YASL members had the good fortune to attend and/or present at two conferences this February. (Read Alex's post here.) Please welcome our first of two guest conference bloggers, Mollie Hall, a first-year LIS and SLM student. Mollie wrote about her experiences at Quasi-Con, the unconference facilitated by the ALA student group at UMSI. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Mollie!
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Back a few short weeks ago, I was part of the YASL panel “Kid APProved: The Best Apps for Young People.” We talked about cheap or free apps for babies and toddlers, emerging readers, tweens (my age group), teens, and college freshmen. The apps we covered were everything from adaptations of storybooks to notetaking programs, educational games to content creation platforms. This was a great first conference experience and I hope to share some of what I learned.
The development of our presentation was fun because the five of us on the panel got to play with lots of apps! We needed to see a range of what was on the market for each age group since that would help us determine what was good or bad out there. We also tried to consider the developmental needs of each group. For tweens, the big focus is their emerging independence and self-creation, so I tried to pick things that aided this sort of development. I also tried to pick apps that would work with what they are learning in school, and things that could help them start to get organized. My three apps were:
Overall, people seemed pretty receptive to our presentation, even though we didn’t get a huge crowd (there were two other panels at the same time - one on LGBT issues in librarianship and one on digital humanities). It was nice to have a relatively familiar and friendly audience to present to at our home turf of North Quad, instead of being in an unfamiliar place for a state or national conference. A few of my other takeaways from the experience:
I’m already looking forward to Quasi-con next year and trying to think of what I can do and how I can get involved. If it’s anything like this year’s event, I know it will be a worthwhile experience.
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If you're interested in learning more about "YASL Presents: Kid APProved: The Best Apps for Young People" and all of the apps that panelists chose to share, check out our Best Apps page.
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Back a few short weeks ago, I was part of the YASL panel “Kid APProved: The Best Apps for Young People.” We talked about cheap or free apps for babies and toddlers, emerging readers, tweens (my age group), teens, and college freshmen. The apps we covered were everything from adaptations of storybooks to notetaking programs, educational games to content creation platforms. This was a great first conference experience and I hope to share some of what I learned.
The development of our presentation was fun because the five of us on the panel got to play with lots of apps! We needed to see a range of what was on the market for each age group since that would help us determine what was good or bad out there. We also tried to consider the developmental needs of each group. For tweens, the big focus is their emerging independence and self-creation, so I tried to pick things that aided this sort of development. I also tried to pick apps that would work with what they are learning in school, and things that could help them start to get organized. My three apps were:
- StickDraw by Bingzer (free) - draw your own cartoon!
- Simple Physics by Jundroo ($1.99) - problem-based physics game with real-world examples
- Dropbox by Dropbox (free) - a platform for tweens to transfer files and photos between computers or between their phone and a computer
Overall, people seemed pretty receptive to our presentation, even though we didn’t get a huge crowd (there were two other panels at the same time - one on LGBT issues in librarianship and one on digital humanities). It was nice to have a relatively familiar and friendly audience to present to at our home turf of North Quad, instead of being in an unfamiliar place for a state or national conference. A few of my other takeaways from the experience:
- Have multiple back-ups for your presentation! The computer and projector weren’t working together, so we couldn’t project our slides. We had to look at them on mobile devices while our audience looked at the slides on their own devices or laptops.
- Always, always, always bring notes! I was silly and didn’t have notes for what I was going to say, thinking I could just look at the slides to jog my memory. As you can guess from what I described above, that was a mistake. And my phone wasn’t working either, so I had to look off Alyssa’s iPad for my slides.
- Do more presentations! I definitely want to try to do a couple of presentations next year. It was great being part of a panel, but I also want to do something by myself. Not only is it a good experience and a resume builder - it’s also just cool to get your ideas out there. And it’s especially important for those of us focusing on youth services, since we are a very, very small portion of the SI population. We need to speak up even more than other groups so that we can be heard.
I’m already looking forward to Quasi-con next year and trying to think of what I can do and how I can get involved. If it’s anything like this year’s event, I know it will be a worthwhile experience.
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If you're interested in learning more about "YASL Presents: Kid APProved: The Best Apps for Young People" and all of the apps that panelists chose to share, check out our Best Apps page.