The Google Books project has the modest goal of scanning all of the world’s books, converting them to digital form, and making them searchable and accessible. To date, more than 15 million books, containing 5-billion-plus pages and 2 trillion words have been scanned and indexed. However, challenges remain. Google continues to innovate on ranking of book results, display formats for new devices, and improvements in scan quality. The cost of accurately identifying the owner of the digital rights has emerged as an important nontechnical challenge to opening up many millions of out-of-print books. Crawford addresses these challenges and looks at some of the new opportunities arising from the emerging digital books corpus — from social collaboration to linguistic analysis and other new areas that are only beginning to be discovered. He shares the latest on the emerging ebook market, including Google’s entry into selling ebooks and discusses how this forms a key part of Google’s approach to making all books accessible and useful.

The move towards ebooks has many school media centers abandoning traditional print reference resources and a handful of schools jettisoning traditional collections altogether. With myriad electronic resources available at the click of a mouse, the notion of collection has never been more amorphous or more important as we determine how to identify and filter resources to best serve the Digital Natives who are our students. In this first of two sessions devoted to ebooks in education, four school librarians from diverse settings will discuss some factors to keep in mind as we determine how “e” school libraries need to be in this digital age. Topics include when databases trump print (and when they might not), what to look for when licensing ebooks, and pitfalls and opportunities for librarians collecting in a brave new world.

Many students are among the consumers investing in e-reading devices, and many school libraries are piloting hardware loans to gauge the appeal and practicality of a switch to digital formats. This second session on ebooks in education provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the constantly changing ebook landscape, paying particular attention to the instructional advantages and potential pitfalls when using dedicated ereader devices in the school environment. The presenters offer an overview of the most common e-reader devices and applications, files, formats, and DRM issues related to ebook content; some practical concerns when purchasing ebooks; ethnographic response from teens using e-readers; and sources for free ebooks.

The way authors and students connect is changing enormously owing to the internet. For the last 2 years, Catherine Balkin, who has been arranging author visits in schools for more than 20 years, researched and worked on Skype chats for authors in schools and libraries. Learn some of the things she and her authors and illustrators have learned in the process. Join in a Skype chat with children’s book author Elizabeth Levy to hear about online chats from an author’s perspective.

In this session, two Phillips Academy librarians will demonstrate practical applications for teaching with LibGuides to collaborating and noncollaborating faculty and others across campus. Strategies include providing consistent learning experiences across the curriculum; creating guides for nonresearch-driven courses; building one-shot sessions to deliver advanced information fluency skills; and collecting and organizing resources in subjects, courses, and/or assignments.

Learn the four cornerstones to a successful marketing strategy for your school library, including how to create your unique brand, determine your target audience, recognize your strengths, and mold your image. Geiger and Arriaga will share the techniques they use to target the different segments of their patron base, including faculty, students, and administration. Learn how marketing strengthened their library’s role in the curricular life of the school and demonstrated their value to administrators.

Unlike some of the more recent vague generational labels such as Generation X and Y, today we are witnessing the emergence of a fully-loaded generational epithet: Digital Native. This generation has grown up with ubiquitous internet access, is filling our schools and shopping malls, dominates every corner of the social web, and is making their way into office spaces. Certainly, as with the assumptions about previous generations, we face challenges. Based upon her work as editor and contributor to the forthcoming book Dancing With Digital Natives: Staying in Step with the Generation Transforming the Way Business is Done, Manafy provides strategic insights into the obstacles and opportunities presented by this generation. As an information industry professional with her pulse on what's happening and what we need to know going forward, she shares some of the trends we need to pay attention to as we plan activities and services in libraries and prepare to invite them into our workforce.

What actually happens in a student’s mind during online research? How is it different from an adult’s experience of the same process? What induces a young learner to adopt better research methods? Research skills trainer Tasha Bergson-Michelson uses case studies from her work with 2nd to 8th graders in public and independent schools to illustrate the surprising things we can discover by listening to the way students talk about their own online and offline research experiences. She uncovers elements of literacy that are unique to online environments—and sometimes contrary to traditional methods of literacy learning—and demonstrates a refined set of research teaching methods focused on identification, visualization, iteration, and pursuit. She illustrates how these methods help students (and even adults) develop new forms of reading that transform their confidence, competence, and engagement when undertaking research, both online and off.

HomeworkNYC Apps: A Decentralized Approach to Homework Help, is an IMLS-funded grant project awarded to New York City’s three library systems. The project is the outcome of research conducted by New York City’s public libraries which showed that students were not strong users of the libraries’ homework help resources and tweens and teens were looking for homework support from the online spaces they inhabit— Facebook, MySpace, Google, Wikipedia, and so on. Librarians working on the project realized that in order to support students, libraries needed to be in the web spaces where students spend their time and also to work with teachers and parents to inform them about the positive role that Web 2.0 technologies and social networking play in student lives. Hear from the project’s outreach specialist about its components, including the development of a suite of apps for use with Facebook, iGoogle, and via the HomeworkNYC website.

You can really engage students by integrating Web 2.0 tools into your curriculum. Learn from Glogster ambassador and Star Discovery educator Robin Metaj how to collaborate with teachers to integrate Discovery Education streaming media, podcasting, Google Lit Trips, Voicethread, and more to promote meaningful communication about literature between students and teachers. Metaj examines the tools and shares implementation strategies with you while focusing on curriculum integration. Come away with new tools for interacting with your students. This session highlights applications in the language arts and humanities curriculum areas.

This session shares how a 8th grade classroom teacher and her media specialist—presenter Susan Grigsby—collaborated on a lesson that involved the writing process, photography, book creation, and the Web 2.0 tool BeFunky. Using language arts Georgia Performance Standards, Grigsby’s colleague designed a lesson in which her students would write a personal hero story but in graphic novel format. Grigsby used a range of other Georgia Performance Standards to enhance the lesson with technology. Students were exposed to a variety of graphic novels with special attention to style, word/graphic choices, and design. They were then instructed on the use of digital cameras and the web-based tool BeFunky.com, where they uploaded photographs and digitally altered them according to the graphic style they selected for their stories. Learn how the technology-, content-, and creativity-rich process worked, right down to the creation of personal graphic novels and the development of an assessment rubric that included design, spelling, word/picture relationships, and proper grammar.

Do you Glog? Got Prezi? This session highlights the last 2 years of the ALA’s Best 25 Websites for Teaching and Learning, covering everything from online note-taking to presentation. Go beyond PowerPoint! Excite your teachers and students with these exciting, innovative, and free sources. Leave with a tool box of all sorts of great web resources.