunities, including my first ALA Annual Conference, a training at school on Social Emotional Learning, and EdCamp Watson today. After chatting with my friend and new librarian Laura Foy at EdCamp, I was reminded of a fun book mark design contest I did several years ago. This inspired me to come home and design some back to school bookmarks for our library. Shannon Miller blogged recently about using friendmojis in the library, and I was inspired to add bitmoji Ms. Kramm and Mrs. Whitehead to our bookmarks.
I created these bookmarks in Canva, using this great background photo I found on Pixabay. I wanted to include important info about our library, like our hours and website. Since our middle school students are 1:1 iPad, I made sure to include a QR code that will bring them to our website with our library catalog and databases. They’re being printed by OvernightPrints, so I made sure to follow the dimensions and instructions they provide for design. I can’t wait to get these in person so I can share them with students and families at orientation next week.
I’ve been evangelizing about Twitter for years. Every chance I get, I tell people how Twitter changed my life and how building my PLN is the best thing I’ve ever done for myself professionally. Several years ago at CMS, I hosted a Twitter Boot Camp for my teachers. Over the past three semesters, I’ve worked with my technology department at Episcopal to use Twitter Bingo as a tool to introduce Twitter to our faculty and get them using it to build a professional network.
What I like about using this format for Twitter Bingo is that the teachers were able to work at their own pace. This also introduced them to a wide range of Twitter activities — from simple things like following and re-tweeting to participating in a full on Twitter chat. Instructions were linked to each square, but teachers really had to get in there and figure it out for themselves. Don’t we tell our students all the time that this is the best way to really learn something?
On the technical/creation side of things, I made the grid using Canva and imported the image into ThingLink to add the tutorials for each square. Since I ran this separately for each division (lower, middle, and upper school), I changed some of the who-to-follow squares in order to help tailor their network to their area.
Of course we used prizes to entice participation. Teachers filled out a Google Form to let me know they completed all the squares, giving a very short blurb on what they learned from their experience on Twitter. Here’s what a few of them said:
“I thought I would immediately want to unfollow the people I was told to follow because I didn’t really want to be following so many people. I have had actual interaction with these folks, so now they are real people to me, and I will continue to follow them because they have great ideas.”
“I had no idea what these chat hashtags were all about and then realized it was a way to interact more efficiently on a topic with the Q and A style. I like it!”
“I am still working on building my community so that my feed is always showing something helpful but I have enjoyed seeing what other teachers are doing. I found Responsive Classroom to have the most helpful ideas quickly.”
“This is great! I should have started a long time ago!”
As I said before, we learn best by doing. This was a great way to get some of my teachers really digging in to Twitter. Did everyone participate? Not even close! But many of those who did continue to use Twitter and are finding it to be such a valuable resource in their professional lives. That’s more than good enough for me!
I am so excited to announce that the awesome #TLChat professional development (formerly TL Virtual Cafe Webinars, #TLChat LIVE, and TL News Night) is back in its new incarnation! A great new team has been assembled and will revive our favorite PD on Monday, February 6th at 8PM Eastern Time!
Find more details about this webinar and upcoming #TLChat PD opportunities HERE.
Seven years ago, our amazing tribe of Teacher Librarians embarked on a journey to deliver much needed professional development on library and technology topics. At the time, there were no such free opportunities to be found to meet this need, so the TL Virtual Cafe Webinar Series was born. School library leaders Joyce Valenza and Gwyneth Jones, along with numerous others, started offering monthly webinars to teacher librarians and other interested educators. Not only did this webinar series provide valuable free professional development opportunities, but it also helped to build and strengthen our tribe.
In the past several years, we’ve expanded our offerings to include monthly Twitter chats and News Night broadcasts to further engage our community. Our #TLChat tribe includes so many inspiring educators who generously share their knowledge and experiences with others. It has been an incredible honor to be part of such an inspiring group of people.
Over time, we have found a decline in participation in our professional development offerings. This is no doubt due in part to the wealth of learning opportunities now available online. We are glad to have been able to provide great opportunities to learn three times a month for the past few years. We have reached the point, though, where we feel that it is time to reevaluate our offerings in order to best serve our community and learn together.
For the months of November and December, we are putting a pause on our professional development offerings to make plans to revamp our offerings starting in January. Although we are still working out the details of what that will look like, we will return on the first Monday of each month at 8PM Eastern Time, starting on January 2, 2017.
We are looking for new voices to get involved with our professional development offerings, in whatever form it may take. If you are interested in getting involved, please fill out the form below to let us know your interest and contact information.
Thank you so much for supporting our #TLChat community. We look forward to what the future holds for our tribe!
Join us on Monday, October 3rd at 8PM Eastern Time for Are You Ready? with guests Andrew Marcinek, CIO at Worcester Academy and Former Chief Open Education Advisor for the Office of Educational Technology, and Stony Evans, library media specialist at Lakeview (AK) High School. They will address Open Education Resources and what it means to be a future-ready librarian. The webinar is free, open to all and you will walk away with loads of useful resources and ideas to take back to your school.
As with any volunteer effort, leadership needs to shift if a project is to be sustainable. And so we’re looking for a new generation of leaders!
Are you ready to step up and help refresh our project? Do you feel you have what it takes to plan cool sessions, moderate conversations, and accept the love and recognition of our TL community?
We need
Presenters with fresh ideas
People who can to plan cool sessions
Folks to help update/maintain the website
Gracious moderators
Planners and archivists
Social media mavens to get the word out
If you are interested, we will train you. Please contact me at librariantiff@gmail.com and we can talk about how you can help with our webinar series.
I love love love my new school! This Smore is something that I shared during a short PD session during yesterday’s faculty meeting to introduce teachers to some great tools for creating digital products. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had conversations with a number of teachers about upcoming projects and I realized this would be a great time to share these resources. I talked about using Smore, PowToon, ThingLink, Piktochart, Buncee, and Canva. I used Smore to create a take-away with embedded tutorial videos for each resource:
What other digital creation tools do your students use and love?
Let me start by saying how much I love and adore my network of educators!
I’ve started feeling a little nervous about the upcoming school year. I always do, but this year is different as I’ll be in a new school for the first time in a long time. There’s a new faculty for me to get to know and build relationships with and I want to start things off by setting a positive tone. Thinking a lot about how I want to introduce myself as the new librarian so the teachers will really get me and what all I’m about, I reached out to my PLN for some help.
I posed these questions of Facebook so I could tap into the great minds of both the awesome tribe of librarians that I belong to and to my awesome teacher friends, especially those who have taught with me serving as their librarian. Here’s what I asked on Facebook —
Teachers (especially those that have worked with me): What are the most helpful and meaningful things that a school librarian can do to support you?
Librarians: What would you want teachers new to working with you to know that you can do to support them?
The response was overwhelming and incredible. I got intense, thoughtful responses from teachers and librarians that helped me create this list and fun graphic:
I sorted and tallied responses to ultimately refine and combine ideas into this list. It will be very exciting to use this graphic to introduce myself and what I can do for my new teachers. What’s even more exciting is that I get to share this graphic with my awesome PLN! Please feel free to use and share this in any way that you see fit. Even if you are in a school where you have established relationships, it’s always great to start off the new school year reminding your teachers the many ways that you are a resource to them.
If you’re interested in downloading the high resolution file of this image, you can download it from Flickr. I hope this can be something for you to take back to school and use to kick off an awesome school year!
As librarians, I believe it is essential that we view ourselves as leaders in our schools. We all know the best leaders lead by example (not with a do as I say, not as I do attitude). Not only must we be digital role models for our students, showing them what strong digital footprints and a positive online presence looks like, but we must also do the same for our fellow teachers as well. One of my favorite things to do in the library is to promote technology through professional development for my teachers. This isn’t necessarily a role that was expected of me as the librarian, but it is one that I’ve created and developed for myself because I felt it was so important.
When I took my current position as middle school librarian, one of my first PD offerings was a Library Tech Petting Zoo. I share this PD idea often, because for me it really helped to set the tone for myself as a leader and collaborator in my school. Numerous collaborative technology projects were born from this fun and informal professional development, and it helped me to lay the ground work for some great relationships with my new coworkers.
I’m also a strong believer in embedded professional development. Library visits are a great time to introduce teachers to new tech tools and ideas, because they get to see them in action as I facilitate students in using those tools to enhance their learning. I like to think of this as scaffolding for teachers — they may not feel brave enough to try something new on their own, but with the support of the librarian they are often willing to try a new tool or idea that they’ll later use with students in their classroom. I’ve done this with numerous tools, such as KidBlog, Google Forms, PicMonkey, and Kahoot (which has been a big hit this year!). Using video to create tutorials for teachers and students is another great way to encourage the use of new web tools and resources. I love using the Flipped Classroom model with students and teachers for PD. Creating video tutorials, such as this one about PicMonkey, is an easy way to demonstrate new tools:
The 2014-2015 school year has been a great one for PD at CMS. This fall, I offered several sessions of a Twitter Boot Camp for my teachers. I did short, 30-minute sessions that gave teachers time to get their feet wet with Twitter. We talked about the basics — hashtags, general Tweets vs. Tweeting to specific people, following people to build a PLN, and Twitter chats. My goal was to introduce teachers to the wealth of information that’s constantly being shared by educators on Twitter without completely overwhelming them. Even though it’s been several months since these Boot Camp sessions, I had a teacher come into the library just this week to thank me and tell me that she’s been getting some great resources and making connections on Twitter. As the only Spanish teacher in the building, the idea of creating her own Professional Learning Community online really resonated with her. #WINNING!
Another huge PD win this year at CMS has been EdCamp. Back in 2011, I worked with some awesome New Orleans educators to help host the first EdCamp in Louisiana. One of my goals for 2014 was to host an EdCamp in Baton Rouge. With the help of my principal and some great CMS teachers, we hosted EdCamp Baton Rouge at the end of September. This was the first EdCamp for all of my CMS folks, including my administrators, so they were unsure of what to expect. Thankfully, some of my NOLA friends came up Baton Rouge to support us and our event. It was a great day of learning; many of my coworkers said it was the best professional development they’d ever experienced.
My principal liked the EdCamp model so much that we recently used it to host a mini-EdCamp on our February teacher-only PD day. Our teachers loved the opportunity to take ownership of their learning and participate in facilitated discussions on topics that were relevant and timely for them. After the rave reviews of this PD model, I know that we will host more of these events on school and district PD days. I’m also looking forward to an even bigger turn out for our 2015 EdCamp Baton Rouge that we will host again in the fall.
In the last several years, I’ve taken my love for PD and sharing beyond the walls of my school. I love to learn and share with other educators, evangelizing about the use of technology in education and the constantly evolving roles of libraries. I’ve been honored to speak at a number of state library and technology conferences, sharing the importance of librarians being technology leaders and role models in their schools.
One presentation that I think is worth revisiting that’s relevant to this topic is the TL Virtual Cafe webinar that the fabulous Tamara Cox and I presented on PD with a Twist. I’ve also presented on this topic several times at conferences, because I think it’s so important for librarians to be professional development leaders in their schools.
Another presentation that I’ve done several times and plan to share with my teachers this spring is on Tech Tools:
An important part of my job is to stay on top of current tools and resources available to teachers and share those resources with the teachers who need them. With the stresses that my teachers are facing with curriculum changes and new assessments, I feel like making their life a little easier by sifting through tech resources and sharing just the best tools with them is so important.
(All of my past presentations, links, and resources can be found on my presentation wiki.)
Is the position of school librarian viewed as a leadership role in your school? What are some creative ways that you’re stepping up your game as a leader and offering great PD and resources to your teachers?
I hope you’ll join me tomorrow night (February 2nd) at 8PM Eastern for the February TL Virtual Cafe Webinar. I’ll be discussing one of my FAVORITE topics…Ditching Dewey!
I’ll be sharing in details the steps I took throughout the entire process of genrefying our library — both fiction and nonfiction. I get questions about this regularly, so I’m really excited to share about this in the awesome TL Cafe setting!
Find more details, including the link to join the webinar, on the session page. Also visit the session page afterwards for the webinar archive.
Last Saturday at CMS, we hosted the first EdCamp Baton Rouge…and it was such a great day of learning, sharing, and networking! Educators from around the city (and several from other places around the state) came out for a day of “unconference” style learning. We had about 30 people show up, which I think was a good showing for the first event of its kind in Baton Rouge. Less than a handful of us had ever attended an EdCamp before, so it was definitely a new concept for most. However, everyone jumped right in and contributed to the learning, which is exactly what EdCamp is all about.
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As attendees arrived, they used different colored Post-Its to suggest session ideas and topics. Designating different colors really helped us when we were sorting and making the session board.
We started the morning off with a few rounds of “Rocks/Sucks” or “Things that Suck” which got our attendees discussing some hot topics in education. My friend and our CMS Data Specialist, Jason Dupuy, did a great job of moderating this activity.
Also during this time, we were busy putting together our session board. The digital session board along with links to notes from the sessions can be found here.
Since we had a smaller group, we scheduled fewer sessions at each time slot. I had several teachers who had never attended an EdCamp before tell me they LOVED the rule of two feet — it meant they could hit up multiple sessions at a time slot and not feel bad about leaving. A number of attendees said this was the BEST professional development that they had ever attended and they couldn’t wait to recruit more people to attend next year…YES!!
At one of our session slots, we held a playground. I combined this idea from EdCamp Atlanta‘s 25 minute tech tools session slots and the Librarians Network Playground we host at ISTE each year. At sign up, we had people put up Post-Its for a tech tool/resource they would be willing to demo at the playground. We had eight different stations where folks were sharing their favorite resource (Kahoot, Kid Blog, PicMonkey, Schoology – to name a few) and the other attendees floated around the room to learn about the different tools. This was a big success and lots of fun! We will definitely do this again next year, as it was a great way to really get to share tried and true tools that we love and use all the time in our schools.
We had the BEST EdCamp lunch EVER, thanks to my awesome parents. They cooked for our crew: pulled pork sandwiches, smoked sausage, beans, coleslaw, and mom’s bread pudding. There were definitely lots of raves about the food and I have to give a shout out to my parents for being so amazing and supporting me in everything I do…including EdCamp!
Thanks to my BFF and EdCamp co-organizer Alaina Laperouse…you are the best! And thanks to my friends Paula Naugle, Marcie Hebert, and Chris Young…they all traveled in from New Orleans for the day and that meant SO MUCH to me!
 
