Notes from Arch Ford Library Meeting - February 5th
Presenters: Jillana Heard (Junior High) and Lori Bush (High School) from Lake Hamilton School District
Discussed Bring Your Own Devices on Campus
Their policy is ‘no use’, but students use them all the time and as a school community they are ok with their use. They do not allow the students access to the school Wi-Fi. They are trying to allow students to police themselves. For example many worry about texting answers to the tests, etc. Students do that already, they just don’t use technology. You have to find a way to make things benefit their use, rather than patrol it.
They have a huge budget within their library system
They buy students books for book club, crafts for cool craft day, and have speakers come in. Try and make connections in your community if you don’t have a budget to do all of the things you would like.
Many of their programs happen during lunch
· They have a split lunch. The students that want to come to their programming ask for lunch passes so they can go to the front of the line and still make it to the program. They admit everyone when possible to any program. The only time students have to sign up is if there are limited supplies for the project at hand.
· There are many craft ideas that they do during a 30 minute lunch. Made t-shirts into workout shirts, made locker frames, duck tape accessories, Clorox bleached shirts, made cupcake decorations.
· They have a Lunch and Learn for teachers once a month. They pick one topic and discuss it where teachers can go back to their room and use what they learned without becoming overwhelmed with an all-day technology in-service.
· They use several books from ALA to do program planning, cool crafts for teens, etc.
Book Club
Check the Harding lists of author visits. Many schools can have a school visit at a greatly reduced cost since Harding pays most of the fees. Many authors now Skype for a reduced fee or for free.
Appy Hour
A one-hour training after school. If it is training on a certain app that costs money if the teacher comes they get that app for free.
Reference Sections
Both librarians have removed their reference section from their school libraries. They felt like it was taking up space, was outdated, and the items they wanted to keep they moved to the non-fiction section.
High School signs in and out of the library using Google Forms.
Apps
· Aurasma – can hover over a book and see a video recommendation or book talk
· Apps Gone Free-a list of apps that normally cost money and are free for a short time
· National Parks – many have apps that will do a virtual tour
· Oregon Trail- app that allows you to make choices to see how well you would have traveled
· Google App-Make sure it is the blue one with the g, it allows you to use ‘Goggles’ to view an item and then it will bring up a list of websites. For example-if you hovered over a painting it would give sites that talked about the painting, time period, artist, etc.
· Evernote-great app for taking notes. For example if you do repairs on technology if you take notes on your ipad you can place them in categories, search, etc. and access them from anywhere.
· QRafter is the QR code reader they like. You can pay $1.99 for the Pro version which also allows you to create QR codes. Those codes could like to a website, message, photo, etc.
· If you have students that like the book “Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore” there is also a short movie on YouTube and a Great interactive App.
· They used Twitter during the meeting, look for #afcmedia
· Many of their teachers now use Twitter in the classroom. They summarize the lesson, ask a discussion question, follow twitter listings on a historic event (for example – the anniversary of the sinking of the titanic – there was a minute by minute post from different passengers about what happened as the ship was sinking)
Some people LMS’ follow on Twitter
Tony Vincent
Steve Anderson – web 2.0 guy
Lisa Johnson
Susan Gilley
The Daring Librarian
Michael Mills
They also save lots of ideas to Pinterest. If you want to follow them on Pinterest they are –
Lori Bush 115
Jheard 46