CSLA’s Centennial Conference

CSLA Centennial Celebration

I had a jam-packed four days of learning, sharing, and networking at the California School Library Association (CSLA) Centennial Conference February 5 – 8 at the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport. I came away with:

  • Notes of many great new books to purchase for our library from Michael Cart’s workshop on “Best of the Best Young Adult Books”
  • New ideas of ways to help students become astute researchers and agents for change from author Paul Fleischman’s “Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines” workshop
  • Inspiration from opening Keynoter Michelle Luhtala to move more learning activities to where students love to be, on digital devices, and to make learning help available virtually on demand
  • Inspiration from closing keynoter Shannon Miller to implement more activities that break down the library and school walls and help students connect with the world
  • At least a year’s worth of lesson and program ideas and tools to engage students from so many talented colleagues whose sessions I attended and with whom I networked
  • Excited product purchase ideas from the many wonderful vendors who support school libraries and exhibited during the conference

I also did a lot of sharing at this conference. Here is information about my four presentations:

AASL's Best Websites

AASL’s Best Websites for Teaching and Learning: I presented this session with Sue Heraper. Here is a link to our slide deck.

Of all the sites we shared, I think our attendees especially liked the hands-on demos we did of how to use two of them, Kahoot and Socrative, to quiz or survey students during lessons.

Good Ideas!

Blogging, Digital Timelines, & More with Embedded Digital Citizenship: This was a short presentation I did to share the project for which I won a Good Ideas! Award. These awards are given for collaborative projects done by a teacher librarian and classroom teacher that can serve as a model for easy replication by our colleagues. The project I shared came from my collaborative work with Spanish Teacher Anita Rossell and her Spanish for Native Speakers Class. Here is the link to my slides for this talk. I will also be talking at more length about blogging at the CUE conference next month.

Going for Moonshot Thinking

Going for Moonshot Thinking: The Latest from Google from Two Googly Teachers: Amy McMillan, a middle school English teacher working on her teacher librarian credential, and I met at the Google Teacher Academy in Mountain View last summer. We co-presented this session to share some of our takeaways from the Academy and to encourage more teacher librarians to apply to attend future academies. As with almost every session I present, we learned so much more as we prepared and compared notes on our different practices. Here is a link to our slides. We also recorded this session using Google Hangouts on Air:

Make Twitter Your #1 Tool for Building a Personal Learning Network: Marie Slim and I prepared this session, an update of one we did last year. We are both passionate about the value of Twitter for learning and wanted to get more of our members on board using it at conferences and for learning and networking throughout the year. Unfortunately, Marie wasn’t able to be at the conference, so I did the presentation on my own. Here is a link to the session presentation Prezi. I also recorded this session with Google Hangouts on Air:

As Social Media/Website Chair for the conference, I did a lot of tweeting and encouraged tweeting by all our participants. In fact, I taught a four-week course on Twitter (which the presentation above was a short summary of) to help prepare more members to tweet during the conference. Although the course is now done, all the material is available to read and use on the course website. One great use of Twitter is to share highlights of conference sessions and events. Here is a Twitter summary of the conference, captured using Storify. You can see as you scroll through the tweets that, while we work very hard learning at conferences, we also have a lot of fun! This conference was CSLA’s Centennial, so it also included a wonderful Gala celebration of this amazing milestone.

I look forward to sharing great ideas from the conference with students and staff at Mira Costa.

CUE Conference 2014

CUE 2014

Last week I attended and presented at the CUE Conference in Palm Springs. The conference had record attendance of over 5,300 attendees as more and more educators see the benefit of this professional development opportunity. In fact, CUE previously was “shorthand” for “Computer Using Educators.” At this conference, the association announced a new logo, included in CUE’s Twitter header pictured above, and that the association name will now be simply CUE. “Computer Using Educators” will no longer be part of the name. The rationale? It used to be that teachers and other educators interested in computers and technology were in the minority. That’s no longer so. Now all educators need to be tech-savvy; they all need the kind of professional development that CUE offers.

Here are a few of my personal conference highlights and takeaways:

LeVar Burton, pictured in my screenshot of CUE’s new Twitter header above, was the Friday morning keynote speaker. Here are some of my Twitter “notes” from his inspiring session:  (Be sure to scroll this text box to see all the postings.)

digital citizenship logoAs part of the conference, California School Library Association presented a “Digital Citizenship Summit” on Saturday. We were very fortunate to have Gwyneth Jones, aka The Daring Librarian, a middle school librarian from Maryland, as our lead speaker. In her session on “Secrets of the Remix Mash Up YouTube Generation” she shared that “Everything is remix; use it for engagement.” We all learn by repeating; we can leverage that and help students to be respectful remixers by working with the tools they already love, sharing other engaging tools with them, and teaching them about Creative Commons and attribution. Here’s a tweet shared by teacher librarian Sharlene Paxton during Gwyneth’s session:

To engage students, we need to be using tools like YouTube and great YouTube channels like Horrible Histories and the History Teachers Channels, while also introducing innovative tools such as Scoop.it for curation, LessonPaths for online lesson playlists, and Flocabulary for engaging learning through rap music.

The Digital Citizenship Summit also included Pam Oehlman on “Teaching Digital Citizenship by Crafting Quick Flipped Tutorials and Using Existing Resources,” Glen Warren on “The Uncommon Core: New Standards, New Literacies, and Student Significance,” and my session on “”Inspiring Creativity While Respecting Copyright with Fair Use and Creative Commons.”

Pam shared an analogy comparing the pencil to digital citizenship instruction; our kids today need the same careful instruction on using devices as we use to teach kindergartners the safe use of pencils. She shared lots of great resources for digital citizenship instruction, and you can see them reviewed in her presentation file.

All too often in school, Glen shared during his session, we don’t ask kids what they want to learn. Instead, we just tell them what they have to learn. One the great things about school libraries, is that we ask them what they want to learn, and we help them connect that to the literacies, including those covered in the Common Core, that they need to learn. Here is a graphic showing how information literacy, which librarians teach, crosses all curricular areas, including personal interest:

Information Literacy

Glen advocated for giving students the same kind of 20 percent time  that Google provides, allowing them to pursue their own interests in that time. He also shared how he makes students accountable for their time and has them simultaneously learn and practice information literacy skills. He uses a Google Form to have them submit information about their work, including the questions they asked and the research they did.

In my session, I focused on teaching respect for intellectual property, on understanding copyright and fair use, and on taking advantage of using Creative Commons material to make that task easier. I also advocated for contributing to a creative society by licensing our own works with Creative Commons licenses and encouraging our students to do the same. Here is the presentation file:

If you haven’t already joined the Creative Commons community, please do so! By sharing, we all contribute to a more vibrant, creative world. Gwyneth Jones included this powerful message in one her slides from her Friday session on “Marketing Your Program Like Lady Gaga”:

creative commons message from gwyneth jones

I tweeted a photo of the slide during her session, and it clearly resonated with many people, since I got lots of retweets.

I was also proud to be a part of CSLA’s booth presence in the exhibit hall, promoting what teacher librarians do:

csla booth

Thanks to Sue Heraper for taking the photo of me (current Past President) with Janice Gilmore-See, current CSLA President, and Pam Oehlman, 2012-2013 President.

I came away from the conference bubbling with new ideas and some fun tech tips to share. Many of these are included in my Twitter feed (I’m @jane_librarian) from March 20-22, since Twitter has become my primary note-taking method during conferences. Also check the #CUE14 hashtag for a wealth of quotes from presenters, links to sessions and tools, and more. Thanks to all the presenters for their great ideas. I’ve captured only a fraction of them here. Also, thanks to CUE and Executive Director Mike Lawrence for enabling CSLA to present the Digital Citizenship Summit.

 

 

CSLA Conference Takeaways on Common Core, College & Career Readiness

I am still in the midst of processing all the great takeaways from an incredibly exhilarating California School Library Association Conference February 6 – 9. Please see my posting on my personal blog for a summary of some of the highlights, including the Unconference I organized and a session on Twitter as a professional development tool that I co-presented. The posting here focuses on several sessions related to Common Core and college and career readiness.

Kevin Baird Keynote

Kevin Baird, Chairman and Senior Faculty at the Curriculum Institute and the Center for College and Career Readiness, was our keynote speaker.  I have been finding lately that my best “notes” from a conference presentation are my tweets, so here they are, assembled using a new favorite tool called Storify, from his session:

Mr. Baird also helped me to better understand the need to help students stretch themselves to be able to read more complex texts. One of the points he shared is that many out-of-high school careers students may enter, such, for example, as law and public safety, actually require them to read more complex texts at higher lexile levels than college texts. That means that we do need to help students but providing more complex texts, but I also believe that the more pleasure reading they do, the better readers they will become, and the more able they will be to read complex material. So, I see my job in the library providing both stretch texts and engaging pleasure reading.

Mr. Baird also shared how the new standards include different depth of knowledge levels and advised us to work to become experts in supporting teaching at the needed level for each standard.

He was extremely generous with us as conference attendees, and provided us with free access to an online Depth of Knowledge guide, model performance tasks, and Common Core-aligned lesson plans that I will be able to study and share with my teachers and administration.

College Readiness-Related Concurrent Sessions

I also attended two concurrent sessions that dealt with preparing students to be college-ready. Sara Oremland, the Teacher Librarian at Albany High School, shared two videos that she produced, one for students and one for teachers, to share what she learned from interviewing college students, professors, and librarians sharing what high school research should be like to prepare for college research. Here is the student video, intended to motivate them to conduct effective research:

Here is the teacher video, intended to help high school teachers understand the benefits of Authentic Research projects:

In another concurrent session, Doug Achterman, Head Librarian at Gavilan College and a former high school teacher librarian, shared results of a series of interviews he conducted with community college instructors about their expectations around students’ reading, writing and research. Far too many students come to community college improperly prepared with the reading, writing, and research skills needed. He helped us explore the implications for supporting teachers and students through our library programs to better prepare students for community or other college expectations, which are in alignment with what we need to be teaching as part of Common Core.

I will be working to use and share this material throughout the rest of this school year and beyond.

CUE Conference 2013

I just had the privilege of attending the annual CUE (Computering Using Educators) conference in Palms Springs, CA March 14-16. Every time I attend, I come away invigorated with new ideas I can implement in my practice and share with my students and co-workers. I also presented two sessions this year. I am embedding the Prezi.com presentation files for the two sessions at the bottom of this posting.

Here were just a few of the highlights of the conference sessions for me:

CLRN’s Brian Bridges fast-paced session on “50 Free Online  Ready Reference and Web 2.0 Tools for Life Long Learners” filled me in on a number of websites and apps that were new to me. Here’s the link to all his tools. He saved them in one of the tools he told us about, edcanvas.com.  One website, Jamendo.com, a source for Creative Commons-licensed music, was one I was able to share with the attendees at my own session the next hour! Another offering I have already checked out is Dropbox’s connection to Project Gutenberg. I knew about both tools, but not that they are now connected. Project Gutenberg is a collection of over 42,000 free ebooks that are in the public domain. When you find a free ebook in Project Gutenberg, you can save it to your Dropbox account in a “gutenberg” app folder. From there, I was able to open the file in my Kindle app on my iPad and iPhone.

At Google Search Educator Tasha Bergson-Michelson’s presentation on “Really, Really Simple Search: Developing Effective Search Education,” she had us work in groups to develop new ideas for teaching students the critical thinking skills they need to become more effective searchers and to evaluate the sources they find. Tasha had us record our conversations in a Google Doc, so we can all refer to them. Here’s a link to her materials.

I attended two sessions by Mark Hammons, Educational Technology Consultant for the Instructional Technology Services team at the Fresno County Office of Education, on iTunes U and on the Apple TV in Education. At the latter, I got some tips on new ways to use my Apple TV. In the former, I learned the basic steps to creating courses in iTunes U. iTunes U is becoming a popular platform for schools and universities to upload both self-paced and in-session courses. The courses are all free, and can be public or private. I am excited about drawing from and contributing to this free sharing community. I have set myself a goal to create a self-paced course on the topics I covered in my “Build Digital Citizenship Skills & Inspire Creativity with Creative Commons” presentation asap. The one drawback I see to iTunes U is that, while the courses can be developed on either Macs or PCs (with some browser limitations), they can only be delivered on iOS devices. I wish Apple would offer an option to deliver the courses on desktop and laptop computers and other types of mobile devices. Are you listening, Apple?

And, it was very interesting hearing my Principal Ben Dale and Vice-Principal Ian Drummond’s background thinking about the evolving iPad program at Mira Costa High School. Here’s a photo of them presenting:

Ben Dale (right) & Ian Drummond (left) presenting at CUE Conference
Ben Dale (right) & Ian Drummond (left) presenting on at CUE Conference on “High School iPad Implementation and the Student-Use Model”

You can see all the presentation files/handouts posted so far on the CUE Schedule at 2013.cue.org. When you click on any session, look for the “Presenter Resources” link. Since many presenters wait until after they present to submit these links, I would check back periodically for resources from sessions that interest you.  You can also find a lot of links to session materials in Twitter by searching for the hashtag #cue13.

Here are the presentation files for my own sessions, but do contact me for a “walkthrough,” since these show only the visuals, not what I said as I presented.

My concurrent session was on “Building Digital Citizenship Skills & Inspire Creativity with Creative Commons.” I shared how to teach students about these concepts, as well copyright, public domain, and fair use, and why they are so important. I also urged the attendees to join the “Commons” and share their own work with Creative Commons licenses so that we can all benefit from each others’ knowledge and creativity. Here is the presentation file:

(If this embedded file doesn’t display in your browser, you can access it at this link. Also please note that these files are graphics-intensive and may be slow to fully download on a mobile device. I would recommend viewing them on your computer.)

Pam Oehlman and I did a CUE Tip talk (informal 20-minute session) on “Free Web Tutorials for You and Your Students.” We walked the audience through five free, online, self-paced, reusable and remixable tutorial options available from CSLA (California School Library Association).

(If this embedded file doesn’t display in your browser, you can access it at this link.)

Finally, here’s Pam and me at our CUE Tip session:

Pam Oehlman & Jane Lofton presenting

We’re wearing our Avatar T-shirts from the November 2013 CSLA Conference, on theme since creating avatars is one of the activities in the tutorials we were promoting.

Here’s me at my concurrent session:

 

Presenting at CUE

 

Dear Parents, Staff, and Students,

I would like to extend an invitation to all of you to attend a very special “Cyber Sunday” event being convened next Sunday, November 13, by the California School Library Association (CSLA) at the Pasadena Convention Center from 9:45 AM – 3:15 PM. As an addition to CSLA’s regular annual conference, CSLA is hosting a day of sessions by experts from the field – elected officials, reps from Yahoo, Facebook, the CA Dept. of Education, CA Dept. Office of Privacy Protection, and more – on all aspects of cyber citizenship, online safety, digital literacy, and empowering our 21st Century learners online. This program is being offered free of charge, and intended for educators, parents, government leaders, and any other interested parties. Please consider spending the day at this event, which I am confident will be very informative and rewarding.

Here is a link to the event Invitation:

Here is a link to the program Brochure:

Here is a link to the Cyber Sunday Registration form. Registration is free, but the organizers will appreciate knowing that you are coming.

For general information, visit the Calif. School Library Association website at csla.net. And, please do contact me if you have any questions. I would love to have you attend.

Sincerely,

Jane Lofton
Your Mira Costa Teacher Librarian and Incoming President Elect, Calif. School Library Association