Track 3: Thing 26 Taking the Lead: Connecting with your Stakeholders

I looked at track 16 and the DIY assignment and thought that as much as that seemed interesting, I was really very interested in Heidi Neltner's Toolkit video. I think I have done a good job building my program over the past years, by setting goals and working towards them, like mentioned in thing 16. I feel like I am more established and have a clearer vision for the library that really fits in with the school mission and curriculum. However, I feel like I don't do a great job of sharing that information well with students, teachers, parents and administrators, which is something that I needed to explore more. Therefore, I watched Heidi's video in hopes of gathering new tools and ideas. In watching the Webinar, I didn't gain any new tools for my toolkit, however, I did gain new ideas for using the tools. First off, I think Heidi made a very important point when she said that you need to assess what the needs are. I feel this assessment piece is really missing for me, yet it is so valuable. I never really thought about the idea of polling the kids using Google Forms. I can definitely see this as useful when it comes to collection development. Polling the teachers to see how I can best help them would also be very useful. I was thinking it would be great to poll them and see what information would be nice to include in a S'more newsletter. I loved the idea of a S'more newsletter because I have tried other newsletters in the past and I feel like they went right in the trash. So, by her mentioning the analytic feature, I would be able to get quick feedback to see if it is being used. In addition, she shared a resource infographic with teachers that I loved the layout for. She also suggested app smashing and making a Thinglink that would link teachers to directions or lesson idea for the app. I thought that was a genius idea.

Although, students and teachers are stakeholders that I need to improve contact with, I truly feel that I am weakest when it comes to communicating with administrators and parents. When it comes to administrators, I have thought every year of making a statistics report for them, but have been very hesitant because it would require a lot of work and I don't think it would be read. Her point about keeping your information short really resinated with me. I had never thought to create an infographic for my principal before. What a great quick way to share information. I am definitely committed to creating one for my principal this year, in which I will highlight the new programs and initiatives, the number of collaborative inquiry based projects carried out this year, and library statistics. I wish I could find a student growth statistic, but I can't really think of anything I do that I can measure that with. As for parents, I have tried to increase my presence and communicate with them more. I do a good job updating my webpage and posting information there on a weekly basis. I started a Twitter account for the library as well and I have an RSS feed for that on my website as well. Unfortunately, I do not have a ton of parent followers. Therefore, for this assignment I decided to build a fb page for the library. I really liked how she suggested making a logo for the library and using it on our Facebook, Twitter and any other media site. I then created one in Canva to be added to my new Facebook and Twitter page. Making the Canva was very easy. In fact, I am already dreaming of other ways I can use this tool. Unfortunately, I can't say the same thing for Facebook. It took me 2 days to get a Business Facebook page up and running. As it turns out Facebook no longer allows you to be able to have a business account without creating a personal one. Once you have a personal account then you need to create a business account from that page. I finally think I have it up and running and now I am in desperate need of some friends. My page is: www.facebook.com/LGESlibrary. I was able to create this personal URL by going into the "about" page and I was also able to provide a link to my school webpage. I hoping that will help to increase the traffic to my site and reach a wider audience (hopefully parents). If you get a chance hopefully you can "like" my page!