BubbleUp Take5: Quick Take-aways from 5 Conference Sessions

Last week I wrote about some big ideas that ran through my experience as an attendee at the Virginia Association of School Librarians (VaASL) Annual Conference. This week, in my Take5, I'm sharing some neat tools and a bunch of  small, do-able (but high impact) ideas I gathered from 5 different VaASL conference sessions. I know there is at least one thing on this list that you will be able to incorporate into your library program today.

1- "A Few of Our Favorite Things" / Laura Ivey & Melissa Urban
Laura and Melissa reminded me of some hands-on maker ideas I've been intending to explore further:

• Strawbees: simple units that let you connect straws to each other
• Stick Together: Collaborative color-coded mosaic posters

2 - "The Inspired Library" / Corina Hayood & Beth Ebenstein Mulch
The super-charged librarians at T.C. Williams High School shared a range of small easy-to-implement ideas that increase library visibility in a school or community in a positive, energetic way:

• Create library menus for new teachers to make them aware of library services (you could even give these out to your whole faculty/staff as a reminder!)
• Genrify the Biography section: students tend to come into biography wanting a book on a musician or an athlete or a president...genrifying this section would be a pretty simple task while going a long way to support student needs.
• Simple contests and displays such as
  • Guess the number of jelly beans in a jar
  • Shredded book contest (shred a weeded book, put into a glass container, students guess what book is it)
  • Banned Books Week Mug Shots (teachers--or even students--pose for "mug shot" photos with their favorite banned book)
  • Student-created Post-it note pixel art on large windows (large spelled out "Titans" facing out the window, notes on each post-it facing the library)
• Thank you notes and treats to faculty and staff upon a successful partnership or collaboration
• Request-a-Book form when the library is closed for testing

3- "Planning for Future Ready" / Shannon Hyman

​Shannon runs an incredibly dynamic school library and offered some fabulous tools and ideas that I would love to incorporate into our program:

• Reading Drills: Along with fire drills, tornado drills, lockdown drills, and everything else needed for safey, Shannon's school does Reading Drills. An administrator comes over the loudspeaker and announces it, and students, faculty, and staff must stop what they are doing and read for the 10 minute drill. What fun!
• Dotstorming: This is an electronic version of an activity many of us have done in print. Picture large posters with ideas or questions around the room. Then each person is given a certain number of dot stickers to vote on the best choice/most interesting question/etc. Dotstorming allows you to do this online.
• Student-curated book carts: Has a teacher ever asked you to pull a cart of books on a topic? What about asking the students who will be acccessing those titles curate that cart of books? What a great way to empower student voice and encourage buy-in from students.

4- "Black Stories Matter" / Shanon Outlaw

In her #blackstoriesmatter session, Shannon shared some great resources for finding diverse titles for our library collections:

• Lee and Low: large publisher of multicultural books for children; also check out their teen imprint, Tu Books
• MyStory: curated book finding tool from #WeNeedDiverseBooks
• Shannon's own "Black Stories Matter" Google Books Library with hundreds of personal recommendations

Shannon also highlighed Sesi Magazine which covers "the black girl's mainstream" aimed at grades 7-12. I had the pleasure of meeting Andréa Butler, the energetic Sesi Editor-in-Chief in the exhibit hall. I instantly purchased a preview copy of the magazine and I can confidently say that if you are a secondarly librarian, you should add this to your magazine collection today.

5- "For the Love of Reading: Using Technology to Help Struggling Readers" / Ian Moore

Ian (of AIM-VA) recommended several tools to help increase the accesibility of text:

• Read & Write: makes documents, files and web pages more accessible. Free Chrome extension available.
• Snap and Read: similar to Read & Write, uses a range of tools to make text more accessible (text-to-speech, simplication of language, etc.) 
• Reedy: Chrome extension which presents text one word at a time, in the same place on the screen, at a controllable speed. Helps students focus on the text. 
• Leverage the power of Google. Google Voice Typing is a great writing tool (often struggling readers are also struggling writers) -- it is available for all of our students, and speech-to-text tools truly "get rid of the FEAR of the white page." Google comment feature is great for editing and praise during the writing process.

I hope you can use some of these ideas in your library program. And, there were so many great sessions that I wasn't able to attend -- I would love to hear your #VaASL17 take-aways!

​-Gretchen

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You might also like:

• Three Big Ideas for School Librarians (November 7, 2017)
• BubbleUp Take5 (plus 1): #Empower17 and School Culture (April 4, 2017)
• #Empower17 Take-aways (March 28, 2017)