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Documenting and Sharing Your eReader Program Practices

March 8, 2011 By

 

Home – Kindles at The Unquiet Library – LibGuides at Creekview High School via kwout

When we began our Kindle program at The Unquiet Library in November 2010, I thought it was important to share our learning experiences, program implementation materials, and data in a public, transparent way.  Hence, I created our Kindles at The Unquiet Library LibGuide information portal, a resource guide that is designed to share our Kindle program practices with others.  Here is how I’ve organized the Kindle information portal:

Home Tab

  • A document library for librarians (these forms are downloadable and available for use under a Creative Commons license).
  • A document library for students that includes the acceptable use form, an eBook request form (we buy books based upon student requests), and an updated list of eBooks available on our Kindles.
  • My bookmarks from delicious on items I’m tagging with “kindle”.
  • A Flickr photo slideshow of photographs from The Unquiet Library related to the Kindle program.
  • Blog posts from my professional blog and/or library blog with updates on the Kindle program; these posts are broken out as individual links to make navigation easier for viewers.
  • A Kindle commercial created by one of our Creekview High School students.
  • A RSS feed from the Edukindle blog.

Videos for Students Tab

This section is designed to give students some background information and review of the Kindle device.  Originally, we had planned to put tutorial videos for students here, but we’ve found that once we show students the basics face to face in about ten minutes, they are good to go and feel very comfortable using the device without additional assistance.

Videos for Librarians Tab

This section contains “how to” tutorial videos of interest to librarians as well as video blog/vlog updates I’ve created to share ideas, reflections, strategies, celebrations, and challenges of our program rollout.  I thought the videos would be a positive supplement to text blog posts for sharing various kinds of information about the program.

Student Voices and Thoughts on the Kindles Tab

This section of the guide is probably my favorite!  In this space, we collect student interviews about the Kindle reading experience.  While all students complete a post Kindle reading survey on paper, I find the conversational nature of the Kindles to be insightful and a bit more revealing than the surveys as I can ask follow-up questions or pursue lines of discussion initiated by the students.  This data is also a powerful way of telling the story of our Kindle program and putting the student voice/face as an essential and important part of the Kindle program evaluation.

Professional Resources Tab

This section is designed to provide viewers an assortment of information streams and resources to explore and follow as they grow their knowledge about the ever evolving eBook and eReader landscape.  I’ve included RSS feeds from some of my favorite information sources as well as videos and presentation slides from respected voices in the profession.

FAQs for Teachers and Librarians

I have received a fairly crushing amount of email since November from people around the world about the Kindle program. While I have made every effort to answer each person who has contacted me, the volume of email is a bit overwhelming at times.  I have just created this FAQ page to give people a starting point who are starting to explore the possibility of using Kindles in their classrooms or libraries.

Why Sharing Matters

Because we are all pioneering and forging this brave new world of content delivery, it is important we share our practices with our eReader and/or eBook programs–what is working, what is not—with others.  The act of sharing our ideas, materials, and practices can be empowering for those who are just starting an eReader or eBook program while helping us to be more purposeful in our own programs.   I find that by maintaining this guide and blogging about the program, I am a more thoughtful and reflective practitioner.  These guides can help us all be more effective and savvy with our program implementation while documenting our programs in a way that is accessible to all program/library stakeholders.

Buffy Hamilton

Filed Under: e-readers, Feature, Resources for Trainers Tagged With: , , , , ,

10 Reflective Steps to Improve Training

April 9, 2010 By

On college campuses across the country, we’re wrapping up the Spring semester and getting ready for summer. It’s a busy time, whether you have assignments to grade, are working with students who are cramming to finish that last paper, are trying to spend out your book budget, or some other combination of year-end tasks.

One of the things that has always appealed to me about working on an academic schedule is the sense of rhythm of the year. There’s a clear start, and, well, the end isn’t so clear (there’s always something going on) but there is a period of time in the summer when it’s possible to accomplish some larger projects that you just can’t fit in between the student related work of the Fall and Spring semesters.

Before diving into those projects, I like to take some time to really reflect on the previous two semesters and think about what I learned as a teacher/trainer and what I can do to make the next year better. Of course, it doesn’t have to be in April, it can be whenever makes the most sense for your library and schedule. If you’re interested in taking some time annually to think through your training, here are 10 steps that have been really useful for me:

1. Reflect

It’s hard to find time to really reflect on things. Most of us have schedules that send us from one meeting or task to another. Taking a few moments to think about the sessions you taught gives you a chance to look back in retrospect and learn things that might be useful. What sessions had the highest attendance? What sessions had the most involved audiences? What active learning exercises seemed to be most effective? What would you really like to avoid doing again in the future? Some of these reflective sessions have helped me see changes that I should make, even when I wasn’t planning on making them.

2. Look at Feedback

Many of us make sure to collect feedback after teaching a group. Some of our organizations collect this feedback for us. In other cases, there might not be formal feedback, but rather follow up emails, nonverbal cues during the session, or some other source of information to help you learn about what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes this information matches what we remember, sometimes it might be different. Combining the feedback provided by the students with your own reflections can make for a powerful larger picture of what worked and didn’t.

3. Share with Others

Once you have a clear picture of what worked and didn’t for your training, it can be helpful to have conversations with other trainers. One of my favorite things to do at the end of the semester is to talk with other people teaching the same information literacy that class I teach. We can share the adaptations we made to the curriculum and our teaching methods and learn from each other. Often, we can get materials that make it possible to make changes without having to reinvent the wheel each time. Sometimes your training peers might not be within your own organization. I have a few people I chat with about technology training at my institution, but most of the sharing I participate in for that type of training is with peers on Twitter or Facebook.

4. Look at the Plan

So far, we’ve considered thinking about what has happened in our teaching. It’s also useful to think about where we need to take our training in the future. I try to take some time every year to re-familiarize myself with the university’s and library’s strategic plans. Knowing where we want to be, as an institution, can help me recenter the types of things I’m teaching to make sure people know what we (as a larger group) have agreed we need to know. It’s also a nice time to look at the mission statements of the organization/library to get a sense of how training sessions are fitting into that public statement of what the group is doing.

5. Consider Shifting Needs

Just as you might need to recenter your training to the strategic plan or mission statement of your library, it’s worth thinking about the shifting needs of the audience you train. Though many of the sessions I’ve offered training on in the past would still be useful in some library settings, hopefully our staff already are caught up on those issues. There might be topics that we haven’t offered training on that everyone else is getting. Or there might be new and emerging technologies that shift all of our needs into a new area. Thinking about these shifting needs can help you think about the topics to train on in the next year. Combining this with a good needs assessment can help for planning sessions that are really useful to your audience.

6. Get Topic Ideas

It’s never to early to be scouting for topics! Chatting with other trainers, reading blogs (like this one!), thinking about presentations you’ve seen, and participating in social media can all provide inspiration for training. I know many of us keep lists of potential topics so that we have a pool of things to choose from depending on the needs of the organization at any point in time. This is a good time of year to look at that list and clean it up a bit. What’s outdated and shouldn’t be included? What’s obviously missing?

7. Attend Training Sessions

Not only can you learn about a topic in a training session or presentation, but you can also learn about how other trainers train. I took a library instruction class in library school that was very good. But the best part of the class was the assignment to go out and observe a number of different librarians teach one-shot library instruction sessions. Seeing the variety of approaches, styles, and personality types helped me understand a lot about what I wanted to do in the classroom (and what I did and didn’t have the personality to do).

8. Plan to Stay Current

With the aid of the internet and social media, resources and groups come and go fairly quickly. It’s worth taking a little time every year or so to think through what organizations would support your training, what conferences would be nice to attend, and if there are any people you want to connect with in the training world. Even if you can’t afford to participate in the formal groups at a given time, there’s a good chance there’s an online option for following and participating in the discussions, and these groups can help you get new ideas for topics and training activities.

9. Spring Cleaning

I’m sure we’re all in a place now where it’s hard to keep up with our RSS readers. I’ve found it really useful to clean out my reader with regularity. I try to do it about once a quarter, but realistically I do it about once a year. Removing those feeds that you don’t read much anyway can save significant time and can make your reader a more productive space. Likewise, cleaning up other feeds, like your Twitter list, can make the time you spend on those sites more valuable. And once there’s less content there, you can feel better about adding new feeds for the sites that you’re just now discovering.

10. Make Notes!!

Throughout all of this, it’s helpful to document things. You might want to make notes of what worked for you this year and what didn’t. You might include new ideas for topics, training activities, groups you’d like to get involved with, or presentation ideas you come up with for conferences. I find these notes helpful because I do a lot less teaching and training in the summer, so the notes come in handy for the Fall. However, they continue to be useful throughout the year as well, so even if you don’t have a few months of a lag in your training sessions you might find yourself relying on them months into the future.

So with that, I hope you have a chance to spend a bit of time reflecting on your training sometime in the near future! I find it really rewarding and helpful, and hopefully these steps will be useful to you, too!

Image Credits:

Capture the Sky by tanjila

Planning Session by WorldIslandInfo.com

Something Different with Fowers by Balakov

What If by Libraryman

My Messy Moleskine by Adulau

Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. She also blogs at Lauren’s Library Blogs and spends a fair amount of time on Twitter, too.

Lauren Pressley

Lauren Pressley is the Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University. In this role she works with librarians and faculty to improve the design of their teaching and to share information about integrating appropriate educational technology. She also works with emerging technologies. Lauren’s passion is helping people learn about the changing information landscape and think about what that means for them as consumers and producers of information. Recently Lauren published So You Want To Be a Librarian and Wikis for Libraries. She was an ALA Emerging Leader in 2008 and was a recognized as a Library Journal Mover & Shaker in 2009. She frequently writes and presents on education, instruction, technology, and the future of libraries. Lauren also blogs at ALA Learning, tweets as @laurenpressley, and can be reached at lauren@laurenpressley.com.

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Filed Under: The Training Life Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Promote Yourself: Get The Word Out About Staff Development!

September 22, 2009 By

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

You need to think about these actions all of the time.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions help you reach your audience.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions will help you make decision makers aware of the inherent value of training.

Promotion. Marketing. Recognition.

These actions are integral to your library’s success.

Quality staff development and training are essential to the success of any library organization. A library that does not have a staff willing to learn and a management supportive of that learning will fade into irrelevance. However, when the many libraries face hard budget choices, staff development is one area that libraries consider expendable or easy to downsize. These heartfelt decisions to eliminate a “luxury” can come back to haunt libraries in the long run with unsatisfied (and mandated) training needs of the remaining staff. To those left standing after difficult cuts are dealing with doing much more more with ever shrinking staff and resources. In these situations the expertise of a staff development professional is vital to helping staff use their resources with the utmost efficiency.

Making staff development visible by promoting training, marketing your services and providing real recognition to the value of training will go a long way to acknowledging the value of staff development/training and help ensure a training’s place in an library’s essential operations support plan.

How do you promote yourself?

The short answer: Talk about yourself, the work you do, and the things you know to people inside and outside of your library.

How do I do it?

Your staff from the top of your staff structure to the bottom of your staff structure should have some knowledge of the training and staff development opportunities you coordinate or provide for the organization. If they do not know anything about what you and your staff can do, they cannot start to recognize the value of what you do for the library.

Get out from behind your desk and teach/lead learning opportunities. These can take the form of may different types of learning/training situations including: formal face to face and virtual classes, prerecorded screencasts, “just-in-time” training, informal one-on-one projects, and open house Q and A sessions. I cannot stress enough how much also need to “be out on the floor” to be an effective trainer. Your visibility both inside and outside of a learning opportunity broadens the respect of your peers and will help you establish yourself as a vital and visible part of the library.

Do not limit yourself to promoting yourself and your library to your internal peers. Seek out engagements outside of your library to talk about what you do, how you do what you do and to ask and offer assistance to other staff development/training professionals.

Network with other library staff development folks either at the local/county/city level, regional level, statewide or national level. If there is no active group, start one. Maryland’s Staff Development group has been invaluable in developing new partnerships, new statewide learning opportunities and sharing each system’s staff development strengths and resources.

Seek out local/regional speaking and training opportunities do broaden your reach and knowledge. Find a great conference and go participate. Put yourself out there and meet your peers and learn from them. These conferences can be local unconference gatherings, local and statewide conferences and national conferences. If nothing meets your needs, create a local/state unconference which gives everyone a chance to be both presenter and attender and can be held for minimal financial outlay.

How do I market my workshops?

The short answer: Communicate what you have to offer both formally and informally to your supervisors/constituents. Develop word of mouth by delivering great and timely content. Seek feedback and incorporate as needed to serve your constituents.

How do I do it?

The task of letting your staff know about what you offer and how that benefits them is the hardest thing to do when marketing your workshops. However your library communicates (email, text, social networking, paper memo) should have a way to let your coworkers know what services you provide as a staff development professional. To connect staff development opportunities, you should get to know what workshops your staff want to attend and what they need to attend. You can use focus groups, surveys or regular meetings to get feedback from your staff on what they would like to know and use those opportunities to let staff know what staff development opportunities are already offered at your library.

You can also market yourself by delivering great, timely and fun workshops. Use those workshop attendees as a captive audience to bounce ideas and provide live feedback and a sense of your staff and how they view your workshops. You can bring in outside folks to share what they know to your library. Your connection to a different voice shows that you work is informed by the latest trends in librarianship and technology.

Perhaps the easiest way of marketing you and your staff development opportunities is to get out among the staff that you serve. Ask if they need help at their desks/work areas. Encourage an open door policy for staff tap your knowledge and skills. Your assistance builds trust and markets your skills via positive word of mouth.

Creating new staff development opportunities from staff suggestions accomplishes two things. First, you are responding to the direct needs of your staff which builds trust and good word of mouth. In addition, developing new staff development opportunities keeps you as a trainer refreshed and helps prevent workshop repetition and burnout.

How do I create recognition for my work?

The short answer: Ask for recognition to create recognition. Evaluate short and long term and change when needed. Seek outside engagements to boost recognition. Generate measurements and metrics to boost recognition of the value of your staff development opportunities.

How do I do it?

Don’t be shy about asking someone who appreciates the content in the workshop you offered or the assistance you provided to write a note to your supervisor. It can be difficult for a supervisor to keep track of all of the different learning sessions you provide both inside and outside of formal training. Direct feedback from the people you serve is a powerful card to hold in an evaluation cycle.


Promotion Artwork

As a training and staff development professional, you should look at your workshops with immediate evaluations (using plus/delta aka keep and toss, and smile sheets) and over the long term (focus groups, anecdotes and surveys) to gauge and measure the change created by your work. Use these surveys to create data about your classes and to serve as a basis for reports if needed.

Another great metric is to measure the actual dollar value saved by your organization by providing training. Ask yourself some questions to begin capturing this data: How much staff time was saved because of proper training? How much staff time and travel money was saved by bringing training to your staff? How much money was saved by you sharing what you learned at a conference with your staff providing them the information from a conference without every staff member paying to attend? This is just getting “return on investment” data which is a powerful advocacy tool when discussing staff development’s value to a library.

Why should you become your best cheerleader?

You are the best person to advocate for the role of staff development in your library. Don’t expect or assume anyone else will advocate for you.

Just because you provide some nebulous value to an organization, that value is diminished without some serious promotion of what you do, marketing of your staff development encounters and recognition for the role they play withing any library.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Mohandas Gandhi

Maurice Coleman

Maurice Coleman, has been Technical Trainer at Harford County (MD) Public Library in North Eastern Maryland for the last 7 years. He has 20 years of experience training all ages how to sensibly use technology, computer hardware and software. He has also trained on effective technology planning and deployment, social media skills, nonprofit organizational development and fundraising, community organizing and presentation skills. He has presented at numerous conferences on topics such as digital personal branding, technology implementation, presentation and training skills, community development and effectively using social media. He hosts the library training podcast T is for Training and writes for the American Library Association’s LearnRT blog ALALearning. For his work he was named a 2010 Library Journal Mover and Shaker and received the Citizens for Maryland Libraries Davis McCarn Technology Award. You can find him on twitter @baldgeekinmd

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