Focus on the Future: Connecting Books and 21st Century Readers

This was a super fun session presented by Deanna Gouzie and Susan Dee.  They gave loads of ideas for ways to use technology to connect young readers to books.  Think about that concept for a minute.  This isn’t using technology just to tell your board you are using it, this is using technology for a purpose and that purpose is to get young people excited about books and reading.

First thing I jotted down in my notes was about book reviews.  Librarians have been encouraging their young readers to write book reviews for millions of years (well…okay…not millions, but you get the picture).  Reading and writing go together and personally, I believe the more we can get kids to write, the better off they will be.  In the good old days, there might have been a system where a child could initial books they liked, or slap a large post-it note on the cover of a book they liked, or maybe a library would have a binder in the youth area where children could submit their writings. 

So, how can we use technology to get kids excited to write book reviews?  These ladies suggested creating a simple form using Google Docs.  I actually did this a couple of years ago to do a survey for my library’s in-service and they are right!  Google Docs creates a simple, attractive form, that kids might be more drawn to using than hand writing a review or sending an email.  There are certainly other ways to use technology for book reviews…blogs of course; your website might have its own form function you could tap into, and I’m sure there are lots more. 

Speaking of blogs, they do a lot with blogs and they suggest the site Glogster.com.  I just took a look at it and it seems pretty easy and hip.  I’ve always used Blogger for my blogs, but that’s because I started dappling in blogs over six years ago and WordPress was just a toddler then and I didn’t know what I was doing…but Blogger’s been good enough for what I need it for, but Glogster looks fun too.  So that was kind of a ramble-y sort of thought.

Something fun that sometimes happens when kids blog about books is that the author might leave a comment.  This just happened at our library and it happened to one of the presenter’s students and man does that leave an impression on a student!  The great thing about getting this stuff online is exposing the kids to a larger community of people excited about books and that includes the authors!

A great way to connect kids with authors, and something I’d like to try with my homeschool group in particular, is using Twitter! They also suggested using Twitter for professional development.  They suggested using national events to tweet on; days like National Picture Book Day / Poetry Month / and Children’s Book Week.  Find the hashtags that everyone else is using and tweet away with your students.  You can all be in the same room even, but document your discussion via Twitter and who knows who might join your discussion!

They talked a lot about book trailers.  We’ve use book trailers some with our patrons…mostly Scowl Face (one of my co-workers) creates them at my library.  They use Animoto, which I will have to try, and they do simple things like just filming their students giving booktalks.  

Other great ideas they had included Skypeing with authors (some will do this for free!) skypeing with other libraries, having programs where you teach the technology, using the Educator Accounts you can find (Animoto and Glogster both have Educator accounts) for more control over access to the student work, and much more. 

This was an awesome session and I came away with lots of ideas of things to do. The other thing I came away with was a free book!  Thanks ladies!