If you were left wanting more... welcome

Welcome to everyone from today’s session at Iowa ACRL. I hope you take a few moments to explore, read, comment, & come back. You might as well sign up for the RSS feed while you are here too. Thank you for coming to the session and I hope that we can work together to find ways to integrate games and gaming strategies in your instruction sessions.

My sessions went pretty well. I co-presented with another librarian in the morning on instruction, curriculum mapping and the assessment process. It went very smoothly and we both received a lot of positive feedback. Then in the afternoon, I got to change direction and focus in on video games and education. If you haven’t checked out the power point and handout yet, please do so.

There were 33 people in attendance for my session on video game strategies in information literacy, but considering I was in the last timeslot of the day and my morning session had 38 people – the 5 person difference wasn’t too bad. The presentation went surprisingly smoothly, the branching paths worked really well and I felt I was able to cover all the key points and weave the thematic elements through each segment in order to make the progression feel natural. The attendees did jump around a little; from gaming stats to what other libraries are doing then back to educational strategies and finally to what I’m doing. But as a whole, I was able to keep them engaged, chuckling a little and still focus their attention in through changes in movement and voice. Looking back on it, I really wish it would have been recorded – so that I could share it & critique myself (always teaching afterall)

My only negative from the session was that I had a really hard time reading the audience. There were clearly times when almost all of them appeared engaged but there were other times when I could make out if they were focused, skeptical or just tired at the end of the day. So if you were there and are reading this… I’d love to get your feedback.