IdeaLab & Conversation Corner

Join Andrea as she shares her top 10 ready-to-implement ideas that you can use to move your library program forward. Choose one, two or all ten of the strategies to help you advocate for your program, build a larger and more informed network of stakeholders, and tell your library’s story all at the same time.

Hear success stories from two different schools about how they modified existing library space to meet the needs of today’s students. In the beginning, neither school had funding to make changes but still managed to move book stacks and more to reinvent their spaces. Adding to the challenge, both libraries encompass two floors. By the end, one school dealt with the repeated reduction of space, including walls being added, to finally getting a full renovation.

Come learn about the free professional resources offered by the Oregon School Library Information System (OSLIS): ad-free videos, quizzes, templates, rubrics, worksheets, and activities for teaching and learning information literacy skills. These resources help students actively engage in knowledge development, skill building, content creation, and sharing. These OSLIS resources include teaching tips for engaging students in effective information literacy practices for fruitful inquiry learning.

Internet safety is a key component to ensuring our students are digital literate. In collaboration with a local sheriff’s office and a Crime Against Children’s Task Force, an internet safety boot camp has been developed to discuss important topics including cyberbullying, digital footprints, ethics, and identity theft. Free curricula sponsored by Common Sense Media, Google, and NetSmartz will be shared.

This presentation will display the interactive library projects that the author implemented at her high school during the 2020-2021 school year while instruction had been entirely virtual: curbside pickup services, Silent Book Club, Library Live, and Outdoor Library.

Always wanted to conduct a diversity collection audit, but never had the time? We give you five ways to audit your collection using five tools in five minutes. Check in with us to discover the best plan tailored to your library and your students’ needs. Walk away with practical tools to apply in your unique setting to represent and support your learning community.

Is your collection inclusive? Is it diverse? Marshall University School Library Program has developed a crowdsourced database that will allow you to upload your collection to get a snapshot of what races and ethnicities are represented within your collection: authors, main characters, and secondary characters. Stop by for a demonstration of how it works and the way you can be included in this free resource to support Shared Foundations of Include and Curate.

Diverse voices, diverse choices. Learn about an interactive activity to help students self-select books written with authentic voices. Created for a remote learning environment, this digital activity allows students to tailor a virtual book talk to their personal interests. It also promotes diverse authors who write about characters that look like them. The activity will be shared with attendees so they can use it in their own library.

School Librarians shouldn’t have to be alone in their advocacy work. Learn how one state mobilized not only school librarians, but members of the community, state library associations, and other organizations to propel advocacy efforts forward. Participants will be able to ask questions, discuss their own challenges and successes in advocacy initiatives and come away inspired with fresh ideas about how to build a community of school library advocates that can make an impact.

Citation Maker from the Oregon School Library Information System (OSLIS) is an accurate, easy-to-use, librarian-created citation tool that helps students understand the elements of a correct citation while engaging them in a step-by-step process to generate accurate citations in MLA and APA formats. It integrates with Word, Pages, and Google Docs, and there are no ads or subscription fees! OSLIS provides teachers and students with free resources for effective information literacy education.

Participants will be introduced to our district’s Ecobrick initiative, our goals and timeline, plus some demonstrations and ideas for creating with Ecobricks.

Brooklyn Center a full-service Community Schools district. Community schools offer wraparound supports for students, families, and community members. Our libraries are transforming from outdated spaces to be the learning hubs of our community schools model. Thanks to IMLS and LSTA grants, we are reconfiguring our spaces to be flexibly used by everyone in our community. And, we are opening our libraries and technology to students and community members– beyond our school hours and buildings.

What is National Board certification and what does the process look like for a librarian? Why should a librarian consider this certification? Attend this session to get an overview of the process and hear tips & tricks about staying organized, video recording and practical ways to address each component from someone who completed both initial certification and the renewal process.

SchoolLibraryNJ, a collaborative evolving, and replicable project designed to address inequitable access to resources for K12 schools and libraries and to present the value of librarians in digitally curating resources for teaching and learning. Led by Rutgers University and NJASL volunteers, we are building a network of LibGuides to support our learning community statewide and beyond. And we are happy to share all the elements to help you launch your own efforts!

Are you tasked with teaching copyright, but lack resources? Do you find copyright and fair use confusing, or have gaps in your understanding? Well, look no further! Copyright and Creativity is pleased to share its FREE K-12 curriculum, including lesson plans, videos, slides and other teaching resources, plus a PD course. Using a positive approach, our materials, lay out the basics of copyright and fair use with the focus on creativity and how to create and share content ethically and legally.