Last week in St. Cloud we attended the Minnesota Library Association Annual Conference! We were especially excited about this conference because not only was it literally just across the river from our office, but we were lucky enough to give a presentation each day!

On Thursday we talked about Community Engagement. The room was packed!

 

 

These pictures are from our session and as you can see, we had participants “engage” with each other as they worked out ideas for connecting with their assigned communities!

On Friday morning we got to chat with other library podcast fans about how we use our podcast Linking Our Libraries to share leadership training with our members.

If you’re interested in learning more about either of our presentations, contact us at admin@cmle.org and we’d be happy to send you more information.

On both Thursday and Friday we participated in meetings, met new library people from all over the state (it’s always fun to hear about different libraries and their projects), celebrated seeing lots of familiar CMLE faces, and attended sessions.

One session I attended that I thought could be particularly interesting to our members was one that discussed tech tips for small libraries. The presenter mentioned Canva and Google Hangouts and Forms, all of which we definitely use at CMLE, but she also introduced some new apps. Plickers is an app that would work well in schools. We got to actually try it out in our session, but watch this 2 min video to see how it works:

Another few tools she recommended were Grammarly, which helps your online writing and has a Chrome extension, and TEDed, which lets you customize a TED talk lesson to use in your classroom.

We had a great time at MLA and look forward to returning next year!