Look At The Opportunities In 2019 For Future Ready Librarians!

We have an exciting new update for the Future Ready Librarians professional learning opportunities we offer and awesome ways to be connected to this amazing community.  

At ISTE this week, we introduced this new, one page flyer from the Alliance for Excellent Education and Follett, which will direct you to the different opportunities for Future Ready Librarians including...

And two new ones coming up in the fall, the Future Ready Micro-Credential...Empowering Students as Creators and the Self Assessment Tool for Future Ready Librarians.  

We can't wait to share these important learning and reflection tools.  They are going to help all of us move our practice and skills as Future Ready Librarians to the next level. 

You will find this flyer here.  

Feel free to share it with your team, administrators and others as you work on becoming a Future Ready Librarian making a difference within your library, community, state and throughout the world. 

And for more information, you can visit the Future Ready Librarian webpage here too. 

The 2019 AASL Best Apps and Websites Are Here...Check Them Out, Friends!

This summer, at the ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC, the AASL Best Apps and Best Websites were announced.  This is always one of my favorite events of the year. 

The apps and websites that were announced as winners today were incredible.  Congrats to all of the winners and the people who create, support and show us how to use them.  

For the last several years, I have served on the AASL Best Websites and Apps Committees.  The last two years, I have been part of the amazing Best Apps Committee, along with our chair, Mary Morgan Ryan and other awesome friends listed above.

As shared on this slide, Our charge is to develop an annual list of top apps that AASL will recognize as being the best of the best for teaching and learning. 

When making our selections we connected them to the AASL Shared Foundations which I find so helpful in not only evaluating the apps, but thinking of ways I will use them in my practice as a teacher and librarian.

Let's get right to the point!

Here are the....

2019 AASL 20 Best Apps For Teaching and Learning, friends!

I also put together a few places you can go to and find all fo the AASL Best Apps curated together in one spot.  These are terrific to share in the fall with teachers and students as you share the apps and websites with them too.

There is the AASL 2019 Best Apps Collection by Destiny, 

AASL 2019 Best Apps Symbaloo and...

AASL 2019 Best Apps Wakelet Collection, which by the way...Wakelet was one of our winners this year!

You will find the Google Slides presentation that we put together for todays celebration here.

I also created a Collection by Destiny for the AASL 2019 Best Websites that you will find here. 

The new 2019 Best Apps will join the ones on the AASL site here and...

....2019 Best Websites can be found here. 

Again, congrats to all of the winners!  

Thank you for creating such special places for our students and teachers to explore, create, inquire, curate, collaborate and engage in learning and teaching.  You are all making a difference in libraries, education and within the lives of our kids. 

PLAYLISTS....A Total Game Changer On How Resources Are Shared In Collections By Destiny

Yesterday I had a collaboration meeting with my friends and colleagues, Megan and Quin, as we talked and brainstormed about the instructional technology plans for the upcoming school year.  We are excited to work on this throughout the summer and roll it out to our teachers during back-to-school time in August.

A big part of this plan is the way we will be curating and sharing the different instructional technology tools, apps, resources and project ideas.  We want to build a place that is easy for everyone to use and robust enough to bring everything together in one spot.

As we build this out, Collections by Follett Destiny will be a big part of this work.

Last year within Collections, I created a Collection Set of Resources For Van Meter of lots of different Collections that held resources including Comic Creators and Resources, Digital Storytelling Tools and Resources, Fonts and Lettering, and Creating Animated GIF's. 

When we go to present these to our staff, and even our students, Follett has added something recently that will make this super easy and awesome!

They are called....

Let me show you how to create a Playlist! 

In a Collection, you click on the brownish orange circle with the + sign in the right hand corner.  It is circled in the picture above too.

You then click on Playlist and...

 ...add a title for your Playlist. 

 It lets you drag....

 ...or select the items to add to the Playlist. 

 They fill in the Playlist as you move them.

 You can also edit and even....

...click on the three little dots to...

 ...make a Copy, Delete or Play.  This is the button you click on to actually Play the Collection.

So, with the Digital Storytelling Tools and Resources Collection Playlist, you will find every site, library book or eResource, database, OER resource, or other online resource that I find, on this site and ready to share within our community.

When I click on Play, it brings up the screen above and lets me click through all 8 of the resources that I have added to the Playlist. 

The Playlist is then stored in that specific Collection,

which I can access anytime and refer anyone to as well.  

As you can see, Playlists are a game changer for what we do as Future Ready Librarians as we curate resources, empower students as creators, lead from the library and so many other things.  

Give Playlists a try...I know you will see them as a game changer within your library, classrooms and school community too!