It was a privilege to spend the first half of Ultimate Pi Day (3/14/15) at the New Jersey Association of School Librarians Spring Meeting. It was a quick day, but a valuable one.

The keynote speaker took up the majority of the formal programming. Our speaker was Eric Sheninger, who is a big mover and shaker in the world of educational technology in schools. He told us how he, as the principal at New Milford High School, worked with his school librarian to do innovative things with technology in education. The way he explained it, he led the effort to not only make technology work in education, but also to change attitudes about technology. NMHS apparently used to be a place where students would get in trouble for having phones, and now it is a BYOD school with a makerspace in the library and a 3D virtual classroom environment.

A lot of their success had to do with creative resource management and communicating about their projects and successes. The school found money in the budget, grants, and organizations willing to pilot programs with them. Sheninger himself got over his aversion to social media, and educated himself on the actual rules about internet content filters, and opened the gates of online communication.

I’m sharing the link to Sheninger’s virtual handout. It all sounded so incredible that I know that many of us were overwhelmed at the end. It seems unreachable for librarians with really supportive administrators and hopeless budget situations. I can see how it would definitely seem out of reach when looking back at the “finished” product of a success story. But Shininger was quick to also point out how much time the change took, how alone he was at the beginning, how much he relied on the help of others, and that he went through many of the challenges that NMHS faced at first, which are the same for just about every school in NJ.  For me the talk was the perfect balance of inspirational and realistic. Also, I’d like it to be known that at first, he forgot to set the settings of his Google Document to “share” just like the rest of us do sometimes, and he had to go back and fix it. I think that’s probably the 21st century version of “he puts his pants on one leg at a time…”

At lunch I was able to network with some incredible library professionals, who gave me some wonderful career advice, and assured me that library jobs for the fall would likely still be coming out well into May. I am always so inspired when interacting with school librarians. They are consistently some of the most genuinely helpful, welcoming, and naturally curious people I’ve ever met. It’s never difficult to have a conversation in a group of librarians — school librarians especially. Everyone is always learning something and everyone is always excited about what they’re learning and sharing.

We were celebrating the 100th anniversary of NJASL, so many of the past presidents spoke. One of them reminded all of us how important it is to stay engaged in our personal learning network because, for the most part, there is only one school librarian per school. Many school librarians seem to feel that they are the only ones in their building that really understands the challenges and the responsibilities of their job. After hearing that, I’m especially glad that I’ve started building my professional network so early by going to all of these conferences. I would imagine that it would be difficult as a school librarian to take time off of school to go do professional development.

The afternoon was devoted to an unconference format breakout session. I went the the elementary school session since I am student teaching in an elementary school now. I chose to join a discussion on information literacy, which ended up being a discussion about low-tech information literacy. One of the librarians in the group had very few tech resources. The district had to send them 30 Chromebooks for park, and they had to tape lots of extension cords on the floor to plug them all in. Yet the librarian was still teaching information literacy using what she had. These kids are missing out on digital literacy, maybe, but they’re still learning to be great thinkers.

Hilda Weisberg dropped in to give a rousing, if brief talk on advocacy via demonstrating the value of school library, and then our day was over and we all had to head back out into the rain.

No photos this time, but there was a hashtag on Twitter than can be accessed here: #NJASL15 Tweets
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