Post Conference Highlights...Part I

NCSLMA 15!

(For those who don't know, a group of school librarians/media coordinators attending a conference in North Carolina, and we call ourselves "N.C. Slamma")

I had the privilege of attending this year's conference with one of my best friends and fellow members of Librarian Royalty, Angela West. We made sure to peruse the conference sessions to divide up everything we wanted to attend in order to share knowledge and resources. I gathered too much for one blog post so I'll start with Friday's first session...

(Actually, I'll start with a quick shout-out to King's Crab Shack where we ate an incredible and affordable dinner Thursday night. Yum. Highly recommended yum. Back to the conference.)

My first session was #2JennsBookClub. No, I did not make a typo. The hashtag does belong! This is a Young Adult literature twitter book club! (Fun idea, right?) Started by two women who are both named....Jenn! The premise is that when a book is chosen, a day and time is announced with their book club hashtag. Everyone reads the book before the day of the "meeting". Then, the meeting starts with everyone giving a 140-character summary of the book. Then there are questions posted every 10 minutes. Q1 is answered with A1 at the start of the tweet, etc. All tweets included the hashtag for the book club and in one hour the book club ends. Everyone has to be succinct in their answers and it involves making every character, word, and thought count! Ideas were given on doing this even at the elementary level using grids on paper where students could only put one letter, punctuation mark, or use it as a space and do the same thing. This would allow everyone to participate without having that one or two students dominate the conversation or shy students too nervous to participate since its either online or on paper! The 2 Jenns club is actually for adults who love YA books, but definitely an idea that translates well to the media center setting. A week or so before each meeting the author of the book is contacted on twitter to let them know about the meeting too. Often the author shows up!

My second session was on Coding. Unfortunately, the presenter had set up her activities in the wrong room so we were unable to do the hands-on activities. She does a lot of coding introduction with kindergarten students. Her seventh graders created a "Winds of Change" garden, using QR codes and World War II research. Each Japanese-art inspired wind-chimed had a laminated QR code hanging from it. That led to the research done by a student on an event or a person who died in World War II. (Many were Holocaust victims.) The artwork was a great integration piece, and creating the website as a project gave students more practice at putting their research and technology skills to use. The garden became a talking point within the school and within the community as well.

Stay tuned for more about the conference!