TLA Take Aways

TLA was amazing! This was my second year to attend. I felt I had a better grasp on the whole conference.

Tuesday night I started off at Speed Dating the Texas Bluebonnet Award Authors with one of the other librarians in my district. I wrote about it here. But it stands mentioning again. It was awesome!

Wednesday morning started with the general session. Author David Baldacci spoke. He was entertaining, hilarious, informative and so many other adjectives! I repeated one of his stories to my hubby. He even laughed at my repeated story. Most of the time my retellings aren't funny. My favorite quote is "Librarians are rock stars!" I'm sure you can age why. 

I had a book signed by Marie Lu for my daughter. She's very excited about Lu's Spirit Animal book 7. 

One of my favorite session I went to was Augmented Reality: The Other AR. I haven't played with AR at all. So I was excited to go to this session. I can't wait to purchase some of the books the presenter talked about that use AR. I also downloaded a new app called Lime. It's like Skype but you can "give help" and the person you are talking too can see you finger point through their phone. So freaky and cool and futuristic and very "The Jetsons"! My daughter and I played with it when I got back. 

Another informative session was Update On School Library Standard Revisions. Sounds boring right? Well it wasn't. Ha! The presenter was engaging. His Google Slide presentation was interactive. The audience was able to type their ideas onto the slides. We are hoping for some updated standards that show off what we do as librarians and why we need bigger budgets. 

The last session I went to Wednesday was Weeding: It's Not A Crime. I was eager to attend this session because I'm participating in the Shelf Challenge. Once I got to weeding it got easier to weed but it was good for me to hear someone else tell me I needed to weed. One of my favorite quotes was "'No one expects the team to play with an old football,' the same goes for books!" Basically I learned to "weed till it hurts." 

As I've been writing this blog I realized I only took notes (on my phone) in certain session. In other sessions I tweeted like a mad woman. It's an interesting way to "take notes" and fun to review the tweets. 

Thursday and Friday to come!