Schools of the Future Conference Recap: My thoughts

Last week was an incredibly exciting week for me and my colleague Michelle Colte!  We attend the School's of the Future conference in Honolulu, HI  Mrs. Colte, our technology coordinators, and myself participated in a playground session on makerspaces.  If you are unfamiliar with playground sessions at conferences they basically offer you the chance to learn information in a small snippet, our's was a Smore poster, and engage with either with tech or materials brought from different educators.  Think of it a quick and dirty way to learn either techniques for teaching or lesson ideas.  I particularly like them because they are hands-on.  Anything to get the juices flowing and creating makes me happy.

As I said above, ours was about our school's makerspace and how we created it on a shoe-string budget.  We made a huge call out to the students and parents of our school and got a ton of stuff to get use started.  We literally have everything from bottle caps to quilling materials...literally!  On that note, since our makerspace was first initiated, we also have more high-tech gadgets as well.  iPads, Ozobots, Dot and Dash, and Bloxels are just a few high-tech items.  During the session we demonstrated how an educator could do an activity either using a low-tech or high-tech tool, it's all on your level of comfort and of course your budget.  The session was a success and I had fun working with the ladies to pull it off.  Click on the link here to view our Smore poster!

The conference was two days long and on the second day I mosied over to the librarian's session.  I was super excited to see that Jennifer Lagrade or Library Girl was presenting!  I follow her blog on school libraries and her sessions focused on not getting caught in the cycle of being a zombie librarian.  Basically, she introduced strategies on how you could make your library relevant and engaging to students in this technology driven world.  I loved hearing her words of wisdom, but I think I may have liked it more that I got a selfie with her too!

Me with Library Girl!

I think it's important to get into a subject that she really focused on, and that was that as librarians we must be connected educators.  Since our positions can seem outdated and/or irrelevant it's important that we get connected on social media and network with other educators in order to grow and gain ideas about updating and presenting innovative ideas our libraries.  We have to advocate for our libraries and in order to do that,we have to be connected and show the world what we're doing in our libraries.  This message especially resonated with me because, in the short time I've been in the education world I've seen the importance of being connected and getting ideas from other educators on how to engage students and keep the learning relevant.  The same applies to librarians.  I say this because of the education climate at the moment.  If we as librarians do not connect, become a life-long learners, explore our passions, grow, and become innovative then we can pretty much ensure that our library's will be under utilized and die.  That's right... die.  Now more than ever we as librarians need to bring our roles in education to the forefront and advocate for them.  We need to make our library's connect with student's in a way that is meaningful and challenges them to want to explore the world around them.

The importance of being a connected educator