Ideas Sparked and Inspiration Inspired

I attended the webinar on Embedded Librarianship given by the ALA Publishing Webinar group earlier this week. I took it as an opportunity to learn about the topic as well as best practices for delivering instruction via the online format.

Two things that I liked immediately that the presenter did: she provided an over arching goal for the session in addition to the learning targets (not objectives - clever), and gave a poll after her brief introduction. It is incredibly hard to have the audience participate in a webinar, so I thought the instructor did a nice job of offering active learning techniques several times throughout her presentation.

It is her belief that learning communities are formed around content, standards (in the case of education), or interests and/or desires. This is an interesting statement, one that has the power to inspire collaboration between individuals.

Her suggestions for embedded librarianship involved examples from inspirational leaders in all sorts of libraries:

• Encourage networking via social media sites in order to establish learning partnerships


• Connect with experts in the field via Skype


• Encourage librarians in educational settings to contribute to classroom activities via Twitter


• Use Facebook to set up a special interest groups to foster discussion


• The use of QR Codes to provide directional assistance within the library stacks

She also talked about several tools such as, Ning, Google hang out, Netvibes and Scoop It! I left the session inspired to check out all of these tools!

Improve Instruction Assessment - notes from a webinar

On January 11th, I attended an ALA workshop on improving your library instruction assessment. At first I thought that 90 minutes was much too long and I wondered how I would remain interested, but before I knew it the session was over and I wondered where the time went. The instructor was fabulous - interesting to listen too, insightful and knowledgeable! She also integrated active learning techniques into the session, which is truly impressive as there were more than 200 attendees in this online class.

The workshop discussed ways in which to incorporate simple classroom assessment tools into a one-shot library instructional session; such as, polls, quizzes or questionnaires and one-minute papers.

Begin with the end in mind or vice versa. Your learning objectives can dictate the type of assessment questions that you ask; or you can begin with exploring what you want your students to be able to demonstrate upon completion of the course, and then create your learning objectives from those evaluative statements. One thing is for certain; planning is key to any successful training session. You need to identify what you hope to achieve and then assess whether or not the students have been successful.

Another key point made by the instructor: if you are not going to evaluate your materials or your delivery; then do not bother to evaluate the student's learning... it will be a waste of every one's time. You must be prepared to review the results of the assessment and make changes. Teaching is a cyclical process.
- plan
- deliver
- evaluate
- improve
- plan
- deliver