AI for Library and Media Specialists

AI for Library and Media Specialists

Feb 4, 2025

Feb 4, 2025

Feb 4, 2025

Feb 4, 2025

Transform Your Library with AI 📚

Join us on for an exclusive SchoolAI sandbox event designed for Library/Media Specialists! Learn innovative ways to foster reading engagement, enhance digital literacy, and reimagine your library space using AI tools.

Special Guest

Featured speaker Shannon Miller, Future Ready Librarians Leader and Author, will share expert insights on integrating AI in library spaces.

What to Expect

  • Practical strategies for using SchoolAI in your library

  • Creative approaches to digital and information literacy

  • Hands-on exploration of AI tools for student engagement

Transcript

Transcript

Hello. Hello.

Welcome, everyone.

I see that we are in.

We've got, a lot of friends here.

I hope everybody can hear. I hope we are all excited. Welcome. Welcome. I'm gonna go ahead and have the chat open.

Feel free to introduce yourself. Say hi. We're gonna give people a few minutes. I know it's your evening time or depending on where you're at. There's people from all around the world.

But, share where you're from, where you're at, how your school day was. I hope everyone had a great day at school, but I'm so excited to hear from you.

Shannon, hello. Welcome.

Hi. Are you able there you go. I was just making sure that you were able to unmute. Hi, Shannon.

How are you?

Great. And we also have Nick Provenzano here of SchoolAI fame. Hello.

Hi. We are here. The three of us are the, three amigos today.

We are going to be, going and doing this sandbox.

I would love to hear, as everyone's coming in, welcome.

We are here for the SchoolAI sandbox.

Today's focus is on library media specialists using spaces in their libraries. But do not fear if you are thinking to yourself, I am not a librarian.

I am not a media specialist. That is okay. You are an educator and you can get a lot of ideas from this session. And our biggest section is we're gonna go over how to make a space and different ideas, and exciting, tips and tricks from everyone in this session. So we're gonna give it, like, three more minutes welcoming everybody in.

I know for me, when I came home from school, I was ready to put on my comfy clothes and lean back and relax.

So I hope that you guys are all relaxing, listening to this fun webinar.

But I will say too, it's so fun to kinda click along and make things. Our goal is to have you share. We would love it if everyone could leave with something to use in your classrooms, in your libraries, in your lessons, in your PD sessions.

We want you to have ideas to use, after this session. So hi from TCEA. Hi. Oh my gosh. Tell the team we said hi. We missed them. I'm so glad you're here.

Been following along.

Yes. Yes. We are all, just watching. Hi from Argentina.

Hi from Colorado.

Hi from Garden Grove close to Disneyland.

Yum.

Makes, they we made tamales in Spanish class today.

Ugh. Best Spanish class ever.

I remember making rice pudding in my Spanish classes.

Welcome. I hope everyone is in the chat sharing where they are from. Last Sandbox session, we had someone, all the way in Australia who was like, it's my summer, and I just couldn't I was struggling to wrap my mind around that. I was struggling to wrap my mind around that.

So I'm a grown up educated woman, and I was like, that's crazy. That is so cool that you are all the way there communicating and hanging out with us. Sue from New Jersey, Oklahoma, California, Wisconsin, Tennessee.

Hi, everybody. I'm just so glad we're here. I am so glad we're there is nothing better. Nick and Shannon, I'm sure you agree. Getting teachers together to collaborate.

Teachers are the best.

I was joking with me and my mom went on a vacation somewhere, and we were actually in Belize.

And someone every, like, person that drove us somewhere or whatever was so nice and they were like, are you guys teachers?

And we were like, I don't know if I should be offended or whatever because they could clock us real quick.

And I was like, is it because we're delightful and funny and smart?

And he was like, and funny and smart? And he was like, you're just loud. So, yeah, teachers are the best. So excited that we're here. Alright. We have given it three minutes. I am going to go ahead and start the session officially.

Welcome again. Sorry to everyone who was here early slash on time ish. Welcome to the SchoolAI sandbox where today we are going to be chatting with and getting ideas for library media specialists on how to use spaces in their libraries to support their students. But no fear, if you are not a library media specialist, this is for all educators, and our goal today is that you can leave with a space or an idea of how to use school AI to support your students.

So the first section, I'm going to be going over some of the materials and ideas we have for library media specialists.

And then, we are going to hear a little bit from our good friends Nick Probanzano and Shannon Miller.

They are going to be sharing their ideas, their thoughts about AI in general in libraries and in education, and how this can help and support our students.

And then the third section, the third section is that we are going to be creating spaces using some of these ideas.

So please be active in the chat. Please create things with us. We are going to be sharing, collaborating.

This is our very own PLC of AI educators.

So I am so excited. Let's get going. Nick and Shannon, do you guys wanna introduce yourselves before I dive into some of the materials?

Shannon, you first. Go right ahead. Go right ahead.

Okay.

My name is Shannon McClintock Miller, and I am the district teacher librarian at Van Meter Community School in Iowa, and I'm so happy to be here today. I see, lots of familiar faces, so it's really great that you guys joined us. I've been looking forward to this all day.

So, so glad you're here, Shannon. Nick, go ahead. Take it away.

I've been Looking forward to this all day too. I get to hang out with two of my favorite people, all my new favorite people showing up. This is wonderful.

My name is. You might know me on the interwebs as at the nerdy teacher. I have been teaching for over twenty years. I've been with SchoolAI since October. I've had the pleasure to collaborate with Shannon for over a decade on this, that, and the other thing. So, I'm really excited for this collaboration and all the future collaborations we're gonna put together, to showcase how we can utilize AI to make school awesome every day and every library awesome every day.

Oh, I love that. Make every library awesome with AI. Oh, my goodness.

Okay. Well, and then to wrap it up, my name is Casey Chambers.

I am here at SchoolAI. I was an educator for ten years and a coach for three years, and I am so thrilled to be here at SchoolAI so I can nerd out and talk about AI with teachers every single day. And it is so fun. It's the best job. So we are going to go ahead and dive in. I hope everyone has been able to, log in to SchoolAI.

So right here on my screen, this is the login page that you get when you log into SchoolAI. You can create a free account. You just log in with Google.

For my library media specialist friends, we have me, Shannon, and Nick have come together to create a four library media specialists, collection of spaces that are right here on the homepage.

And I wanted to dive into a couple of these ideas, and then Shannon and Nick are also going to dive in on these thoughts and ideas.

So I know that, library media specialists, your guys' jobs are just expansive. You guys have connections with the whole school, every grade, every student. You guys are you guys are technology leaders. You guys are thought leaders. You guys are leaders with professional development. I it is astounding the amount of roles and things that you guys have and occupy in a school.

So this is a very small, small jumping off point that I wanted to share with you. So first of all, I am sharing a digital citizenship space.

So this one is designed for eighth graders, and it's, specifically for an elementary that's in in my local area. But what I wanted to show is it is just an exploration where students can dive in and have a chat back and forth. But one thing I wanted to point out with school AI spaces is you can, create more options where you can change the level. So as your classes are coming in and out, in and out, in and out, you can change the level and launch it for different grade levels.

And so, like, for example, you launch it for eighth graders and then you can launch it again for another class, and it will be the level that you need. So that's the first thing I wanted to share is school AI is very personalized for each grade level, which is really, really cool because digital citizenship for twelfth graders looks very, very different than digital citizenship for a sixth grader or a third grader.

And so educators out there that is a feature that we have here.

This is another one, learning to categorize library materials. It walks you through that.

Another one that's really, really cool is a research assistant.

So this is one that you can have as an open ended chat.

When we are launching AI to students, we really want to give them an opportunity to use it as a learning tool.

AI is now a part of their word their word a part of their world.

A statistic that I read probably six months ago, is that sixty five percent of the jobs that our students will have in the future have not even been created yet, which is mind blowing to think about.

And so as we are providing these resources for our students, we want to think, hey, this is an open ended AI chat for you to research and learn.

And so again, you can give a specific audience.

You can when you are ready, let's say you're ready to launch this for your students, you can add it to a Google classroom. If you are a partner with us, you can add it to canvas or you just get the QR code or a link.

And then you can provide this to your students. I'm actually going to send this one in the chat right now, and I know, Nick also has one that he's gonna launch for everybody too. But I would love it if you guys would participate in this one, maybe ask it a couple of questions to see how it can guide the students.

One of the things, that I would also like to mention is that we are really wanting students to be owners of their own learning.

We want students to own their learning and be active participants in their learning, not just active, instruction followers. We want them to be active participants. And so when we provide them with chat bots and things like this, it really gives them an opportunity to ask their questions that they wanna ask and get curious.

And so you can see here that all of the participants that are jumping in, I can see all of your chats. And I hope it's okay if I open up and I can, kind of see what everyone is asking. Everyone's just getting started right now.

But you can go through and see the questions. And how cool would it be is if, let's say, Elaine has a question that she is not understanding. I, as a librarian or as an educator, can go find her and help her and and say, oh, this is a question. Did you get did you get help? Like, let's talk about it. And this gives us some really good insight on how our students are doing.

And so all I just wanted to make sure everyone knew that this is a really key part of using AI with students is that we know what they're saying. We know what's going on, and we know how to use those conversations to support our students. We're not just sitting back at our computers. I don't know one librarian who just sits back and watches the kids go to the library. You guys are active participants in the students, in the students interactions. And so use these as a way to help and support your students.

So, Nick and Shannon, did you guys have anything to add about this data dashboard or anything that could help and support as we as we talk about this?

Really quick. I wanna jump in. Stephanie asked a great question, and I wanna answer it before we jump into that.

Stephanie says, is there a way to easily send the rejoin links to everyone at once? So every student that is in a space has their own personalized link. So there's no way to send one out to everyone.

But the tip that I give to students, is that when they get into their space, they can just go ahead and bookmark it, and that will be their space. So that link to that space, as long as it is, still an open space, they will have access to. And even if the teacher pauses it, they can actually still go into that space and see all of the things that they have done. So that bookmarking feature with the little star there, if you're using Chrome or any of the other web browsers that you use. They have a bookmarking feature, so I would have students bookmark it right away. So that is my suggestion, for all of you to use.

That's a great idea. And and I think that's a great idea for that continuous learning. So, Shannon, did you have any suggestions or ideas as we are diving into, the data dashboard?

I think one thing that's so great about this is it's such an easy way to, like, support our kids in research and to be able, like you said, to not only see what they're asking but really guide them if it's going over and talking to them, if it's them like sharing with a partner, you know, being able to support them, if they're stuck or having troubles. And also just celebrating the ideas that they have in research, I think, is is so important too. And I love it because this would be great for our youngest learners to our oldest learners and a wonderful way we don't get to see their thinking, you know, all the time. And so I think a a wonderful way to to kinda walk through what we're doing in research and just accessing, information too.

I love it.

Shannon, I love that you pointed that out that we don't always get to see their thinking in that research process, and that is so true. Like, I hope it's okay, Amy, that I'm out here pulling up your the pulling up your chat. But this is a great example where I can see, oh, she's asking for these specific concepts. She's asking for these specific ideas.

And then I can watch her as she builds on those ideas.

And so the other thing that kinda came to mind, Shannon, is that this is really self paced. I don't know about you guys, but when I would provide a research project to my students, I would watch their eyes go like, I would pick, like, the six students. I would watch their eyes glaze over of just, like, terror. They would look at the full library.

They would look at, like, the huge Google search. And there would my my kids were fifth graders, and so they would just be so extremely overwhelmed.

And so when you think about how a chatbot is just one question at a time, It is just one question at a time, one pace when you are ready for the next thing, it will give it to you. When you need clarification, it will it will give it to you. If you like, if I was right here with Amy and I said, I don't understand. Can you explain diaspora to me?

Can you I don't understand. Can you tell me that word more? It will help you more. It's like having your own personal one on one, support there, for a teacher then to come in and dive in and help where is really, really needed.

Another thing that I just wanted to say is that, you know, how many times can we if we have a classroom of twenty or twenty five kids, like, being able to support them all where they're at is, I think, like, such a neat thing to be able to do and think about, like, the confidence that your kids would feel just like Amy is showing, and she said that she's pretending to be her students. Like, I think about, like, tomorrow, I'm gonna be doing polar animals in first grade and, like, you know, all kinds of things this week in elementary. But I think with kids, like, they need that, you know, that confidence and being able to not only succeed at their, you know, answering or asking questions, but also to, you know, struggle and re ask and and rethink things too. So the support that they have there is really cool.

That is so true. And and to build off of that too, I'm in a student space right now. Let's just dive into that research assistant.

I'll sign in and giving, specific I'm I apologize. I'm in my home office right now, so, obviously, my Internet is gonna decide to be a problem.

But when you are in a student chat, you can have it change the language as well. So I know that there's a lot of our students who would want to access this information in a language that they, understand best.

Obviously, we're talking about bridging activities and things like that, but these are the languages that our spaces can communicate in and can support our students. So we do have a couple of questions. Can you share more information you see on the chat with other teachers? For instance, if the students are using the space in the media center but want to share it. So that is such a great question.

When you are this is part of a pro, our pro organization.

You are able to add collaborators.

So if you are pro with a, with an account with us, you are able to add collaborators where you can create a research assistant and add the classroom teacher, things like that.

But an option for free, is that you could, download the CSV and share that with the teachers, or just, you know, be emailing back and forth about that information. So that's really, a great idea. But, yeah, this collaborators feature is something that is really, really useful.

So I won't take up too much more. I am stealing so much time from Nick and Shannon.

But the last one the last one I wanted to share, I'm kind of doing this top row, and they're gonna dive into the rest.

I wanted to talk about all of those fun little activities that you guys do in libraries. You can totally some a lot of my ideas are elementary ideas, but I think that the secondary idea can can really transfer over. But when we're learning about genres, when we're learning about different chapters, when we're learning about different, aspects of libraries or of books or of media literacy, you can do fun games and interactive things. So this is called the genre safari exploring the wild world of books.

And so what it does is it takes students through a safari, where they encounter different things in a jungle and they learn about different genres. And how cool would that be is if if you are talking about text features with older students or, and and you do, like, a Taylor Swift space where Taylor Swift is is talking to them about text features. I don't know. Whatever the kids like these days, we're trying to stay relevant.

You could have the space talk to them in gen z language, and I think that's hilarious. You could do all of these things.

So I those are the kinds of ideas and and exciting experiences that you can give a research assistant, you know, just an exploratory space and an adventure.

Those are things that you can kind of take on in your library to help support the things that you're teaching. So before I hand it over, I'm just gonna answer Sylvie's question. How do we access the collections?

So if you go on to school AI and you're right on the launchpad, you'll just see it right here for library media specialists.

You could also dive into discover and you'll scroll down. We've got February spaces and then here is that library media specialist. So I'm gonna pause my microphone. I'll be in the chat. Please ask questions. And Shannon and Nick are gonna take the next twenty ish minutes and, fifteen, twenty minutes and talk about their ideas before we learn how to create a space. So you guys take it away.

Oh my goodness. All this pressure following all that awesomeness. I don't even know where to start, but I will do my very best. So, one of the things that stands out to me about utilizing AI, of course, is the fear that students are just going to believe everything that they're told.

Right? It's an idea of literacy and media literacy and how can we identify all of the things that we want kids to identify that is factual and real and something that we should explore. I'm gonna share my screen here for a moment. Let me go over here.

There we go. One of the old school, media literacy projects that I remember going way, way back in my days teaching ELA was a project where students had to research the Pacific Northwest tree octopus.

If you are not familiar with the Pacific Northwest tree octopus, I am going to share that with you right now.

I'm gonna drop that into the chat, and I would love you to join and ask tons of questions about the Pacific Northwest tree octopus. So please go ahead and join, and we can start to see some of that. Well, Shannon and I will talk about, media literacy.

Shannon, how early do you start media literacy conversations with students?

I talk to them about it in preschool even.

And so Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. So I work with our preschoolers. I'm in a school that's preschool to twelfth grade. And so I see these kids from the time they're little until they're they're older. And so through books when they're little, through conversations, through songs that we have, you know, just everyday conversations too when they're using their iPads or they're using some kind of technology and and you know that's so important and not just me as a librarian but we know that it's so important to really empower our teachers and give them the skills and the resources that they need but also even our, you know, families too. So it's it's important across the board at our school, to all of our kids. We want them to have those that confident in in those skills.

That that is a great point. And I think that's the thing that's sort of tough when we look at this is that some people believe that media literacy is something that, oh, it just starts in middle school. Right? That's when they're getting we have to look at the world around us, and students are inundated with media all of the time.

And that is something that's really important for us to keep in mind. So starting in preschool and saying, hey. Just question the things that you're seeing and just starting from there. It's like, oh, does this make sense?

Is this believable? And, you know, as I see people interacting, a little bit here, like, immediately, Sharon and Karen are both like, what is this about to specific to our trust react to us? Is that real? What is going on here?

As we pull up and see what type of thing here Karen is asking, is this a real article?

Yes. There are many articles about them. How can I live with a tree? It's about special adaptations to live in trees. Look at all these here. These are very real, believable responses to people.

What do they eat? Do they live in water?

So if you look at these questions as people continue to engage, Tell me more. Just look at this. They give you the Latin name of it.

There's Sasquatch involved.

Absolutely. And they have a wonderful symbiotic relationship.

Do you wanna know more? And look. They get together and they cooperate in the forest and all of these. So this space is actually, and this is what I love about it, a digitized version of a old school website that I'll show you the inside of the space.

It's, like, one of my absolute favorites, and to be able to use spaces to build it makes me so happy.

I will go into oh, that's where I have to go into mine because this one there's mine.

So when we edit it, when we go onto the inside here, I've provided tons of information to ask about Pacific Northwest.

If you ask for it, there is a song and noises that it makes. So if you really wanna dive deep into this, you can really, really, really, really, really have some fun with this.

Even abbreviate it for a while. At the very, very end of it, the whole point is for it to get to the point where students question the authenticity. And then once facts are given, explain the whole project to students and start to discuss the value of media literacy. So this whole part is designed specifically run to get kids to question that. So if I were to type in Pacific Northwest three Octopus, It'll take you to a website, and this is the website that we used to use teaching our, students. Looks very legit.

Pacific dark twelfth. They're in danger. Look. There's a picture of an octopus in a tree. That must be real. They have all of these maps. Why is it endangered?

They have some old timey photographs of magazines.

This looks incredibly real. Octopus, devil of the trees.

Watch out for loggers.

Another one. So we would give this, and I would give this to freshmen in high school.

And the freshmen would dive into this, and they'd be like, what is happening right now? Like, what am I looking at? And they would believe that this is potentially real. Frequently asked questions. We've got sightings, people. So even though these haven't been updated in a few years, back when I was using this, this was like the hot media literacy tool that we were all using.

So, you're gonna use it with your sixth grade tomorrow, Amy? Excellent. I've used this with my fifth graders. Wonderful. So be able to create a space, and I encourage you just to go ahead, remix your own copy.

Yes. You gotta let us know how it goes. Being able to have fun with this and see how far people go. And then, again, what I can do quite simply is go into groups to see how people are doing, to see how they're engaged, what type of conversations are they having, who's digging deep into this.

Sous vide is going on. There you go. Just a bunch of one word answers, and why are they blue? And it gives us these informations.

How do they eat?

This will dive super, super deep. Again, ask it what it sounds like or if there's a song. I really built a lot of them into this.

But it's powerful because it's something fundamental that students need to understand is that just because AI says it, it's not the bible. Right? It's not the truth of all the things.

AI makes mistakes. Humans makes mistakes. Humans make AI. It's all part of that process where you need to double check all of the things, and that's super powerful. And one of the things that we say about Gen AI in particular is that everything is a rough draft.

Everything is a rough draft. You should be assessing everything that's produced by GenAI so that you can explore what that means to you. So, I don't know, Shayna. Have you used the tree octopus with students in the past?

Yes. In the past. And I I can't even wait to use this with the kids.

Right? It's it's it's one of those examples of how exciting technology can take something that even at the time was exciting new technology. Like, woah. A website. This got all this information. And now we're taking it up a notch where now we can put it in context where kids are using chatbots.

Full stop. Period. They are. We know they are. Right? Even if they're just at this point, depending on which iPhone you have, you could be talking to Siri who's now powered by, the Apple intelligent, which is AI, which is connected to open AI.

So that's it. Like, they're using it. They're asking these questions. And so we need them to take a second and just say, a tree octopus?

You know go from there.

You know what, Nick? Something that came up in my in my head is how someone put in a comment that Melissa said AI uses a whole new element and modernizes this concept. Mhmm. Because I know for me, when I would show my fifth graders that that website, they would be like, oh, that's that's weird.

That looks lame. You know what I mean? Like, they would and when I like, that website, when I was growing up, would look super high-tech. Like, oh, wow.

That's so cool.

But the website now, they're like, that looks sketchy. That looks like a sketchy website.

So now that we are using a AI chatbot, a school AI chatbot that's telling them someone put in that's so funny.

Maestro Moreno put threats to their survival includes logging, pollution, and even predation by Sasquatch.

So that that response, the students, instead of just taking it as at at its face, you'd be like, wait a second. I know that that's not real. So, I wanted to just share a phrase that I use is that you are smarter than the AI. And I have even said that all the way to kindergartners who are looking and using school AI spaces. You are smarter than the AI. So when you catch it in a weirdness, in a in a weird thing that it says, you're smarter than the AI. So, anyways, I just wanted to point that out that this adds a whole new element to this, media literacy, thing that we have to teach.

Well and and the idea behind it is that you will read things that sound truthful or are truthful in a different context. Octopuses are real. Right? That's a fact. We know that octopuses are real. Okay. So you're taking something that is real, and you're putting it in circumstances where you're like, and then if you read closely, something should stick out to you like Sasquatch.

The minute you get to the Sasquatch part of your investigation, you hopefully automatically trigger wait. What? Bigfoot's involved? Like, even the part I underlined here, its presence attracts Sasquatch during the annual octopus harvest, a key cultural event.

Right? So no matter what we're doing, and this is how it's designed, is to eventually I prompted it to go so far off the rails that no matter how far along a kid gets, it'll keep getting more and more and more ridiculous so that eventually, everyone will get to the point where they go, oh, this isn't real. This is nonsense.

And the best part is is that you can make this about anything. This was easy for me to do because I was able to grab all of that content that was there and then put it into the prompt and then cite the prompt because I think that's important to denote where you get that in the prompt. That this wasn't something I created for sure. But in reality, you can literally create anything you wanted, make it as silly as you wanted.

You could make it, I don't know, the underwater paddle dog. It's a dog that only lives underwater, and you just go ahead and build a whole space about that. It'll create content. It'll create news articles for you.

That's awesome, but, also, that's terrifying.

Because if you are a third grader and you're on some website that says it has a chatbot, it needs to take that in with a discerning eye. So on one side, it's awesome for us as educators to use it to sort of trick and teach.

Other people are gonna use it just to trick. And I think that's what's something powerful that we need to continue to work on, especially as we look at more AI generated video content, images. Like, those things are real. And having little fun examples like this that can start more serious conversations, I think, are crucial in our efforts to support media literacy.

Mhmm.

I want to A little bit about your, future ready librarian space and and how that could be used?

Yeah. I would love to. The so if you know me, you know that I am a leader for future ready librarians, and we have an amazing framework that supports the work that we do. And so this is such a great space because we can, you know, have a way to explore the framework and to put in the things that we're doing. We can learn about ourself and our own practice but also improve our practice and support the things that we do within the framework and the different wedges.

And so I am very excited that we have this not only for me to use with all of you and also, you know, with when I go and I work with other librarians, like last week I was in three different spots, but I'm excited to use this myself too because I think we always as librarians and educators can improve what we're doing and get ideas and so what a great way to get feedback on what we're doing around curation, what we're doing around professional development, how we're leading from the library, student empowerment. We're getting ready for digital learning day coming up next week. And so really kind of digging into our practice.

And a great way to my I was thinking about this the other day as I was working on my own professional development plan at school. It's a wonderful way if you are working on your goals or, like, your individual professional development plan to really hone in and be able to share some of those things that you're learning too. So super cool. I am very excited about this.

So everybody make sure that you bookmark that and go to it and use it. I'm I'm really excited about that.

Yeah. And to to double down on that, I mean, obviously, any professional group has a framework, and sometimes they're very dense, like, to get through and to sort of explore. And so the future running one was actually a lot easier when Shannon was talking to me about it and we started to build that. I was like, oh, this is actually kinda nice.

But to build it into a space to allow you to dig deep into it and to get those ideas is so powerful. But for anyone else out there, that has a professional community that you're thinking, oh, I wish we could have a space like that. You can. If you have a PDF of those guidelines and that framework, you can build a space, upload that PDF, and instruct it to support you however it is you want it to support people.

So you can build your own, space for your own professional group as well. So no matter where you are in the world, if you've got those standards framework that you want to help teachers explore more thoroughly You're sure. You can upload those as a PDF and connect it to your Google, Drive account if you have, like, a a Google Doc that you wanna connect it to. You could do all of those things.

So while this is definitely cool for future ready, it doesn't prohibit any of you from creating your own and sharing it with your professional communities.

Yeah. I thought about that the other day. You know, when districts or if you're a district library leader, you're part of that group, which we all are. I'm in I'm in the district all by myself. I'm the only librarian, but I work with a lot of others around the country and I love that because it can be for your own school, your own organization, your state, you know, anything that you're working on, I think that that is really gonna just make us better at what we do.

Absolutely. I think anything that allows us as a educational community to dive deeper with less constraints or fewer constraints, excuse me, is powerful because it allows us to take ownership of our learning.

Yep.

It allows us to do it without time constraints, which is usually that's the biggest problem. That's why that's why Casey's not lying when we're so excited you people show up because we don't have your day of teaching sitting in front of your computer or listening to your own. Someone said they're listening on their phone while they shovel snow. Like, that's a rock star Canadian if I've ever seen one.

You know, to do all of those things, like, we get it. So to give up your time to make yourself a better professional is the ultimate showing of, like, who you are as a teacher. We wanna support you. Like, you show up.

We're ready to put on that show because you're dedicating what little free time you have to continue to learn and put you in a place to better support students. And that's so powerful for us. I mean, it's what drives me continually when even when I was in the classroom and I was presenting all over the place, like, going into a room and doing a keynote and seeing all of these teachers choosing to be there to continue to learn. I know, Shannon, you see the same thing.

Like, sometimes you do that, like, you're not here for me. Right? Like, I'm just gonna go talk about whatever, but it's so powerful to see all of you there. So it's been nice to see and connect with so many teachers and to utilize these spaces.

The Pacific Growth Lift your Octopus, we posted that yesterday, Casey?

Yeah. We we posted that on February first. And so Okay.

So it's already got twenty three launches. I mean, people in the book finder, thirty one launches. I mean Yes. People are already finding these. And that's the next one I wanna show.

I think really quick, you should show the help me find a book.

Yep. That's what I was gonna show right now.

Used it today.

I used it today in my in my high school book club.

And so Oh, you did?

Yes.

So as Nick as Nick pulls it up, and he mentioned it a couple of times, but, when you create and I'll go over this too. I just wanted to reassure everybody that after Nick shows this, you when you create a space, you can upload any document that will become the source of truth for that space. So, Melissa, to answer your question, you can upload a document of your library books, and your students can ask it questions. What book, you know, what book is this?

What book is that? And it will tell them where to find it. So, Nick, take it away. Talk to us about this help me find a book space.

Absolutely. I'm gonna share it here. I've launched it. You're welcome to join this space. So I just had this crazy idea.

And this was right after, like, Shannon and I started talking. I was like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if someone could just help me pick out a book when I couldn't get to the librarian? You know? Because, you know, kids aren't always finishing their books when they're at school.

Sometimes they're finishing at home, and, you know, you can read tons reviews online and Amazon. You can check out the library. But sometimes, especially for kids, you just have a hard time committing to what it is that you wanna do. So I thought, hey.

Wouldn't it be kinda neat if I just built a space that can help you choose what type of book that you want. And so I immediately shared it with Shannon because I'm like, well, if anyone's gonna tell me that this is garbage, it's gonna be Shannon. She will tell me, Nick, no. That's what librarians do.

Don't do this. But not only did she feel okay, she's like, oh, I shared it at my workshop with a hundred librarians.

I was like, oh, I didn't know if it was ready. And the librarians how did they respond, Shannon?

Loved it. We were all so excited. We were all looking for our next great read too and and looking for ideas on what to add to our title wave list, and it was great.

Yeah. It was, scary, but I can't get a better stamp of approval than a, room full of librarians at, at FETC, excited about something like that. And so for Shannon to share that, meant so much to me, but terrified me because I thought I still had some tweaking to do, but she assured me, no. It was great. It got me a book that I wanted to read.

So that's really exciting just to see that. So now the inside of it really quick before I turn it back over, because I wanna make sure that you guys can see the inside because the guts are what gets me excited, about these different spaces. So help me find a book. Here we go. We're gonna go ahead and look at the guts here.

So I I also love to get a look at the prompt and how how it works. So So I used our assistant, which is the space designer.

So for those of you who don't know, the space designer, which is really, really, really neat, is an assistant that is a chatbot that will build the prompt for your space. So I talked to the space designer, told it what I wanted, then it helped me create a space, but there are some elements that were really important.

You're gonna ultimately recommend two to three suitable books. You're gonna introduce yourself, and then you're gonna ask questions. What type of books do you like to read? What was the last book you read, and did you like or what did you like or dislike about it?

How old are you? What is your favorite book? And then it'll analyze all of that information, and then it'll provide two to three books with the title, author, a short summary of each book. Ensure diversity recommendations while aligning with your preferences.

Encouragement. Encouragement is to try at least one recommendation. Offer a fun factor quote from one of the recommended books to spark curiosity.

And then requirements, ensure recommendations are age appropriate and diverse, keep the conversation engaged and interactive, provide clear, concise book summaries that capture student interest. So I don't have, access to collections like you guys do with your amazing, libraries. So I couldn't download mine, because I have everything. But if you could download yours, you could upload it, and then you would add to the prompt to focus solely on what's available in the catalog.

So that helps whittle it down. Now, again, depending on your library, you'd be like, hey. They can ask for whatever they want because we can order that through interlibrary loan or whatever systems you have. Like, however you wanna do that, that's totally fine.

But, again, this allows kids maybe sometimes to get what they want without maybe being embarrassed or they're too shy to go to the library and say, hey. I'm really into anime and manga, and I don't you know? Maybe they're embarrassed to say that for some reason. You know?

That could be the case where they're really into the Twilight book. So they're really into, like I think you could have a lot of boys and girls find out about books that they might never ask about because they're embarrassed, so they're afraid, or quite frankly, they don't know what they don't know. And so to have something produced for them where at that at least at that point, they can do what we all hope is that next level of research. Right?

Oh, okay. Let me go online, and let me see what people are saying about this book. Let me take a look at it. What are the reviews?

So from even that standpoint, to provide three suggestions, to allow them to explore is a win. And I imagine for librarians, right, I can't imagine that that is not the thing that you want.

More than anything, it's for kids to explore those books on their own. Shannon, what do you think about how did it go with your book club? How did that work out?

Good. They were looking for today, we were just letting them read whatever they wanted, and it was fun because the public librarian was there too. We do it together.

And so she was really excited as well because she had never really used AI before, and so the kids and us as librarians were very excited as well. So it was cool.

That's awesome.

That's awesome. That's and I think that's exactly what we're trying to do, especially with a lot of these spaces, is to just casually integrate AI in very small ways to get people accustomed to it. And, again, that media literacy is around no matter what type of space that it is. Because, again, maybe AI makes a mistake.

Yeah. Maybe it says, oh, this is the wrong author of that. But any AI can make that mistake. So, again, asking them to follow-up and do that research and go, oh, well, check the library catalog.

Go to the website. You know? Build all of that in is super powerful. So, these are just a few.

There's gonna be more that are gonna be, built and shared by all the amazing librarians joining the community, but, I was just very, very lucky to be able to collaborate with Shannon. And I know that we'll have some more fun stuff down the road. Right, Shannon?

Absolutely. I've been taking notes this week, so look out next.

So to that to build off of that, Peter had a good question. Will you develop a reading fluency space or assistance for students to recognize their reading?

How do you so for Peter, for that question, our speech to text feature, it does work and is in there, but it is not specific enough to evaluate on fluency quite yet. But that is something that we are working on, so keep an eye out, eye out for that. Melanie had a question. How do you make sure that the space is recommending books you have in your collection? When you're in your prompt, this is a great segue into my goal for this is to show you how to make a space. So if you wanna click along or if you just have this, I'm gonna be recording this and sharing this out, but let's I am going to recommend that you have two tabs open. So the first tab that I recommend is that you go to the create section, and this is going to open up the space creator.

And what that does is it starts on a totally blank slate and it tells you to prompt it.

Think about prompting like it is to the most impressionable, obedient student teacher that you've ever met in your life, but you have to tell them exactly what to say. Think about when you were a student teacher and you did not know how to manage a class. You needed to know exactly what to say to get the students to do what you wanted. Think about it that way. You need to tell it exactly what to do.

So to your question, Melanie, you need to make sure that the AI knows that it only uses the attached document. So say only recommend books from the attached document, and it will obey you.

So the second tab that I recommend having open is the space designer.

So you will have the space designer assistant open for yourself and you will have in the second tab your space creator.

So as an educator, a librarian, whatever you can think of all of the things that you would like to do or, it you know, just we've been talking about just putting a small little bit of AI into your, activity.

And so you could just quickly ask it, anything. So I'm just gonna put I want to to do an activity with students to help them explore text features in books.

I want it to be a fun adventure. And the cool thing about this assistant is it will give you suggestions. So what grade level are you working with? Oh, yeah.

That's smart. I should probably say elementary because, you know, you guys know me. You guys know me. I'll say elementary.

Great. Here are a few ideas. So first, it's giving me ideas. You don't have to come up with all this stuff.

Text feature treasure hunt, detective agents. Okay. We're definitely gonna do detective agency as someone who watches Law and Order religiously. We're gonna do that. I want to go with, this, and then I'm just going to say write me the four step prompt.

Done. And it's gonna write me the prompt. Done.

It bay is based off of a four step prompt method to define the role, provide the task, the instructions, and the requirements. Now, we all know that we are not just going to copy and paste this and say we're done. But I am gonna put it in here. I actually kind of like the format in here a little bit better. So the AI will take on the role of a detective agency leader who guides the students through their mystery, the examining text features and various books. So it's having them go through the library, pick out a book, and examining it.

Engaging with an introduction. Welcome young detectives. Guide the students to identify text features like headings and subheadings, blah blah blah. Oh my goodness.

I love it so much. I go through it. I think this is great. If I want to edit it, I will, in this assistant, say edit blah blah blah blah blah.

Right? I'll tell it to fix what I want. And then when I'm ready, I will just copy paste it into the space creator, and it is done.

Also, make sure that you come up with a super cute fun prompt, a prompt, super cute fun, title. So text feature detective agency. I'm gonna copy and paste that right into my title, and then this is where you can go and add files. So, you can go in and add anything that you want, then you can go and generate all fields with AI. So the cover photo, the subtitle, the teacher description, all of that.

And then MySpace is done. I can click the preview to hear it, see and and test it. I know that there's so many teachers out there who push it and test it to make sure that it's exactly what they want.

And then they go in and may and and adjust the prompt as it goes.

So that is me. I literally made this space in what? I started talking four, five minutes ago.

And this space is very, it's pretty good. I I would probably do a little bit of edits here and there, but I'm ready to go. I click save, and it is done. I have created a text feature detective agency activity for my library.

So that is how you create a space. Again, you have the two open tabs. You have the space designer, and then you have the space, creator open, and you create those spaces in the way that you need.

Yes. For we one of the other things that I wanted to share was the AI literacy framework. I have it in a PDF right here, so I'm gonna send that link.

We also have a space for the AI literacy framework there.

The very last thing I wanted to share before we open up for q and a is the whole reason we are here is we have launched oh, I'm so sorry you see that long list. We have launched a library media specialist exchange. So this is a place for you and library media specialists around the world to dive in and chat with each other about AI and library media specialists. We want you guys in there sharing, discussing, learning, growing, all of these things. We have people sharing, all the time. We've got about ten educators in there right now, and we hope to grow it. And we'll be sharing a ton of spaces this month.

So please share this with your friends, your colleagues, your library friends. We want this to be a place where teachers can talk about the impact of AI in your libraries. And as you as Shannon says, lead from the library, we want to provide this as a tool for you. So Shannon, did you want to mention anything about this discussion board or or or, to wrap it up?

Yeah. I'm so excited. This is gonna be a great place you guys as you as you not only use it and create things, but also even just to ask questions and see what everyone else is sharing. We as librarians are the best shares and collaborators in the world, and so this is going to be an amazing space. So please share it, take part in it, and I can't wait to connect with all of you too. It's gonna be really awesome.

So thank you guys for creating this.

Perfect.

I am so thrilled and so excited to have everybody in here.

And thank you so much for participating. Thank you to Nick and Shannon for sharing. We're gonna just open it up to any questions, q and a in the chat. Q and a, we can if you wanna raise your hand, you we'll call on you and you can unmute and chat.

But we are even if you just wanna share an idea that you're gonna use in your classrooms or in your libraries, we're so excited to hear it. So we've got the last five minutes for q and a and sharing, but if you've gotta go, we totally understand. We hope to see you in the community.

Thank you so, so much for engaging, for growing, for learning, for for innovating in your libraries.

Karen said it perfectly. It's a lot to process. It is a lot to process, but we're excited to get started, and that's where that community comes into play. Please dive in.

Ask questions. Be like, hey. I, you know, they were talking about all this stuff. I want I want help and support.

So, yes, go ahead. Maestro Moreno, do you wanna go ahead and share your thoughts or questions?

Yes. I have, I'll hold off for my thought. But first, I have a question for the help me find a book. Do you have any books listed in Spanish?

You if you have, if you have your library catalog in there and it has a Spanish book, it will recommend in in Spanish. And if the student is talking to the chatbot in Spanish, you can also have it respond in Spanish. And so, and and in Nick's prompt too, it also said, you know, to to offer lots of different options and things like that. So, Nick, did you wanna add on to that for for that prompt?

So I didn't build the space with a set collection of books. So it's not like it's pulling from a digital bookshelf, and there are aren't Spanish language in there. It's literally pulling from its access of all of the books in the world up to, probably, I think, April twenty twenty four, like, whenever the model, that they're using of current information stops.

So if you want specific Spanish, language books, when it asks you the things that you're looking for, you could ask for Spanish language books, and then it will only give you Spanish language books. So those first few questions allow the user to help narrow down. And so even if you got some English ones and if you'd say, hey. Can you provide Spanish language ones?

It'll produce those Spanish language ones next. So, that's all up to the prompter, as they use it. But if you, as the owner of the space, only want Spanish language, written books, you can just put that into the prompt and say only provide examples of books that are, in native Spanish language or something like that. So you can have the space be as specific or as broad as you want.

I just made mine as broad as possible because I wanted all the kids to find all the books.

Yes. Perfect. Thank you. And then my other question is, my students wrote a script on, their daily routine.

Others chose to do a special event.

I want them to use AI. I mean, I've used risk, but I want to use AI for this.

I want them to copy their script and possibly, yeah, give them feedback.

Oh, wow.

To write yeah. Not to write anything for them, but just give them feedback how they can maybe make it better or maybe some errors that they might have made grammatically.

I actually wanted to share. This kind of reminds me of a space that we have in a collection.

If you're looking at learning activity collection, you can go to writing feedback.

And what that does is I've just created a very basic give the students feedback, but what I would suggest that you do is click the remix button, and then you can upload whatever, rubric you have, and it will have the kids copy paste. And it will have give the students that feedback within the space, and help them and guide them and say, hey. Have you thought about this? Hey.

Have you thought about that? And that writing feedback space is perfect. You can you can erase the ones that I have attached. I just have, like, basic writing feedback things, but you can upload what you would like in there.

Does that sound like something that would help address that?

Perfect. That Great.

I will put that right in the chat for you.

Perfect. Thank you. And let's see. I think I have one more thing.

Oh, okay. My idea.

My idea. So I'm gonna use the research assistant.

Okay. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have students, ask school AI or the research assistant to provide them dishes from Latin America Mhmm. And to provide them recipes in in English.

I'm sure a lot of the verb students will not be familiar with, so they're gonna ask AI to provide them the verbs in its infinitive form only, not in the command form, but just the infinitive verbs so that in turn, my students can take those verbs and then create commands in Spanish.

Mhmm.

And then so they they they are gonna make the dish and bring it to class with the recipe in Spanish. So I I'm gonna use it because it's a time saver for the students. It's gonna save time from going to Google or any other research to find a recipe.

Yeah. Have you and I'm sure you've done this in your class. I'd love to hear it. Like, sending your students to Google for me was always, like, a little bit of a nightmare because they would just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll or pick the first thing. Like, this is so direct, and it will your students will just get the recipe they need, and then they can get to the work that you want them to do. I love that idea.

Yes. I actually sorry. Sorry.

Let me turn that off.

I actually tested tested it out already, and it gave me great feedback. So I can't wait to share this with my students. Thank you so much.

I am thank you so much for sharing that. I'm so excited about that. I also wanted to share too. Please, if everybody's in here, dive into community and share.

If you have questions, you can add them to this discussions page. If you have ideas like this like the Spanish recipe that is genius. You could go add it into the show and tell and just share that. There are tons of ideas that teachers are posting all the time.

So please feel free to go, Diamond. And I also put my email, and Nick put his email in there. We are always available.

I'm just gonna go ahead and share that community link one more time.

Please share those. Share your ideas. We are all this like like Karen had said earlier, this is overwhelming. This is a new brand new technology.

We are learning. We are growing, and this community is here to help us and help us make our teaching practice more exciting, more AI AI friendly, and, we're so excited. So if there are no other questions, we're gonna go ahead and close, but I appreciate everyone. Thank you, Shannon. We are so glad to have you. We hope to have you again. Thank you, Nick, for jumping in and helping SchoolAI, Nick, my bestie, my friend.

And, we are so excited, and we will see you in the library media specialist group. And I can't wait to hear from everyone. So thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Have a great evening, and we will see everyone soon. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Bye.

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