Patricia Martin, marketing expert and author of the popular book, Renaissance Generation, shares her most current research on what we can expect from the coming cycle of re-birth. A sought after strategist, Martin has worked with clients such as Discovery Channel, Microsoft and Target. She reveals what lies at the beating heart of the social movements forming the next wave of prosperity. Martin understands our challenges and provides solid ideas for how libraries should respond so they are reborn, not left behind. You will learn how to apply the insights to position your library as a critical asset in your community, whether it's a town, a campus or an organization.

WordPress is a very popular blogging tool, which is exactly what it was designed for back in 2003. And it's still a terrific choice for blogging, but it's oh so much more: It's a robust CMS (content management system) that can be used to power your whole website, whether you want to blog or not. Designing and maintaining an attractive, dynamic and useful website has always been a time consuming challenge. WordPress to the rescue! With its pre-designed themes, web-based editing, and built in widgets that let you add dynamic content, you'll have a web presence that will be easy for your students to use and easy for you and your staff to maintain. In this session, you'll learn from library pros about hosting your own version of WordPress to take full advantage of all its features.

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.

“Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible” (Mark Jenkins, To Timbuktu). Learn about maps and other digital primary resources for all students to investigate and interpret in this session by Kay Hones. She’ll cover resources; yearly events/dates for information literacy online activities; and her top five sources for new links, blogs, and more!

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 how 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.

Electronic information discovery tends to subtract traditional contextual clues. Digital natives can easily gather tremendous quantities of resources without any real understanding of a particular topic. As such, young researchers are left drowning in information, which too often produces superficial synthesis at best. On the other end of the spectrum lie grossly overdue assignments and plagiarized material. As information professionals, we should put the lack of context on the educational radar. We need to recognize when our students are trying to navigate without it. We need to teach them to recognize the absence and strategies to build it back in. Join Sue Smith and Lauri Vaughan in an exploration of what University of Kansas anthropologist Michael Wesch coined the “collapse of context” and how to address it in the classroom.

If you want to learn about technology, ask a digital native, someone who has grown up with computers. So goes the conventional wisdom, anyway. We can indeed learn from our students, but, according to presenter Mary Ann Bell, adults need to be careful not to attribute more expertise and understanding to youngsters than is justified. In this session, Bell will share results of online surveys she conducted that reveal gaps in what kids really know, and she’ll discuss how to address these areas, which include information ethics, website evaluation, smart and safe searching, and other topics.

Technology and the ever-changing web have enabled librarians and information professionals to transform their environments and services. But what does the future hold? Hear from a panel of chief information officers who have a long history with libraries in the public and academic sectors. Gain insights, stretch your imagination, and spark innovative ideas for adding even more value in your environment.

Under a provision added to CIPA, schools are now required to provide students with education about internet safety. Providing inaccurate, fear-based information, which unfortunately is all too common, will not effectively protect younger students or empower teens to make good choices. Such information will also create challenges in implementing Web 2.0 technologies for instruction. In this session, Nancy Willard will provide research-based information on the actual online risks and make recommendations for how to effectively educate students and parents about these risks.

Most students are digital natives, having grown up in a world that has always included, email, texting and other forms of digital communication. Most teachers are digital immigrants, with established rules on how communication between student and teacher should occur. Andrew and Brooke will discuss how to introduce digital etiquette with students to ensure that communication lines remain open and accessible!

In this session, a panel of librarian leaders from public school and independent school libraries, academic libraries, and public libraries will model and engage in collaborative problem-solving and participatory librarianship by hosting a panel discussion in which participants will be invited to share challenges they are facing in their library settings. They will create conversations around these challenges and use the “wisdom of the crowd”—that’s YOU—to help explore creative solutions to challenges. Not only will they tap into the energies of participants who are physically present, but they’ll also invite virtual participation from the library community at large who may not be in physical attendance to help contribute to these conversations. They will utilize face to face dialogue as well as virtual means including Poll Everywhere, Skype, Twitter, and other cloud computing applications to expand the “room” and the wisdom that can be gained through personal learning networks.

How do you get effective technology instruction and meaningful research lessons successfully integrated into a districtwide curriculum? A curriculum coordinator, a librarian, and a district technology specialist each had a piece of this puzzle. It took teamwork and determination to fit the pieces together to transform a districtwide curriculum to achieve 21st-century standards. Learn how a school district’s intranet social networking tool allows consistency and better vertical alignment across 67 campuses and how that technology became the key piece in the collaboration puzzle. Come learn practical and exciting ways to use open source technologies to achieve similar results in your district.

The tools we use amplify our abilities and extend our memories. As one of the best web-based tools for organizing, highlighting, and sharing information, Diigo deserves to be considered as a cornerstone of everyone’s personal learning network. In this session, Kathy Johnson will demonstrate its features and functions and show how you can customize the tool to fit your specific needs and learning styles. Additionally, using the educators desktop, she’ll show you how to set up collaborative learning environments for your students and enhance their abilities to keep all their information organized.