This is Our Time to Shine: Connecting with Teachers, Students and Your Community with Collections

During physical school closures, I'm doing everything I can think of to help my teachers and students succeed. From book lists to research, the skills I’ve honed over the years are coming in handy! One thing that I've found to be welcome is the creation of collections, and I've even made some videos to help staff understand what they are and how they can be used.

Many classroom teachers are really overwhelmed with remote learning. Even teachers who are tech savvy and active users of online platforms seem to be struggling with various challenges. Finding ways to engage students, share meaningful content and make it easy for students and their families to quickly access what they need are true obstacles teachers are tasked to overcome. Fortunately, Follett Collections by Destiny® is the tool I’ve found to be essential during remote learning. 

A few of my teachers have created and used collections, but until this pandemic, many were not up to speed on how useful it can be. Creating a collection and using it is a natural way to collaborate and easy to do virtually. Plus, building a collection is the perfect way to ease a teacher’s load by providing some much-needed support and resources! I needed to find a way to connect with teachers who have not used Collections before while also reminding teachers of my willingness to collaborate and help. 

Getting Started
I didn’t want to overwhelm my staff with a ton of information or a super long email. Using WeVideo (you could use any video program), I created a short video for my staff reminding them I am here to help and showing just a clip of what Collections is all about. I also made a longer video taking a deeper dive into collections and how we can collaborate to build one for their class. I plan to make another video, showing all the tips and tricks to building their own collection. If you haven’t added the bookmarklet tool for Collections, I highly recommend it!

I shared the promo video through an email to my staff and posted the longer version on our staff website for them to access at their convenience. Understanding that teachers are currently saturated with information, I wanted to keep it short and remind them of the support I can offer. Sometimes a brief email, text message or brief post on a staff website, is all our teachers need to reach out to us for support and help. I wanted the videos to be housed where teachers can easily access them and some place they visit frequently. 

Collections is an easy-to-use tool that can really help our teachers, students and families. While we struggle with how to reach out to our communities, finding ways to connect to resources is a great way for librarians to guide teachers through remote learning. This time is challenging for all of us, but I believe this is an opportunity for librarians to truly lead beyond the library as we are experts in curation and digital resources. Our roles may look a little different these days, but we have the expertise and the resources to connect our communities, and Collections is the perfect opportunity. 

I encourage you to think outside the box for ways you can support and help your community during physical school closures, whether it is creating a how-to video for Collections or Follett eBooks, partnering with a classroom teacher on a project or curating resources for a grade- level team. We are in a unique position to help everyone thrive during remote learning. Future Ready Librarians, we’ve got this! 

Traci Chun
Teacher Librarian

Traci Chun has been working as a teacher and teacher librarian in Vancouver Public Schools in Vancouver, WA since 1999. She is currently the teacher librarian at Skyview High School. She is active on district level teams and volunteers on the legislative advocacy team for the Washington Library Association. Her work has been recognized by ISTE and in articles by Digital Promise and Education Week. Traci also co-hosts the Brave Educator podcast. Connect with Traci by following her on Twitter @TraciChun or find her on the Future Ready Librarians Facebook page.