California School Library Association held its annual conference, "Journey to Expertise," at the Bahia Hotel in San Diego February 6 - 9. It was jam packed with an incredible number of informative, inspiring, and entertaining sessions and events. I was involved in planning in a variety of ways, including performing miscellaneous tasks, presenting two awards, and reviewing the last year as Immediate Past President; serving as the advanced registration chair; organizing a Friday night “Unconference” with my friend Marie Slim; and presenting a concurrent session about Twitter with Marie.
Please see my Mira Costa HS Library blog for some highlights of speakers on Common Core and college readiness. This posting focuses on the Unconference, Marie's and my Twitter session, and author events.
Unconference
The Unconference was modeled after the one organized by Joyce Valenza and a team of other rock star teacher librarians at the AASL Conference in Hartford last October. With generous permission from Joyce for the plan and Gwyneth Jones for the graphics, I copied and adapted the AASL Unconference agenda and wiki, recruited Marie to be a co-organizer and a team of several other great TLs to help. Visit our wiki here. The point of the evening was to allow everyone to share their good ideas. So often, conference attendees think they don’t have enough to offer to submit a session, or they can’t get one together before the deadline. We all have worthwhile ideas to share; this event allowed for that sharing.
We started the evening off by dividing everyone into three different groups based on a quick poll of topic interests. (There were lots of ideas proposed, but we went with three, which seemed about the right number of groups for the number of people there.) Then, for about a half hour, one group discussed ebooks and how to deal with them, another group discussed how we teach student research and what students really do, and a third learned how to make craft books from Lisa Bishop.
For the next segment, we had a fast-paced Smackdown of ideas. We invited everyone to submit slides to a Google Presentation in advance, but attendees could also share on the spot and we captured their ideas in the slides for future viewing. Do have a look at the embedded slideshow on the unconference wiki or here. The one rule, to keep things moving at a fast pace, was that each presenter had a maximum of two minutes per idea.
And, for the final activity of the evening. We had people “vote on their feet” as to whether they thought an idea rocked or stunk. For example, one of the topics was “should we still teach citation format when there are citation generators?” Interestingly, the room was pretty evenly divided between the people in favor and opposed for almost all the questions. You can see our questions in the embedded slideshow on the wiki or here.
Marie not only recorded the entire Smackdown and part of the rest of the Unconference, she also created a Storify which embeds those videos, tweets, and photos from the evening. So, even if you missed this event, you can still experience a lot of it through this record. We didn't always have screen sharing on when we should have. I learned a lot watching the videos that I will apply next time.
Twitter: "Make Twitter Your #1 Tool for Building a PLN"
Marie Slim and I are both big fans of Twitter, and use it regularly as the key component of our personal learning network to connect with other teacher librarians, classroom teachers, authors, and more. We were excited to have a good turnout at our session, and, more important, got a number of people sold on starting a Twitter account or make more use of an existing account. Here is our presentation file:Here is a Google+ Hangout video of the session. Since we didn't screen share (I'm a newbie at this recording business, and learning as I go), you will want to watch the Prezi presentation file as you watch this video:
As part of our goal to get more California library folks tweeting, after the session I created a California school librarians Twitter list. Please check it out, and @ me on Twitter if you are a Californian and I missed including you. I'll start following you and add you to the list. Let's make the list grow. As with all public Twitter lists, you can follow it and use it as an easy way of viewing tweets from all the California school librarians without having to follow all of them yourself or create a new list.
Authors, Authors
Our closing session speakers were the incredible Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver, who together author the Hank Zipzer series. Hank, like Winkler, suffers from learning challenges, and the books help kids deal with such challenges. Here are a couple of my tweets during this session:
Winkler tells kids: Every single one of u is powerful. It’s your job to find out what u are good at and share it with the world. #cslacon14
— janelofton (@jane_librarian) February 9, 2014
Winkler: We need to teach our kids how they can learn, as opposed to what we think they should know #cslacon14 Librarians do that!
— janelofton (@jane_librarian) February 9, 2014
As librarians, we need to remember that mission every day!The author panels also introduced me to some new-to-me authors and books I will want to purchase for my library.
My Birthday
And, I celebrated my birthday during the conference. What a great place to do it! Here are the lovely flowers my husband sent:
And, a kind tweet and photo from Marie during breakfast that day:
No comments:
Post a Comment