And now without further ado I will turn things over to Deborah Gaff of the
Bartholomew County Public Library for her presentation on School and Public
Library Partnerships: STEAM to Students Deb Hi thank you very much
Deb Gaff speaking and I am with the Bartholomew County Public Library we are
located in south-central Indiana the main branch of the library is in
Columbus Indiana and we also have a branch in Hope Indiana
I'm the STEAM programming specialist I am a retired computer programmer and I'm
a licensed educator with teaching experience in grades K through 12 so
throughout the webinar I'll be pulling on sometimes my library hat sometimes my
teacher hat to sort of give you perspective on both sides
I have several programs I manage at the library Full STEAM Ahead is an engaging
program for our young patrons in grades k-2
and grades three to six I host two separate sessions each program begins
with a read aloud it ends with an engaging activity our new highly
successful program is called Stitch Camp it's an introduction to sewing and
making and one of my biggest programs that we'll be talking about today is
Coder Dojo learning to code at the library a new
program we're implementing at the library is Crypto Club learning about
secret messages how to encrypt and decrypt messages and these are just a
few other programs I lead throughout the month I have had the awesome opportunity
to engage patrons through both of the Bartholomew County public school
corporations extending what I do at the library to the patrons at their school
in this webinar I will share some tips for collaborating with schools as well
as some additional information about the programs I take on the road in
Bartholomew County the screen that you see now you're free to feel free to
contact me at my email there or follow me on Twitter or Instagram I often post
what I'm doing with the schools or at the library so I'm
I'm always happy to share ideas so please steal ideas it was a great thing
all right I've had probably the most success collaborating with public
schools by first making connection with the public school librarians and the
educators but my primary contacts have been with the public school librarians
this is a pretty easy first step as school librarians and public librarians
share essentially the same goals we want to provide access to information in
a variety of formats whether it be books movies digital resources or after-school
opportunities for children and teens we all strive to better serve our patrons
at the beginning of this school year our library hosted a regularly scheduled
meeting of school librarians from our County's largest school district the
group had scheduled their meeting in our library conference room and our library
just happens to be centrally located so this was an ideal meeting place for
the school corporation as part of the meeting we were able to offer a tour of
the library as well as the opportunity to share some of our newest programs
with school librarians we were they were pleasantly surprised to hear about new
developments and opportunities at our library here is my first tip always have
an elevator speech ready so this is was an opportunity they were going around
touring the library I happen to be present and hey Deb what's new and in
your world and I was able to pitch my Nick and Tesla Book Club which has
resulted in activities being held off-site at schools and I'll explain a
little bit more about that later you may wish to invite the public school
librarians to your library keep in mind that National Library Week is April 8th
through 14th and of course April is natural library national library month so invite
your school librarians to the public library
for a tour Hey and perhaps a light snack because I'm going to tell you as a
teacher after school I would always like to have a snack right i have a question
sure so what time of day is is best do you think to invite them to do some sort
of meeting like that like after school hours probably I would say definitely
after school hours because they're pretty busy and they have very little
free time during the day I mean librarians are at the schools are being
asked to do a lot more to help out in the classrooms and to provide
programming within their library so I think after-school would be best you
could try an afternoon meeting and and you know contact them ask them what what
do you think works is yeah yeah makes sense yeah
summer reading programs are scheduled to kick off soon at your library this is
a great opportunity to make a school does it or share promotional materials
as you know and meet school librarians having a face with a name is a great way
to facilitate ongoing conversation it's nice to know who you're getting that
email from I don't know about you but my priority always goes to the emails from
people I know and and lastly then to people I don't know so if I have a face
with a name I'm more likely to answer that email and here's another tip be
sure to share share some research about the high impact of summer learning and
what it can do for this students the ALA for instance has a some nice
documentation on their website Richard L Ellington is an American
scholar and researcher at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville where he's
been a professor of education since 2005 and his research shows that summer
learning especially self selected reading can help prevent the learning
loss during summer vacation and this is huge remember that our our school
teachers are being graded the schools are being graded on student
performance and if they have an opportunity to help their students
achieve and and not lose their prior learning during the summer break that's
huge for them and that's huge for those students that are taking those
standardized tests so when you approach a school or the school librarian the
more you connect to how it can benefit the school really the better it's going
to be school teachers like librarians have very little free time little little
very little wiggle room and they're their classroom day so if they know
something is going to directly impact their students and help their students
achieve all the better because it indeed does take a village to nurture our young
patrons that village can begin with connecting with your peers and the
public or private schools in your area I will share in a few minutes some of the
collaboration opportunities developed by contacting school librarians and don't
here's another tip don't forget to make connections at the Indiana Library
Federation events these events are a great place to introduce yourself to a
school librarian even if they're not part of your community they're a
fantastic resource you can ask them hey you know what's the best way to
collaborator or bring programs to the school they probably have some really
good information for you too often and I'm going to tell you I'm guilty of this
as well we seek out our known friends at ILF events but I try to make an effort
to reach out and make new contacts at each event I attend you never know where
they're going to lead I have learned a lot from school librarians at ILF
by striking up conversations at the lunch table attending sessions delivered
by school librarians that's a good idea yeah for sure and it's a great opportunity to find out
what are being offered at the schools so if
you're in a session and you learn about this cool program that they're doing at
one of the schools the school librarians have put together you might want to
check with your own community and say hey are you doing a program like this we
hear it's highly successful at schools in other communities and you know you
can that's it that's another foot in the door another opportunity to bring
programming once those teachers or public school librarians know that you
have a successful program you're in like flint yeah that's actually in one of our
previous school and public library partnership webinars I think I mentioned
this to you at one point one of our media specialists mentioned that if you
can approach a school librarian with a concrete idea of what you'd like to do
it usually is more effective than just going to them and saying hey we should
partner but not really knowing what you want a partner to do so you know
obviously you might have to still work with them to collaborate on an idea but
approaching them with an idea already is great yeah I I think that's that's
really key and then when you're presenting that idea make sure you
emphasize how this can benefit the school how this benefits the children in
the school the teachers in the school what what are they gonna get out of out
of this partnership or this program that you want to bring to the school how is
it helpful for them one of the things that is good to think about is is what
is your niche what did what do you do best and and take time and call and
introduce yourself and my personal favorite though is I like to make
connections in person especially at conferences in fact I've even written
for proposals to present it ILF that the
summer conference are what do they call them their regional conferences yeah
this year so presented I want to present so I'm hoping to have that opportunity
and also at the Indiana Department of Education summer of eLearning
conferences so let me tell you a little bit about that because I love these
conferences as both a teacher and a representative of the library so the
Indiana Department of Education helped sponsor several of these elearning
conferences and if you just google search Summer of e-learning for the indy
IDOE Indiana Department of Education you'll see the list of locations where
the Summer of E-learning conferences are taking place and there is about 20 or so
happening throughout the state during the summer so chances are there's one
near you so why would you want to present add in a Summer of E-learning
conference because you have e-learning resources right you have a great already
bag of great opportunities to connect and let the teachers know about and let
them know what you have so for instance you have ebooks to start with and you
have databases and you have okay what what else my thing is it will they you
could talk about the INSPIRE databases oh yeah I mean yeah and then like you said
other databases if your library has something specific to your community for
sure and you know this is a great place to connect and you're connecting with
teachers you're talking to teachers and maybe they're not teachers in in your
area however you know teachers are going to talk to other teachers you're going
to get some feedback from those teachers and you know you you're starting the
ball rolling and pretty soon it's just gonna snowball
right look for other opportunities as well school staff meetings after school
so in in a school environment we would have staff meetings well one school I
worked out we had a staff meeting every Wednesday after school for an hour and a
lot of times it said you know just bringing everybody up to date on what's
going on and what's what's the news we also had some time devoted for a little
professional development hey did you know about this or know about that and
and teachers and the school librarian we're always tapped to hey tell us a
little bit about what you're doing in your classroom because that's pretty
exciting but that would also be a great time for the library to come in and let
us know what kind of resources you have how you can help us students have a
research paper to do we can help you with that
you know looking for e-books we can help you with that we have digital card
e-learning cards or or a library card so what students access our electronic
materials share that with the schools and how you would get into a school
staff meeting is you probably want to contact directly the administrator of
the school so the principal or assistant principal but let them be sure to let
them know hey you know here are the things that we can talk about here are
the resources that we have at the library that we'd be happy to share and
how this would benefit the teachers at the school also do you have a great STEM
or a STEAM activity that's just oh my gosh every time you do it it's like it's
a home run that's a great thing to you know create a flyer here's here's
this great program and I'm just gonna pick something let's say we're gonna
talk about bubbles and we have a good book to read for
primary students about bubbles and then we have a great opportunity to do a
little hands-on activity and and why my schools be interested in that well a lot
of times you're looking for opportunities to reward students I
finished all my AR points for the school year I have had perfect attendance so
they reward those students field days at the end of school you might have
stations in the that the children get out to go out and experience so why not
have a station from the library you know there are many many opportunities to
highlight hey this is a great program what what else can we do where can we
move that into your school activities and the core story times at school at
the Bartholomew County Public Library we have a staff member who goes out pretty
regularly to do story times at schools especially in the primary and pre-k
group and it just started with making a contact with a single teacher getting
into that classroom with a single teacher the teachers oh my gosh I had
this great experience that this librarian came in and and did some read
a story maybe did a little activity with the students and and then that word
spreads and in teachers say well you know how do I get that person into my
library as well the other things to think about is how can i connect the
activities that I currently do or my special activities to the Indiana State
Standards and Indiana State Standards are in this not for teach only for
teachers anybody can view the State Standards you can look at the State
Standards they're not that difficult to read or understand and of course if you
have any questions um please don't hesitate to ask me
having worked on both sides I can certainly help you find standards that
go with the activity that you're doing standards are really important like I
said before teachers just have very little precious free time so I'm gonna
put on my teacher hat and I'm gonna talk to you about some of the experiences
that I had as a teacher in with librarians coming into the school and
what I really liked about them so when I was a teacher at the Greensburg Junior
High School we had a team librarian from the Greensburg Public Library visit our
school during each of the lunches she did this about once a month and how this
worked students would get passes from the school librarian to bring their
lunch to the library and eat while listening to the visiting public
librarian and this this was awesome because she did such a wonderful job so
she would do book talks so she might bring in a collection of books maybe a
dozen or so books the kids have a short amount of time and the kids by the way
because sometimes it's very noisy or it's very crowded so those those kids
that are gonna like the book talks are gonna you know they're gonna like the
library they're gonna jump at the chance to be part of this group so her books
could might be on a particular topic or they might be new blacks or a particular
genre she might talk about young Hoosiers and if you're dealing with
older school children you might want to talk about the Rosies as well but when
she was talking to do this short talk maybe 15 minutes or so after she
explained to all her books and then she'd engaged the students which I
thought is awesome so she asked them have any of
you read any of these books would you like to give me some feedback on books
that you've read have you read similar books how has
that worked for you what did what did you like about them what kind of books
do you like what kind of books would you like me to feature on my next visit
she's not talking at my students she's talking with my students that's just
made me really super happy as a teacher
she also sponsored battle of the books and I particularly I liked that a lot
and what she would do is when she introduced Battle of the Books she'd
bring in the books book talk them and she would leave a set of all the books
with our library so there was no there was never any barrier for our students
to participate in Battle of the Books because we would have a set of blocks at
our school that the students could check out now we bought extra copies of the
books as well so you want more than one student reading books for Battle of the
Books right but it was just really nice to know that that she leveled the
playing field for all of the participants throughout the county
by leaving with his stack of books when she left and it was it was a great
experience we loved Battle of the Books I would meet with the group once a week
after it was introduced I had a help coach a team and I really liked that too
of course I've loved to read so yeah but I contacted your school librarian make a
flyer what will you talk about how long is the talk and be very specific about
what you want it what you want to do how the students might benefit from that
it's a great idea to do the Young Hoosier Book talks because there the
list is already out there students like to read them over the summer middle
schools in Bartholomew County are especially in tune to the Hoosier Young Hoosier
books because they get prizes for finishing all the Young Hoosiers and
they get to vote on their favorite book is there's lots of supplemental material
that the committee actually creates to go along with those books to help you to as
the librarian talk about them absolutely you don't have to ever invent any new
wheel to do some of these programming opportunities in the schools there are
lots of resources available to you just reach out ask ask about them I think
you'll find that a lot of people have resources to share or favorite websites
that they like to go to and stuff like that so just a few other ways that that
you might help at the school is to put together maybe a little program on
digital citizenship oh my gosh that's like so huge in the schools right now
especially when students are often given presentations or they're writing papers
and when they do those presentations they need to know things like what's
copyrighted what do I have to do if I want to use this picture well it's on
the internet must be free right you know how do I give credit to where credit is
due and they always like music in their video videos that they create or
powerpoints and what is an amount of music that I can use before I have to
buy the song right so letting them know and letting them understand that and you
know we talked about earlier about it takes a village you
know I can tell my kids 100 times about this but what's really nice is if they
start hearing it from somebody else
and citing resources okay so I was a science teacher and science teachers and
social studies teachers also have writing standards we have to write in
science and social studies so it's not just that language arts teacher that you
want to be making connections with if I had had access to someone coming in to
mice that would come into my classroom and help me explain how to cite
resources oh my gosh that would have been good wonderful and the other thing
would to be a great thing to share is how to use informational databases so
one of the really sort of sad things is it if you peruse the public school
librarians web page you're gonna find access to INSPIRE maybe Worldbook or
other informational databases and they're probably one of the most
underused resources in the school they're probably even in your library
and underused resource it's because people really don't know how to use them
butt they do know how to Google right but what I really like about the
informational databases is I know that they're getting correct information and
you can even start this off by showing them some really good looking websites
that have really bad information on them so one of my favorites there is a
website and that it is about octopuses that live in trees in the Pacific
Northwest and if I know right and they even have a
little link you can donate to the cause to save these it looks really super good
it looks authentic and you know the kids don't live near water probably think oh
maybe maybe they are rains all the time in the Pacific Northwest right so maybe
you know but you know let them know that that's how to access information in
those databases and why those databases have more accurate information than you
might find Thank You Suzie shared the the link to the tree octopus yeah Thank
You Suzie cuz that's just a really standard favorite of mine to get kids to
think about you know using really good sources and how to tell if the source
is good so all of these things librarians do because that's what you
you know best but you know we need some help in the schools with those as well
I'm gonna talk about one of my some of my programs that I actually do in the
schools at this time so I do CoderDojo and what a CoderDojo is it's an
opportunity for our young people to come in and learn about computer programming
a CoderDojo so dojo by definition is a place where
people come together to learn and the participants in my CoderDojo are called
ninjas and they're not fighting ninjas but think of a ninja as a person who
strives to be the very best that they can add something and and will persevere
and work hard to learn more about it I started these programs at the
Bartholomew County Public Library and we meet most with Wednesday's after school
and I had been doing that for oh gosh about a year and had a really
established program at our main branch and wanted to reach out to our Hope
Branch our Hope Branch is very small and so the
really was in space to host a CoderDojo and I wanted to reach out start reaching
out to upper elementary school students so I met with our branch manager and
they said is it okay you only serve one elementary school at this branch is it
okay if I make contact directly with the elementary school and he's like yeah
sure go right ahead so I contacted the principal and the Dean and told them
about CoderDojo and you know we actually in the state of Indiana have a coding
standards in a better computer programming standards that are part of
our science strand for standards and a lot of schools don't have the resources
or the training to offer that program so they were really enthusiastic about that
in fact they have some sixth-grade students who are meeting or exceeding
their expectations so they get sort of an a bonus special with me three times a
week I go in three days a week in the morning and meet with about 12 to 15
elementary school students sixth graders at this point and and we do a little
mini CoderDojo how time-consuming is that for you to plan out of curiosity actually
it's not as time consuming as you might like I'm gonna share a couple of slides
I'm going to share one of my favorite pages for for resources but you know
you don't have to be a coding expert to lead a CoderDojo you have to be a
willing learner and and learning alongside the kids I'm not a Scratch
programming expert and that's primarily what I do with the sixth graders but I
know where to find some resources I know how to get them started and if I don't
know of an answer to a question I'd say hey let's just figure it out yes that's
a really good point and that is the direct
that STEM programming should really go is being a co-learner with the kids and
taking some of the pressure off librarians we feel like we have to be
experts in everything and we're probably most of the time with your you as an
exception most of the time we're not technology or STEAM experts but if we're
learning with the kids and we're figuring out with them and letting them
take the lead on stuff now take some the pressure off of us absolutely sometimes
even if I do know the answers say oh oh look at what she's doing on her screen
because she's already got this figured out
and you know that that develops some of those 21st century skills that employers
tell us I was like super important so collaboration teamwork and in modeling
that for kids is just a super great thing so if you were at the ILF conference this
past fall you probably at least saw in the program that there was going to be a
presentation about CoderDojo Indiana and this was done by Courtney Lambert and if
you just google search Tech Point Youth or CoderDojo it'll take you to a page
about CoderDojo and at the bottom of the page his Courtney Lambert's contact
information so Courtney is like the most enthusiastic person about running these
little CoderDojo and she would like to see Indiana become one of the leading
states in the number of CoderDojos that that we have available for students so
during this presentation several school librarians contacted Courtney and said
can you can you tell me more can you put me in contact with somebody who does
CoderDojo so Courtney shared several of those names with me and one of them
happened to be a middle school librarian in my own community so I contacted her
and how she got interested in CoderDojos this is
sort of a fun little fact I host these on Wednesdays after school and there are
two middle schools in Columbus Indiana one the students can walk to the library
the other is on the opposite opposite side of town and there is a young man
that was coming from there that other middle school and he was the only one
from his middle school that was attending my dojos and he said to me one
day hey you know what can you come to our school sometime and do this like
well talk to your librarian and see if we can have a place to hold it he was he
was concerned that you know I have friends that want to learn this too and
but they can't get here after school so I contacted that that school librarian I
invited her to a CoderDojo because I think the best way to learn about them
is to be part of one see what's going on she sat down just like a ninja and did
the activities that I was doing with the kids and it it was it was great she's
very enthusiastic so I go over there two days a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays
it's today being an exception I'm here with you to help host a
CoderDojo during their lunch so we've worked out a program where the kids
bring their lunch trays and their chromebooks and learn about coding and and
we we just keep the information that we're sharing with them - like 10 or 15
minutes so they have an opportunity to explore it and still eat their lunch and
the kids the kids love it in fact this has led to another program because I can
only go over there for one lunch period it's the only time I have in my day to
go over there and the other two lunch periods of like what when are we going
to do this so now we're gonna start an after-school program as well there with
CoderDojo so you know just you don't feel like you have to be a coder to start a
CoderDojo you just have to be enthusiastic this is
the website that I had mention it's a code club dot org in the UK we don't
have a US version yet but they are working on it they've been doing code
clubs for years in the UK and in Europe and we're just sort of jumping on the
bandwagon now but if you look at all the resources they have available for you
what I really really like about this website is and I'll print out copies of
the projects for students I might spend 5 or 10 minutes of that CoderDojo giving
them some general instruction maybe I'll show them hey in Scratch do you know
you can move sprites around the screen with it arrow key you know something
like that related to one of the projects that I'm going to share with them but
the projects are written in such a way that it not only shows the kiddos what
to do but also explains to them why they're doing it so they code a few
lines and then they test it and code a few lines and then they test it it's
really very nicely done because that's exactly what we do in the real world as
a former computer programmer I did not write hundreds of lines of code and hope
that they worked I wrote a few lines and then tested it and I collaborated with
my friends and I showed my friends what I had created and and I don't set any
expectations that they will do one of my projects so they might be inspired by
the project and then try something on their own just a tip when you go into
schools if you have an idea to do a CoderDojo at the schools just check
with the IT department or with the librarian or whoever you're
making contact with and make sure that the students can access the websites
that you intend to use one of we found out one of the schools does not let the
students go to the Scratch website whoa what it's computer programming but there
are sample games that other people had invented and the kid they're afraid
that the kids will spend too much time playing games I like to look at it this
way though hey you know I'm being inspired by what somebody else has done
and you can remix them and you can change them and make them your own
so you know you just always check before you go especially if you plan on using
the computers when I go to the elementary school the students use a
computer lab and when I go to the middle school the students have one-to-one
Chromebooks so they use their own devices I just make sure they can access
what I'm showing them okay remember when I told you I had that elevator speech
are ready so when those librarians came to tour the public school librarians
came to tour our library hey I talked to them about the Nick and Tesla book club
way we've organized this at the Bartholomew County Public Library is
that when students take check out a book they get a little kit one of the gadgets
that Nick and Tesla invent so for instance Nick and Tesla would like to
invent things to solve problems and they suspect that this person has stolen a
comic book and they're trying to get him out of the office so they built a little
bristlebot and they let it listen the guy is like oh my gosh runs out of the
office and they are able to search for the comic book so I had my little
elevator speech ready and I talked to um to the ah to the librarians about
the program the next day I got a contact from a local elementary school and said
hey we passion projects on Friday and we'd like
to bring kids over to the library to be part of this Nick and Tesla book club so
I meet with eight to ten students every nine weeks for about six weeks of that
nine weeks and talk about a Nick and Tesla book and we also make one of the gadgets
that's featured in the book each time so just having that elevator speech ready
and being ready to go as awesome another program I happen to be walking through
that elementary school with some Ozobots the one where I'm doing the CoderDojo
and the third-grade teacher stopped me and said whoa can you tell me about
those cuz I've been thinking about buying them and I said great and then I
have to think well how can I develop a program that she might be able to use
these in her classroom and I found a book if you were a polygon and read it
and that was a read aloud for the kiddos to get them started using the Ozobots
nonfiction read it actually covers three standards for third-grade reading so
learning new vocabulary and applying these and the new vocabulary we observe
the Ozobots and you see here in the top right hand corner of the screen you know
though we know who find out what kind of tricks they can do these are Ozobot
Evos and then we learned that you know robots are everywhere they mow our lawn
they vacuumed our carpet and I show them a little video clip of how they're used
to the factory to take products from one place of the factory to another so we're
gonna train our Ozobots to do the same and they had some little challenges like
the one you see on the bottom right so they're learning about perimeter and
then we did some area and they're using rulers which is great because
measurement skills are really one of the lowest scoring areas in in schools I had
these third graders for 90 minutes and they were not off task
even one minute that um then I also want to do some decoding this was really
amazing because I wasn't sure that they were gonna have that manual dexterity
skills to create these fine lines and to make the codes they need to be exactly
the way you see them on this color chart but they did and they made their Ozobots
act like a tornado and spin and so I got these Ozobots from being part of
the CoderDojo Network and CoderDojo the Tech Point
Foundation has several grant cycles and you can apply for grants so I was able
to use the grant money to purchase the Ozobots I have a set of 18 and you
should watch for them they often go on sale so it's not just something that you
use only in elementary school but this is a middle school activity whether they
have Chromebooks or iPads or uh PCs you can code them and then load the
program onto the Ozobot double-click him he goes and does so what you coded to do
and if he's you're successful he does a little victory dances like so and you
know just so you know you don't have to make up these lessons there are hundreds
hundreds of online lesson ideas you can level this all the way up to high school
activities and hey if you happen to have a 3d printer you can make little
costumes for them how cute is that right and use a program like BlocksCAD
and have children learn how to how to do that and the last program that I'm
implementing out at the schools right now is called Crypto Club and this is in
collaboration with that National Girls Collaborative Project and it's by no way
girls only program it's just the National Girls Collaborative tries to
make sure that the programming appeals to girls as well as boys
so it's about encrypting and decrypting secret messages using different ciphers
it was developed by the University of Chicago there's a great curriculum that
goes with it it scaffolds children very nicely and I'm just going to go out and
share that curriculum with at the schools and by the way by Bartholomew
County Public Library is the hub site for the Crypto Club so we can do some
training if you're interested in learning more about a program like this you can
take to the schools strong math skills a lot of connections to standards really
fun and by the way cybersecurity hmm big big career opportunities available
for kids there too so making sure that they have that opportunity and I also
like Little Bits coding with Little Bits so I'm actually going to be doing a
presentation shamelessly promoting the ILF Southeast on April 20th so if you
want to connect I'll be down there showing you a little bit about Little
Bits and I'll have several kits available that you can test them out and
hands-on try them yourself I am see if you like them right and once again
here's my contact information so if you'd like to contact me I'd be happy to
hear from you.
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