Our New Standards Are Coming. Wanna Chat?

By AASL Standards and Guidelines Implementation Task Force on 09/14/2017 • ( 0 )

By Joyce Valenza and Sara Kelly Johns, members of the AASL Standards and Guidelines Implementation Task Force

Join us on Monday, September 18, at 6:00 PM Central, for our first National School Library Standards live Twitter chat. During the hour-long chat, we will begin to unpack and interpret AASL’s new Common Beliefs and Shared Foundations. We hope to engage many members of our community, as well as our stakeholder friends, in informal conversation and sharing.

Members of the AASL Standards editorial board and the implementation task force will be on hand to lead the chat and respond to questions.

To participate, simply follow the hashtag #AASLstandards during the hour and contribute to the conversation in the form of tweets. We will archive all the brainstorming, best ideas, resources, and links from this and future chats.

So, what is a live Twitter chat? In case you are new to live Twitter chats, here’s a little background to help you prepare for Monday’s #AASLstandards live chat.

A live Twitter chat is a synchronous event, a conversation focused on a single topic of group interest and moderated by an individual or a team from the community. During the course of an established time, usually an hour, participants’ discussion filters through a single conversation hashtag. (In our case, it will be #AASLstandards.)

How do you participate?

All you need to do as a participant is to tweet during the course of the hour using the conversation hashtag #AASLstandards. Or you may choose to simply follow the conversation by searching the hashtag without engaging. We really hope you will want to share!

After a brief period of introductions, questions will begin.

Live Twitter chat questions use a Q & A format. Q1 is used for Question #1; Q2, for Question #2 and so on. Participants respond by prefacing answers with A1, for Answer #1, and so on, always remembering to use the hashtag (in this case, #AASLstandards) in each tweet. It’s not only about direct answers. You are welcome to directly respond to the question, or to ask follow-up questions, or comment on the posts of others, and/or share links and resources. Usually about 10 minutes of chatting is planned for each question.

Live Twitter chats are generally fast-paced. But don’t be intimidated! Enjoy the flow. Have fun. You cannot catch it all and you certainly do not need to read the entire stream! Choose to skim or scan or focus on a few fellow participants and interact with them.

Experienced live Twitter chatters find it handy to use tools like TweetDeck or TweetChat or Participate.com to isolate and better manage the flow. You may want to set this up in advance.

It helps to remember that the archive is coming. You will be able to relive, review, and reflect when you examine the conversation transcript and the shared resources. This chat and future AASL chats will be archived at Participate.com.

Note: If you are active on Twitter, as a courtesy, you may want to tweet to your Twitter followers, “During the next hour I will be tweeting in a live chat focused on #AASLstandards.” Some of your friends will want to join in or follow! Others will forgive you. :-)

Please join us for this chat and the others to follow this fall. Your contributions are truly valuable to our professional growth.

A few more details

Your moderators for this first chat will be Joyce Valenza (@joycevalenza), Sara Kelly Johns (@skjohns), Kathy Mansfield (@akmansfield), Judy Deichman (@nms_library), and Maureen Schlosser (@MaureenSchlosse).

Additional Twitter chats will be scheduled and AASL hopes you will plan to be part of those as well.

Please save the date (actually the hour) and help spread the word for the first live Twitter chat in anticipation of the launch of AASL’s National School Library Standards, prior to their official release at National Conference in Phoenix.

Resources

AASL offers two eCOLLAB webinars to help school librarians become more comfortable with Twitter and Twitter Chats:

Jane Lofton: Twitter 101: Why You Need to Tweet to Build a Personal Learning Network
Jane Lofton: Twitter 201: Now I’m a Tweep – What’s Next?

For more background on live Twitter chats, check out:

Nikki Robertson: School Library Twitter Chats are Cropping up All Over]
Steve Cooper (Forbes): The Ultimate Guide to Hosting a Live Tweet Chat
ISTE Get the Most out of Twitter Chats

For more information about Common Beliefs and Shared Foundations prior to the chat, check out the following:

National School Library Standards Website (Key an eye on this landing portal that now contains our Shared Foundations infographics, introductory video, links to articles. Check out the carousel on the top for recent resources. Much more to come!)
On the Horizon: New Standards to Dawn at AASL 2017 (Contains Common Beliefs) by AASL Standards and Guidelines Editorial Board Chair, Marcia Mardis (pages 48-51)
Implementation Task Force: A Broad Timeline by AASL Implementation Task Force Chair, Mary Keeling (pages 52-54)
Anticipation! New School Year, New National School Standards, by Marcia Mardis and Mary Keeling