Student Digital Diner Inagural Session
 
   I lead a series of tech trainings for the teachers in my building called the Digital Diner. The goal of the sessions is to provide teachers with practical experience using technology in a fun way with the goal that through the experience, they will take it back with them to use with their students.

  This past year, I expanded the offerings to include a Student Digital Diner.  These sessions are held in the media center at lunch and students who sign up are allowed to bring their lunch in for the sessions (which they usually are not allowed to do). My assistant and I also end up supplying some type of holiday themed candy treat as a part of the festivities.

  Our first session was last week and focused on how to access the electronic books and audiobookresources available 24/7 on the library website.  Although we are a very technology oriented school, historically our electronic book circulation has been relatively low. Our best month ever had just over 100 ebooks circulated, inspite of our ebook collection growing to more than 400 titles in the last year.  It has been hard to determine whether this is due to a lack of publicity, a lack of available titles, or just that few students knew how to access them.

  I chose to hold this session to make more student aware of the great electronic book resources we have available at Lakeside.  There were more than 20 students who attended the session over the course of both lunch periods.  For many attendees, it was the first time they had attended a lunchtime library event.

   At this edition of the Student Digital Diner, students learned how to add electronic books to computers as well as tablets, phones and iPods.  In hindsight, I wish we would have spent more time focused on how to put electronic books on students' devices.  Specifically so they could have learned about how to put both audiobooks and ebooks on their tablets and phones.  The instruction about how to put them on computers took more time than I anticipated, and I think it would have improved student ownership to have more time to experience putting the ebooks right on to their own devices.

   One of the best things about the session was
the addition of door prizes to the Digital Diner.
At both sessions, we held a drawing, and
gave away some Valentine's Day themed
 candy to students who brought their invitation to the event with them. I would definitely include door prizes in the future.  After all, who does like a good door prize!
 
  I do think that the session did develop a new "colony" of electronic book users at Lakeside that I look forward to growing in the future!  To help continue to build interest in the electronic books at Lakeside, I am sending a follow up survey to the participants to get their feedback about this session as well as their interest in future sessions.  I am also including an opportunity in the survey itself for them to select an electronic book which they would recommend as an addition to our library collection.  I am optimistic about the potential future increases in ebook circulation at Lakeside.  We'll see how it goes-maybe it will be a topic of a future blog post.

@brian_librarian
@goldeneaglelmc