There was so much amazing stuff from Thursday and Friday at the Follett Software Users Conference last week that it has taken me a little while to process it all. Not to mention, I just didn’t have time to write in Chicago as it was happening. Now that I’m “Back Home again in Indiana” I’ve had a chance to sit down and write a little bit about the rest of the conference.
Don Tapscott - Keynote
The highlight of the conference I think for me was the keynote by Don Tapscott. He said, “We have the best education the 18th century could provide.” He said it is time for us to think of a new model. We need to move to collaborative learning. Kids need to learn how to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times in your lifetime. We need kids that can solve problems, put things in context, and love learning. Work and learning are the same thing for the future. He said it was not about technology, but rather a change in the how a teacher interacts with their students.
Social Media in Education
If you haven’t checked out all the amazing things Shannon McClintock Miller is doing at her school, you are missing out. Shannon is the District Librarian at Van Meter Community School in Iowa. She shared a plethora of ideas and tools for using social media in school. You can check out her presentation here. I got a few minutes to chat with Shannon and she is an amazing librarian!
Advocacy
Mary Barbee from Georgia and Connie Williams from California shared some ideas and thoughts about advocacy. A couple of things that really stuck with me is: What do you see when you come in the front door? Is it a list of rules or a place of possibilities? How can we make the library an inviting place where our users want to come and can feel a part of it? Mary also had a wonderful walk through checklist that administrators could use to see what their library should have! What a great idea! Connie had a quote that I really liked, “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. – Antonine de Saint-Exuperty. What do you contemplate the possibilities are for your library? We have to create the vision and then work to make it happen!
Free Digital Resources
Ann Sheehan brought together a list of online tools that were free to access. There were many I knew about, but the list contained many I hadn’t seen before. Some of my favorites from the list are:
- Eduscapes – http://www.eduscapes.com
- Thinkfinity – http://www.thinkfinity.org
- Free Federal Resources for Education Excellence – http://free.ed.gov
What’s Next with Destiny!
Many of the updates they talked about will come in the December update. We’ll see a mobile app coming for Destiny (Android platform), RDA compliant for cataloging, connections with Follett Shelf, and much more. Some of the things coming sooner are with the Standards Search they will include connections with Common Core and other national standards. Also starting April 1st, if you have updated to 9.9, Destiny will now have the option of the One Search feature for free!!!!! I can’t wait to get that one set-up.
Learning Commons
Robin Cicchetti shared the transformation of Concord-Carlisle High School using the Learning Commons model. This model focuses on the library as a place to create and share information. It is more than just a warehouse. The librarian is a facilitator to learning. Space is flexible where students can work in small groups, they have an area to present and share their thoughts and ideas. Robin’s school has gone that direction and you can learn more about that from her presentation that is linked here.
Leveled Library
My presentation was about our Leveled Library, which I refer to as my first branch library. We were able to be proactive when it was set-up to show how the library could be a part of creating these resources for guided reading. It also helped to prove why our main library did not need to be leveled. We used Destiny to help leverage for data with tracking what is being used and allow teachers easy access to see what we have.
But, I think my favorite thing as always about any conference is the interaction with people. There were several dear friends at the conference and I enjoyed the chance to catch-up with them. I met several new friends and just the interaction and conversation outside the session leads to a lot of learning, too.
I have lots of ideas swirling in my head about how what I learned could impact our library program. Today was back to school and the normal catching up from being gone along with practice for a webinar I’m doing with Connie Williams next week. We had our first graders in doing some writing activities that were a lot of fun, too. But one thing my friend and mentor Marge Cox shared in her session was a challenge. Before you get back in your routine and lose sight of the information you learned, go back this week and implement something you learned, try a new technology tool, and share what you learned.
If you weren’t able to attend, you can search the Twitter hashtag #fsc11 to see a lot of what was happening. Looking forward to the next FSC Users Conference next year!
Tags: fsc11No Comments