Ready to Read at New York Libraries

PrintA new year = a new project! I am happy to report that I am now working on the New York State Library’s Ready to Read at New York Libraries program. If you are not familiar with this project, I encourage you to check it out (especially if you are a public librarian working with young children and families!).

Here’s a description from the Ready to Read website:

Ready to Read at New York Libraries is an initiative of the New York State Education Department designed to improve and expand the availability of high quality public library early learning services in local communities across the State. Through this initiative, families and caregivers will be provided with the knowledge needed to prepare their young children for their school years ahead.

The priority component of Ready to Read at New York Libraries through 2019 is the Early Childhood Public Library Staff Development Program, a train-the-trainer program that will strengthen library staff skills to ensure that families and caregivers with young children receive the highest quality services at all of New York’s 1,000 public library outlets.

Also, be sure to check out the program’s Facebook page!

And the terrific family resource, DayByDayNY, with daily songs, stories, and activities families can do with their young children to grow early literacy skills. I posted a screen shot below:

Screenshot

ILEAD USA Seed & Grow Videos

As part of ILEAD USA, teams were asked to answer specific questions about their projects while being videotaped (called Seed & Grow Videos). It’s a great way to learn more about the projects coming out of ILEAD here in NY, and a good follow up to the pecha kuchas that were created earlier this year.

These were taped (do we still say taped?) by each team either over the summer or in the fall.

The Red Hook Collaboratorium’s video is particularly creative!

Nice work, ILEADers!

Great Pecha Kucha Examples

The ILEAD USA teams brought great project ideas, creativity, and fun to their pecha kucha presentations at our June session in Utica. I invite you to view all of their hard work below!

And of course, because I am a librarian, I must also give you the definition of a pecha kucha (thanks to Wikipedia):

A presentation style in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each (6 minutes and 40 seconds in total).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PechaKucha

Inspiration at ILEAD USA

The first ILEAD USA in-person session was held at the end of March at the Mid York Library System in Utica, NY. It was three days of training, networking, and INSPIRATION!

I want to thank the eight teams for participating and Mid York for hosting. The NY State Library has more in-person sessions planned for June and October, and I’m excited to see the team projects progress. Each team is developing an innovative project that uses technology to meet a community need.

We did a bunch of brainstorming in March using outcome-based evaluation (OBE), and the projects are really taking shape. If you need help with project planning and evaluation, please feel free to visit the State Library’s site for the OBE worksheets we used.

Now back to the inspiration! As ILEAD is a national program with multiple states participating, keynote speakers were streamed from Illinois for all states to view. One really stood out for me in terms of its creative and thought-provoking look at libraries and their future. Check out Eli Neiburger’s presentation:

Free training list on WebJunction

I’m prepping for a mini-session that I’m conducting on WebJunction next month, and I came across something pretty great and worth sharing!

WebJunction and the Wyoming State Library have been compiling a list of free, library-related trainings each month. The list is organized by categories (everything from academic libraries to fundraising to technology) and then by date. Abstracts and links for more info are given. These are not just WebJunction sessions but trainings from a variety of sources.

Take a look: http://www.webjunction.org/find-training/free-events.html