It was an interesting and exciting experience being the chairperson for the K-12 Library Managers Congress. Day two got off to a cracking start with Joyce Valenza’s keynote on The Flipping Librarian. The pace was frantic as Joyce worked her way through a smorgasbord of tools and resources to support the flipped learning approach. Check out her presentation below.
Flipping Librarian
I’m going to refer to Joyce’s masterclass as well (the day after) as you will be able to access more tools, resources and ideas at http://joyceatedutech.wikispaces.com/
Sunny South and Crystal Choi focused on The social librarian by exploring the what and why about using social media for progressing an understanding of digital citizenship, promoting and advocating for the school library, filtering & curating information and then connecting this up with students and staff, engaging professionally to advance our knowledge.
We explored the services of the State Library of Queensland with Janette Wright, State Librarian and CEO. Our view was with a futures-focus on the type of services that the community needs to engage in learning and creative experiences. Janette encouraged us to consult with our communities on a regular basis and shared this quote from one of the SLQ patrons –
If there was no library it would be like a cone without ice cream.
An important theme of SLQ is on sharing and this helps to support the creation of new knowledge through their digital and physical makerspaces. If you check out the SLQ What’s on page you will gain a good impression of the diverse range of services provided to their community.
It is important to consider the library ecosystem of school: public: academic. Barbara Stripling observes that our library ecosystem is under threat. If we fail to nurture school libraries it has a significant impact on other parts of the library ecosystem. If we close school libraries we place pressure on the other library sectors to absorb the traffic to provide services to help students develop skills for the workforce and/or scholarly inquiry.
Karin Gilbert reminded us in her presentation, Managing change..being a thought leader in the age of knowledge, that we need to be utilising the web based tools, apps, systems, applications and social media to help manage our time so we can turn attention to thought leadership and the strategic directions to build capacity for our school and students. Kim Smith shared a great example of this in her case study on sharing resources through central library management – iLibrary Project. The tyranny of distance is being addressed for students and staff in the Diocese of Townsville Catholic Education area. Regardless of their geographical location they can access resources and content that supports the implementation of the Australian Curriculum. Also check out their Pinterest – Tceo iLibrary.
We then had a change of pace as we embraced moving from a traditional library to a contemporary iCentre with Helen Stower and Kathryn Schravenmade from Mt Alvernia College. Helen and Kathryn shared how they rebranded the library and this has been captured on their website at Mt Alvernia iCentre. Check out their timeline as it is important to know that this type of change doesn’t happen quickly. Joyce Valenza has captured some great moments from their presentation at http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2014/06/07/mt-alvernia-the-journey-to-icentre/
Another step up was to consider gamification in the library. Michelle Jensen from Hoxton Park High School provided some background research and then shared what has been happening in her school library as she has built a virtual library. A whole new language was brought to the forum as Michelle discussed the types of technology she uses in these spaces.
The EduTECH conference ended with Ian Jukes on the topic of aligning technology initiatives in the age of disruptive innovation. This blog post by ThinkingComputationally captures the core of Ian’s presentation.
The next day I went to the Masterclass on Design Thinking with Ewan McIntosh, Hamish Curry and Tom Barrett. Even though Ewan said NoTosh wasn’t keen on one day workshops, I believe it was an extremely productive day. We had the chance to take all the thoughts, ideas, issues, concerns (and more that had filled our heads on the previous two days) and bring these to the design thinking process – Immersion, Synthesis, Ideation and Prototyping.
Our ‘opening hook’ was “Welcome to the school of chaos”. In small groups, we took on the equivalent of the 90 minute challenge for schools activity and just kept building on this for the day. If you head on over to the NoTosh Lab you will be able to access the tools, resources and strategies we were exposed to throughout our day that connected into the design thinking process.