 All right, so we are at our second session of the day at Big Talk for Small Libraries 2021. Welcome, anyone, everyone. And with us right now, we have Abby Adams, who is from Schoen, Vermont on the East Coast. Where am I here? And she's gonna talk about school libraries and how you can use some things you do in the school library and the public library world because they're not so different. So I'll just hand it over to you, Abby, to take it away and tell us all about that. Great, thanks for that introduction. Yeah, so my talk today is about school library lessons for the public library world. And I put this together because of a dual perspective that I have, I'm the librarian. Did everybody, can everybody still see my slides? Cause it just... Yes. Okay, great. Sorry, I'm not going to get it. You're just not, but actually there it is. There's your slides. Okay. I will try to make sure that it doesn't do that, but we'll just go with it. So I'm a library director at a small public library in Schoen, Vermont, but I'm also the library media specialist at the elementary school in that same town. All right. So this is the description that you had when you registered for this, and I'm not gonna read it to you because you've probably already read it, but I do like to include it in this just to remind you about what I said I would talk about. Little bit about me. I do have a public library background when I got my MLIS. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in public libraries. I specifically didn't want to work in school libraries, but here we are. The beginning part of my career was in mobile library services. I drove a bookmobile and now I'm a director at a very rural library in Vermont. It's both small and rural because I know that some of you small libraries are located in areas that aren't rural. So yeah. And I've been a public library director for nine and a half years and I've worked in school libraries for five years. So only in Vermont can you run two different library organizations and still only work less than full time, both in some libraries in our state, those two jobs are combined position in our town. They're not. But one of the things that I just wanted to acknowledge because I'm sure many of you are in the same boat is part-time work in a library is still full-time responsibilities. It's difficult to juggle. So let's work together to come up with some ideas to make our job and our lives a little bit easier. Since I am coming from a school background, I'm going to tell you the outcomes that I hope you walk away with from this presentation. So schools are all about outcomes as you may know. I hope you come out of this with a better understanding of school librarianship if you're unfamiliar with it. And I hope you have a few more tools in your toolbox, online tools and resources to apply to public library programming and services, tools and resources to work more effectively with colleagues and tools that work well in a virtual setting. You got this. Some of the things that I've included in this presentation are things that I've observed working in a small rural elementary school for five years. Other things are based on the work of pedagogical scholars. And obviously nothing that I say applies in every context. So I'm hoping that you will be inspired by this presentation to build a stronger relationship with your local school and see what lessons you can learn. So first of all, just a little bit of background. Why do they do things so differently in this school? The first is every school in the country, whether it's a public school or a private school is teaching a particular curriculum. If they're a public school, that curriculum is mandated by the state. And along with that curriculum, institutions, school institutions are mandated to assess whether students have actually learned the curriculum. So those two pieces really drive why school libraries operate so differently than public libraries. The other three are initiatives. So schools, just like every other industry, has fads and fashions and things that their administration think that they should take on. Tradition, schools do things because school has kind of always worked that way. And then the last piece is something that is really very different than the public library. Schools act in a legal sense in local parenties. So they are standing in place of the parent for while kids are in school. That is definitely not the case in the public library. And we do a lot of messaging in our communities to make sure that people know that that's not true, that we're not there to supervise your children. We're not there to be responsible for your children. But in school, the school institution explicitly does that. And I forgot to mention, but if you do have any questions throughout this presentation, please feel free to throw them in the chat. And I'm more than happy to stop as I'm talking and answer questions. There's a lot of information in here. And I want to know whether I'm going too fast or too slow and the presentation will be made available afterwards. So you can go back and review if you'd like. But I do know our time is short, even though it feels like a long time. It's not that much. All right. So the first thing I want to talk about are big ideas. These big ideas have helped me to better serve my community and design programs and services that meet a variety of needs. And they've also inspired me to think with a school library mindset in a public library context. These big ideas are also the things that I found most surprising coming from a very particular public library background moving into a school setting. School libraries function to support the curriculum of the school. So just like we talked about, that's kind of the point of school, but it does mean it gives us a great opportunity that a public library can use this function to provide complimentary services and build partnerships. So here are some questions that I'd like you to consider along those lines. For the local school in your area, what's their preferred program for documents and presentations? Do they use Google Suite? Do they use Microsoft Office? Do they use something else? What other educational programs do they support? Are they undergoing an initiative for project-based learning or international baccalaureate or universal design for learning? These are educational frameworks that schools are using in an increasing amount in our country and around the world in order to better serve the educational needs of students. And it behooves you to figure out what your local school does. What kind of technology do students have access to? So one way to think about that is you have two opportunities there. So for example, our local school, all the students have Chromebooks. So that means that, one, if they're having trouble, they're gonna have questions about Chromebooks. So it behooves me to know some answers about Chromebooks. But it also means that they will have very little exposure to any other kind of laptop device. So maybe the Public Library has an opportunity to introduce different kinds of technology. This last piece about what kind of technology students have access to was really important during remote learning in our town. Our school uses Google Suite for all of their applications and helping families to navigate those various tools, including Google Classroom, was a concrete way that we could have an impact in our community while everything was shut down last spring. Next big idea, strategies that work for kids work for adults too. The best schools create a culture where all people are part of a community of learners and strategies that help kids to regulate themselves work well for adults too. You can apply pedagogical theory to all learners, not just children. And the great example of that is flexible seating. There's a growing understanding that children need different kinds of seating in order to be comfortable and productive. And the same is true for adults. So consider just one idea along those lines, consider adding standing workstations or lap desks or chairs that have movement. It's good for kids, it's good for adults too. The next big idea, there are no special needs. My interventionist and special education colleagues have taught me that there's no such thing as special needs. There are only needs. So once we start thinking about our systems and services that way, it becomes a lot easier to think about accommodating a variety of needs. And so this is one of those things where like, is when you switch your brain to think of needs as needs and pretty much all equal, it becomes much easier and much less frustrating to accommodate a patron's needs. Emotional needs are real needs. So Maslow's hierarchy of needs underpins most of the social emotional learning that schools support and it's a good approach. We need to feel safe and connected before we can learn. So the idea here is that if you have a patron that constantly is coming in and they don't seem to need any resources, they don't seem to need any information, they just need to chat. That's a real need, that need for connection. That's one of the things that we've seen in our library during extended closure is that our patrons who are calling for requests on the phone don't just need to tell us what books that they would like put out for curbside, but they also need a real conversation with someone for five minutes. And that's a real need and that is something that our library can 100% provide. Teachers teach everything, especially routines. So when kids know what to do and how to do it, they have the power to be independent and you can apply that to your library patrons as well. So my tip for you is make sure that you're doing your best to explicitly teach the routines and systems that your library uses, especially to the patrons that use those routines and systems. And a poster, a putting up a poster does not count as teaching, though visual aids are important for queuing, for reminding somebody what the routine is. So plan to teach and then put up visual aids or other cues to help remind people what the routines and systems are. Along those lines, don't create opportunities for bad behavior. This is a huge difference between school libraries and public libraries. The very first thing that a teacher does at the beginning of the year is they think about the arrangement of the classroom and the schedule of the day so that they minimize the number of problem behaviors and problem situations that arise. So it is of so much benefit to look critically at your library and see places where we have inadvertently created opportunities for people to make bad choices. A great example of this is that large spaces invite large movement. So our library in 2012 put on a large addition to our very small existing historic library, which was about 900 square feet, we doubled that. And we had a grand opening kind of before the bookshelves were sort of in. So it was this giant 800 square foot room. And every single child that came into the library, even children that had been coming to the library for years and knew about the rules of library behavior, saw that room and took off running around it. It was such a great object lesson for me about that idea that the arrangement of the space invites a certain kind of behavior. So to that end, here are some thoughts for you about thinking about your own space. What is the natural flow around your circulation desk? Is it intuitive? Do people seem to know what to do or do they always go to the wrong end? You may need to observe for a few days or weeks to see what people's natural impulses are or have a look at consistent problem behaviors in your library and make changes. Our paper towel is always thrown on the floor in your bathroom, well, maybe move the trash can or put in a larger one or install a door handle that could be more easily opened without touching it. So people don't have to use a paper towel for it. Just think about ways that we can arrange our space and create routines so that people have no choice but to follow those rules. Learning is a social process. This is based on Bogotsky's social development of learning theory. And when you receive the link for this presentation in the comments section, there is a link for an explainer YouTube video about it and some more links for your learning. So schools have a broad definition of learning and especially in elementary schools, learning happens all day in many different contexts. Humans learn better from people they like and schools leverage this to teach successfully and you in the public library can leverage it too. So that is to say people, you can develop those personal relationships with your patrons and then leverage them to better serve your patrons and have more positive outcomes in your interactions with them. So if one of your colleagues has a better relationship with a patron, it's not a failing to have that person be their primary point of contact, especially if there is a problem that you need to have addressed or if there's learning that needs to happen. So along the lines of this social development of learning theory is this concept of the gradual release of responsibility. It's known as I do. So the teacher models what is being learned, we do. The teacher and the student share the task. It's also called in the school world, scaffolding. Just like scaffolding when you're building a building helps support the structure, it's the same idea. And then you do at the end, the student is independent. So time is passing and gradually you go from a place where the teacher who's modeling the skill is doing everything to where the student is doing everything. Good teachers learn to live really comfortably in that middle, we do section. And to understand that because of the challenges of our world, kids are not always independent every time that they come in to doing a task. So let's say for example, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but you miss your alarm, you wake up late, you're late for work, you're rolling to work. And all of a sudden something that you have done every day is really difficult to complete. And that's cause you're not available to do that task. You've got all of this other emotional baggage that you're carrying around. Right now people are carrying enormous quantities of emotional baggage. And so our patrons may need more support to be independent and do the things that they need to do than they've needed in the past. This gradual release of responsibility has really helped me to just take my frustration level down about repeated questions or patrons who need assistance with very, very simple tasks. It can be really hard not to get irritated when you're asked how to do something for the 20th or 30th time. But this concept has really helped me learn how to do that. And it helps me to plan and adapt my we do. So for a simple task, it may be very easy for somebody to go from watching me do it to doing it independently, but for a complex learning activity or if somebody's carrying around a lot of emotional baggage, then they may need a longer time to live in that world where I'm really helping them. Right. Do we have any questions? Can anybody still hear me? No, we're here. Yes. Okay. Okay. Just checking. I've had some funny things with my internet while I've been talking. So just wanted to make sure that I didn't get booted off and I was cheerily shouting it to the void. Yeah. No, no, nothing looks or sounded any different from my side. Great. Okay. No, I'm sorry. We don't have any questions or anything. You wanna know more about what I was talking about where sirens go by as soon as I unmute myself? Go ahead and type into the question section and we can grab them for you. So if I can get some comments, you sound like a great librarian. Yes. Oh, that's very kind. And they're giving some great info that they need. Yeah. But yeah, if anyone has any questions, type it in whenever you think of it and I'll jump in and we'll make sure we get them all answered for you. Okay. Great. Well, then we'll crack on. Just wanted to do a quick check-in to make sure I still had everybody. All right. Okay. My next big idea for you is that there are different types of thinkers. Quiet think time is important for all thinkers. It helps us think more deeply. It helps make sure that quiet voices have a chance to be heard. And it helps slow down your people who have difficulty sharing the air time. So this is more advice when working with groups of adults, but groups of children. If you are asking a question or leading a workshop or doing a project or leading a talk or discussion, make sure that you give everybody some quiet think time and provide opportunities and tools for thinking. And I'm gonna talk about some of those tools right now. So some of my favorite tools for thinking are called visual thinking strategies. And these are two links right here. The first is a website called Project Zero. It's from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And it is their visual thinking strategies. I'm not gonna, well, maybe I guess I should click on it. Nope, let's see. All right, here we go. I'm clicking on it for you. You get the link. Maybe, slowly, slowly. So visual thinking practices are ways to help record our thinking as it's happening. It's ways to help expand your thinking and to make your group work a rich, deeper and more connected experience. And there are all kinds of resources here. So the resources section is the one that you want. And there are videos and books and tools for you to use. The thinking routine toolbox is probably the place to start. Okay, I'm gonna go back here. All right. And then there's also a book, if you prefer to learn that way, Making Thinking Visible, How to Promote Engagement, Understanding and Independence for All Learners. And there is an updated version of this text called The Power of Making Thinking Visible. The link is in the presentation. But I highly recommend poking around with Project Zero or getting a copy of this book. It really helps in working with groups to make thinking deeper and to deepen engagement. Here is an example of one of these visual thinking strategies. This is slightly adapted from one from Project Zero. And it's one that I've used with both groups of kids and groups of adults. And it works really, really well. So if you are doing a brainstorming activity, get a giant piece of chart paper and divide it into these sections. So each person in person one, two, three and four for the first however many minutes takes the time to record their thinking on their section. Then after that time, person four and person three will talk and then right in that middle section what's the combination of their ideas are. So maybe if it's brainstorming, take from both parts what are the best brainstormed ideas that you have or ideas that you think should be raised to the group. And then as the last step, all four people have a discussion and synthesize their four different viewpoints into the center. So this is a great way of really having a rich discussion and a rich brainstorming with a large group. Oftentimes if you've brainstormed with a large group you know like the same five people are the ones who share out all the ideas and it has a stifling effect on your members of your group that are more introverted or who are quiet speakers or who just aren't comfortable speaking up in front of a large group. And a visual thinking strategy like this allows you to really get input from everybody who is at the table. Along those same lines I am a huge fan of protocols to structure group work. What is a protocol you might ask? I hope you know what a protocol is I'm sure you do but they're very useful for accomplishing adult work and the school reform initiative is my favorite resource for protocols. My personal experience has been a highly structured protocol can often lead to the most creative group work. So I'm gonna click the link here and show you just what it looks like. Maybe everything seems really slow to load today. Just one of the joys of living in a rural area. All right, so the school reform initiative has protocols written in both English and Spanish which is really useful. It has protocols for all kinds of types of work. And what you're seeing right now is an alphabetical list of everything. And they also offer, oh, and they also offer protocols in Portuguese that's pretty new, I didn't realize that. And they do section out ones that are specifically for use with youth. I'm gonna switch to the tag view because I want you to see how they organize them. So for example, if you are looking for a protocol about how to deal with a dilemma with a group, if you click on dilemma, they have protocols, explicit instructions for how to structure that. Or for looking at student work or tuning a document, you know, taking a document and making it sort of like, tuning is one of those education speak words. But it's like tuning an instrument. So taking out the parts that don't fit and making the whole thing more coherent as a whole, right? So I highly recommend that when you are engaging in group work with your adult groups, especially if you're doing anything that is potentially might lead to conflict or difficult feelings, using a protocol is a really, really great tool. And in our school district, it's been really transformative in doing collaborative planning together, right? The last kind of tool-ish thing that I have on here of working with groups are three of my favorite strategies when working with groups of adults. They're also really good with working with groups of teens or kids. The first is using post-it notes. So they're useful for slowing down quick loud thinkers who like to blurt out and take up the air time in a group. And they also allow people who don't want to share out loud the ability to contribute. So once you've done a brainstorm with post-it notes, let's say you're brainstorming about a topic, you give everybody three post-it notes, they have time to quietly think and rate them down. Then you can do what's called an affinity sorting. So put the post-it notes up on the wall and as a group decide which ideas are related and place them close to each other. It's a really great way of making visible consensus building in a group. The second strategy is one that's been used in schools for a really, really long time and it's another great strategy that works really well with adults. It's called think, pair, share. It's a three step strategy. So if you're asking a question or asking for response, you give quiet think time, then you turn and talk to the person next to you about it, you're given time for that. And at the end, you share out to the whole group what you talked about. And the last idea on this page is my favorite strategy for sharing out, which is that you are only allowed to share your partner's thoughts to the whole group. So this also helps with people who in groups like to think that they have all the best ideas in the room and they're just going to hold on to that one idea that they wanna share and they're not going to listen to what somebody else has said. So if you are only allowed to share out what your partner's thought, then you are ensuring that at least one other person is listening to everybody in your group. All right, another really big idea that I was totally blindsided by was how readers learn to read. I thought through all of my years of study and all of my years in different public library settings that I knew how readers learned how to read. That there were developmental skills that had to be in place and that you could do a lot to support vocabulary and print awareness and love of books and print function and you worked on your phonological and phonemic awareness. And if all those things were in place, then boom, you would have spontaneous readers who blossomed into reading just like roses in a garden. And I thought that because those other readers we see most frequently at the public library, those are the kids that camp out in your kid's room and pull 8,000 books off the shelf and look through them all. But working in a school taught me and working with children who are early and emergent readers on a more frequent basis than I would see them in the public library, that reading as a complex task is guided by developmental skills but it is not a developmental skill. It requires the purposeful mapping between two different sections of the brain, the part of your brain that understands language and the part of your brain that understands symbols. There has to be a connection that's built between them in order for you to be able to read. So when I was able to observe this and learn more about it, it totally changed the way that I collect books for children. So as adults, we choose books for lots of different reasons and children choose books for all of those same reasons but they have an added layer of learning how to read or needing support to read what they're really interested in. So schools because they're explicitly supporting their curricular mandate to teach literacy use a different strategy than public libraries for collection development. There's a lot of emphasis in the school on choosing just right books, making sure that kids are picking up books that they can read and decode independently. And I have found that many libraries because of our many public libraries because of our strong belief in information literacy and independence and privacy around reading, we think that like telling a kid to find a just right book that's anathema to who we are as people who wanna foster a love of learning and a love of literature. But there's a middle ground. We can have ways to support those emergent and early readers in finding their just right books while still also allowing every child to choose a book for whatever reason is most important to them and their families. So I'm gonna give you an example here about the difficulty of text. One of the common misconceptions probably not from librarians, but certainly from parents is that picture books are easy to read. And the difficulty of the text is driven by several different factors. So text is easier to decode when it has repeated phrases, has short familiar words that are easy to sound out and has pictures that match those words. So your controlled vocabulary books, your easy readers in your books, they are all written with this idea in mind, especially when they're written at a much lower reading level. Text becomes harder to decode when it relies on sight words, which you have to memorize. You can't guess how to spell it or how to say it by how it's spelled when they have a varied sentence structure, when they have complex or unfamiliar vocabulary. And the last one is one that I was not aware of until I worked in a school. What text is much harder to decode when it has pictures that do not match the words? So with all that in mind, most picture books are written at a pretty high level of fluency, which is why older kids actually often find picture books very engaging. And it's why even confident young readers may need an adult to support them with reading picture books. So for many of them, the sentence structure is really varied. There's a lot of complex vocabulary and the pictures complement and extend the text instead of matching it. So I'm gonna give you a concrete example because I dearly love concrete examples of a simple to decode text. So that's simple to sound it out and read it and a complex to decode text. So have a look at the picture in the corner on this slide and think about the differences between these two sections of text. Here's the first one. Ms. Abby sits on a mushroom. She reads a book. She is smiling. So we've got repeated structure in the sentence. So it's she, she, she. We've got words that are really easy to decode like sits or book. And we have a picture that matches those, that text. So even if you don't know the word, if you can't sound out the word reads, you might be able to guess it because it starts with an R and you see that I'm reading a book. Very easy to decode. Now, let's think about a second sample text to go with this illustration. Even though I was tiny, I still found a way to enjoy my favorite activity. Wow, the difference between those is really dramatic. So even if you could sound out the word even, even, okay, though is the next word in that sentence. And though is one of those sight words, it's complex vocabulary and might not be a word that a child has ever used. And so you're lost by word number two in that sample text. Thinking of the difficulty of text has really helped me to do readers advisory better with families and with kids. And I teach this technique, these strategies, explicitly to parents who are trying to support their children as they learn how to read. Because if I can learn how to do it, anybody can learn how to do it. And it makes it much easier. Yes, I heard somebody talk. No, I was just agreeing, yes. Great. All right, okay. So the next piece is... I do have questions that have come in that might go back to something else first. I wanna jump into those a little. Yeah. Actually, okay. Let's see, very good ideas. Two questions. Facilitation is very important with many of these strategies that you're talking about. How do you suggest someone not familiar or comfortable with facilitation become proficient in it? So actually using a highly structured protocol is the easiest way to become comfortable in facilitation. The protocols from the school resource initiative have really explicit steps for the facilitator of each protocol. And working with protocols has really helped my facilitation skills. So that would be right off the bat, one thing that I would suggest that you add to your toolbox because it will help build all of those skills. And then that's... It's designed you through doing it step by step, yeah. Yes, yeah. And they're really explicit instructions. So like five minutes. So all you have to do is read the script. It's very... It is designed to be used as a tool by literally anybody. You don't have to have public speaking skills. You don't have to have interpersonal skills. You don't have to be savvy about, you know, figuring out when the room is ready to talk after they've had quiet think time. No, it just lays it out for you explicitly. But the second strategy that I would recommend to increase your facilitation skills is to do it, right? So, and it can be really scary to start. I understand that. So start with like low stakes groups. So start with groups that you're already comfortable with, you know, use a protocol, practice, practice, practice. But yeah, the number of skilled facilitators who are born that way, I would be confident in saying is zero. Yeah, it's something you have to learn and yeah, just like anything. And yeah, you just become more comfortable with it by doing it, yeah. Absolutely. Any other questions or shall I move on? Well, the other ones I think I'm gonna hold on to the end guys, I saw your questions there because they're more general type ones. I think they might be good to have at the end. So not a problem, yeah. Perfect. Okay, so with all of this understanding about how emergent and early readers really learned how to read, it just redoubled my efforts to support those readers with targeted collections. So what I mean by that is decodable text. That's not just those, you know, books this size like hop on top, but also the smaller books that they use in reading instruction in the schools, where it's the same sentence structure on every page and all of the words are sight words. We built a collection of those books in our library in conjunction with the kindergarten teacher at our elementary school. She really wanted her students to be able to practice with independent reading text over the summer. And although I had some text that was fairly low level, it was all really long. So one of the other skills that children develop throughout their literacy development is stamina. We forget as fluent readers how exhausting it is when you have to sound out, you know, three or four words in every single sentence. So your decodable text should not only have words that are able to be sounded out, but they should be short to help build that stamina and build that confidence with readers. For that, Bob, with that same idea in mind, transitional fiction is a huge part of our collection now. You may call these books something different in your library and whoever comes up with the best name for these books is going to win a million dollars. You might call them short chapter books or series chapter books or illustrated chapter books or beginning chapter books or transitional fiction or beginning fiction or any number of other names. These are titles like Magic Treehouse, Junie B. Jones, The Bad Guys, the Scholastic Branches series. They have repeated familiar characters. They often have very formulaic plot, such to the point that I don't know if you've ever looked, but usually on page 19 of Magic Treehouse books, there is some kind of disaster or plot turn. So they may be for readers that are going from that early independent stage to more fluent stage, they're a nice bridge because they require less reading stamina than a true chapter book with paragraphs and few illustrations and complex text. And then the last one is talking books. So it used to be 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, depending on where you are in that library curve, that books with tape or books with CD, were super popular in our libraries. We have withdrawn most of those, I imagine, but thinking about ways to pair books with talking is a really great way. And there are many, many that publishers have put out where the narration for the book is built right into it. Box is one brand, there are a whole bunch, but I do recommend that you consider getting some talking books for your collection. It is a great bridge for emergent and early readers to be able to have the text read to them while they're looking through a book. And the reality of our communities is not ever kid has an adult or an older sibling who is willing or able to do that. So it's another important tool and another targeted collection that you can build to support emergent readers. Now, if you don't have these kind of books in your collection and you're wondering how to get them, one suggestion that I have for you is to partner with a community organization that works on supporting reading or literacy, or to partner with your local elementary school to see about building collections of these books or beefing up what you already have. All right, we are now moved on to the tools section. So if there are any more questions about big ideas, I will pause now and we'll address them before I switch gears. We do have someone who has a suggestion, they said, try Wonder Books from Playaway. They are wonderful talking books with option to read independently. Fantastic. Playaway has Wonder Books, what the hell, yeah. And I feel like publishers are moving more and more into these kind of books. I feel like about every year, there's another company that comes out with their version of it. I don't have any strong opinions about which of them are better than others. So I do recommend that you kind of try it out, do a trial collection of three to five items and see what circulates, see what people like. Sure. And someone else also says they're also moving into chapter books now as well, so. Fantastic. The Wonder Books is, yeah. Great. And yeah, before we jump on, I also want to know if you can repeat the companies for talking books that you use? Well, the other one. The one I mentioned is called Vox. Let's see, let me find the actual name of the company. Let's see. It's, they're called Vox Talking Books. Is it like V, Victor? Yeah, V-O-I. V-O-I. I will link for them into the presentation so that you have that. Great. But like I said, there are companies are coming out with these more and more and it's worthwhile, being around and seeing what you can find. Okay. So there is a link to Vox Talking Books in presentation. So when that is uploaded to the site, you can go back and just grab that. Okay. Shall we crack on? We have only a few minutes left. Yeah, yep, yep. We're going to go back. All right. So one thing that teachers use is, and this has been especially true during remote learning, teachers have been using Bitmoji for micro branding. So I use Bitmoji in this presentation. I love it as a way to kind of put my face on what I'm talking about without using my actual face. And it's an easy way to make your presentation have a coherent look or make your marketing have a coherent look. I feel like branding is a huge part of library marketing right now. And I don't know, I just think it's really fun. So this is a tool that you could use in order to add a little bit of micro branding to your library, give everyone of your staff people a little Bitmoji and use them for signage or use them on your website. Bitmoji is an app. It is owned by Snapchat, but you don't have to download Snapchat or use Snapchat in order to use Bitmoji if you have privacy concerns around Snapchat. And so you do have to have a device that you can download the app on to in order to create them. But you could download it, create a whole bunch of little avatars and little stickers, and then just delete the app. If time. And actually somebody had asked about that at the beginning of your presentation because they loved your little pictures of yourselves. And what is that? And I said, well, I knew that one. I knew it was Bitmoji. But I looked it up and they actually have now a, for Chrome, you just Chrome, a desktop version of some that I didn't realize. I saw it on the website. So you could hopefully grab your, create yours doing just some on a computer too. Fantastic, I was not aware of that. So thank you for your presentation. Great, all right. Unsplash, Unsplash is an online website. It contains three high resolution photos that are freely usable anywhere. And they are beautiful, gorgeous photos. Anytime that I've included photos in this presentation, they are from Unsplash. And I really love it for putting in just gorgeous high resolution images in your online stuff. Okay, videolink.com. This is one of my favorite websites when I'm working with groups of kids. It used to be called safeyoutube.net and it is a scrubber site. So what it does is it pulls the video you want to share and only that off of YouTube. It also allows you to clip or crop the front end or the back end of a video. And it prevents you from having embarrassing or inappropriate ads or auto-play suggestions or what all of the other complex things that happen with YouTube and when you're using it with groups. So it's just, it is a really great tool if you are sharing YouTube videos with kids. I have a lot of negative feelings about unfettered access to YouTube because I've had a few experiences in my library career that have been where kids have seen things that they shouldn't have seen. Not when I was presenting, thank goodness, but with auto-play on public access computers. So I just really, this is a great tool for preventing that from happening. Flipgrid, so Flipgrid is owned by Microsoft. It is explicitly for non-commercial use and it is for educators. However, in their terms of use, they describe educators as any educational institution, organization or other educational business and you can sign up today as a librarian, it's free and what it allows you to do is to create a prompt and then share the link and then users can create their own short videos responding to the prompt and everybody who has the link can see the videos. I'm just gonna click here really quick. I'm not gonna take the time to share a video because we are very short on time and I wanna make sure to end at least sort of on time, give everybody a chance to go to the bathroom before our next talk. But I just made some sample videos and you can click on them and see what they look like and you may record a response. You'll notice right here it says that the response is moderated. So that means that before the response goes onto this page, I will watch it and approve it. But I do recommend that once the presentation is up, if you wanna explore this tool and try it out, you may use this link to create your own short video. It is a great way to engage people, I guess I clicked on that again, engage people especially during remote times. It has been a really powerful tool in the school. Okay, the next one is Book Creator. This is a company that has been bought out by Google, I believe, but it creates high quality eBooks online. Your free account gives you 40 books with one library, which you could create yourself or you can share that library code with other people and then they can create books that live in that library. It's a great educational tool for doing kids presentations. I've also used it for creating eBooks that are a decodable text, just writing my own where the words match the pictures to have eBooks available for kids to read remotely. And it's a really fun tool. They also have a lot of really good resources and support and examples. It's got really nice, clear help features built into it so it makes it a user-friendly software to learn as well. The next one is Kahoot. Kahoot is a program that is free for educators. It does cost money for businesses, so a license for a library would cost money per year. I believe it is very reasonable. I didn't check the price before this presentation, but it's around five to $10. Now I don't know what it is. Anyway, it's very reasonable, but my real tip for you about it is it has a free seven-day trial. So if you wanna give this a try for doing online trivia nights or a quiz with a group of kids, sign up for the trial and see if it works for you and see if it is a reasonable software to use. Schools use this all the time for checking learning and for engaging kids. And through this link, you can look at other quizzes that people have put together and you can answer them yourself. So if you follow this link, you can do that. Another one of my favorite online tools are Google tools. I'm slightly biased because our school district uses the Google suite of products, but I really find them useful for a couple of different things. So Google Docs allows you to freely collaborate with more than one person at a time in real time. This is so crucial for remote work and it prevents you from having to email back and forth different versions of a document, which is maddening and annoying. This presentation was created on Google Slides. I find it very convenient to be able to work on presentations through Google Slides at any computer terminal. Google Meet is a slimmed down video conferencing app. It's not as good a Zoom for a variety of reasons, but it often loads better in low bandwidth. And I don't know about your library or your community, but low bandwidth is definitely an issue in our area. Google Forms, I use them all the time through the public library for registration, for coordination, and for eliciting feedback from our patrons. And Google Classroom, which is an online space that you control. It's basically like a private dynamic website. And we used Google Classroom this summer to host read aloud materials for our patrons. Since it's private and an online space, it functions exactly like an online version of reading aloud inside your library. So I could throw up all kinds of read aloud pictures and not worry about them living forever on the internet or people who were not supposed to be accessing them, accessing them, because I controlled who had access to Google Classroom. Worked out really well for summer reading because our library was closed during that time. And virtual classroom spaces. So this is a screenshot from the Virtual Library Media Center that I have built for my K3 students this fall at the elementary school. It's pretty basic, but there are some teachers who are creating truly beautiful ones. This one is actually made with Google Slides. And when it is presented, you can click on anything, any text and any picture and it takes you to another slide in the presentation or it takes you to a website link. And if you were to click, this is just an image of it because it is for my school. I'm not going to share it with you today. Sorry. But the little icon here that's a speaker, it will read aloud to you the instructions about how to use it. This idea actually came to me from another teacher named Mikayla Jenichan. And there are some teachers who are truly doing some really amazing things with virtual libraries online right now. Okay. We're almost done, we're almost done, we can do it. The last four of these are four of my favorite Google extensions. So these work with Google Chrome, Pear Deck works with Google Slides and Microsoft PowerPoint to create interactive slide presentations so that your participants can interact with the slide presentation as you're giving it. Google Meet GridView gives a more zoom-like appearance to Google Meet. So Google Meet is that slimmed down video conferencing software and it just shows you whoever is talking in your screen. But with GridView you see the little quilt of faces just like Zoom. Read and Write which is a talk to text program. It allows you to highlight and to select text and have it read aloud to with the screen reader or to use your microphone on your computer to input text. It's a really powerful tool for accessibility. We use it with students but it would be great for your adult patrons for accessibility reasons as well. And the last one is called ScreenCastify. It is a free screen video recorder and creation software. It allows you to narrate over a short PowerPoint presentation or for example, to log into your audio book online thing and allows you to create a video explaining how to do that for your patrons. Okay. With all of this about school libraries I did want to talk about some things that public libraries do better because I know that you are working your hardest every day at this very challenging job. So one of the biggest challenges in working in a school library was the amount of ed you speak, the jargon that school institutions use. And I really think that public libraries do a better job of using plain, accessible language for all communications. A skill that we might want to improve on is using more infographics or short videos right now to communicate with the largest number of people online to remember that our communities just like a school community has a variety of people with a variety of reading levels and a variety of capacity for understanding new information. And public libraries are so much better at weeding their collections. Keep that up. Can't, you would not believe the number of books that I had to hoe out of the school library when I started there. So that's good to hear. I know there's a struggle there for everybody. It is a struggle. And yeah, I just, I do think public librarians are better at it than school librarians. It's just something about maybe it's like intermittent funding through with public education. I don't know why school librarians are so afraid to withdraw terribly outdated, distesting books. Not all of them, certainly, but it has been a very stark contrast in my two groups of colleagues. So I do encourage you to think about ways that you can collaborate with your school counterparts or counterparts in your community. One thing, just one idea that we really leaned into this last year was providing tech support to families during remote learning. It really helped for a lot of people who maybe already had a personal connection with the public library to be able to come to the public library with their school questions. And I did training for the rest of my very, very part-time staff to make sure that I wasn't the only person who was able to answer those questions. And we're at the end. Feel free to reach out to me via email. My email is here. I love to talk about libraries and I would love to help you with thinking about ways that you can reach out to your school colleagues and connect with them. And I'm happy to take any questions now. And I'm going to stop sharing my screen if I can figure out how to do it. I'm actually good up for now. Leave that thing up there for now. That's perfect. Yeah, not a problem. Could you still see my face, right? Like, yes. Yep, yep, your camera is up there. That's fine, yep. Great, thank you. This is great. Lots of comments. Thank you for a great presentation. Of course, awesome enthusiasm. Lots of good info there. Just so everyone knows, she showed a lot of those websites and links that were in the presentation, the slides. You will have the slides as well. So you'll have links to all of those. And that'll be for all the presentations today. So don't try, you don't need to scribble down all of the links and URLs and things that people are sharing or talking about during their sessions. You'll have the slides available later. So you'll have all of that information afterwards. And you actually answered one of the questions that we did have someone wanted to know tips for connecting the school librarians for public. And you talked about that already. So I think we will work on getting into our next session now. If anybody does have any more questions, they want to talk to Abby about working with the school and the library together. Please definitely reach out to her. She's happy to chat with anybody.