Library Media Tech Talk

My librarian co-worker (Mrs. Misti Bell) and I had the privilege of attending the Arkansas Association of School Librarians (ArASL) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas on July 27th. This was a special occasion for a few reasons. The first being that the ArASL Chair-Elect, Mrs. Sloan Powell, extended an invitation for us to present at the conference back in May when she read the blog post on our "Makerspace Day" in the library. (The link to this page is at the bottom of this article.) The second reason is that the keynote presenter was Mrs. Leslie Preddy, the current President of the American Association of School Librarians. Leslie did a wonderful job sharing about the many resources that AASL offers! It was also great to hear her talk about the Makerspaces she has established in her own middle school library. I came away with five important points that Leslie shared about starting a Makerspace: 1. Begin with what you know 2. Start small 3. Think hands on creativ...

I was greatly inspired by a TL Virtual Cafe session I attended online a few weeks ago (thanks to the Twitter PD community at #tlchat). After hearing so many great ideas from library media specialists/ teacher librarians from all over the country, I decided to give it a try in our own school library. We have been slowly assembling all the needed pieces to start a Makerspace this year! We had planned to have this program during our two lunch sessions (1st lunch- grades 10-12 and 2nd lunch grades 8 and 9). A last minute schedule change kept us from having the program for grades 10-12 this time. We decided to have 5 Makerspace stations in the library. They were all very successful, and the students that participated were very engaged. We had a 3D printer station led by two of our students from EAST. They had designed a replica of the Willis Tower (formally the Sears Tower) using Google Sketch Up Make and Netfabb. We decided to print several of these, and we gave them away at the...