Attending the LibTech Conference 2016 was a fantastic opportunity. The amount of information was both exciting and staggering. I loved seeing the ways in which librarians are using technology and helping give access to technology to their patrons. Coding Clubs for Kids are a great opportunity to give children an understanding of an important process that is going on behind the scenes in almost every profession. Presenters gave resources for librarians who are not experts at coding to be able to still help and explore coding with kids, such as codeclubworld.org and code.org’s Coding with Anna & Elsa. Internet security was a keynote topic and was extremely informative, not to mention mildly terrifying. Andromeda Yelton gave many great resources such as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense (https://ssd.eff.org/) that gives step by step instructions and tools to help protect oneself online. Even her simple tips of making sure if you’re putting in private information you are on a site that starts with https instead of http. It may help many patrons to know that simple trick of looking for the ‘s’ on the end to signify secure. There was also a great session put on by the Dakota County Library called STEAMfest that gave hands on time with some of their STEAM technology. That was fantastic to actually see them in action and envision how easily they could be used in a library setting. The Snap Circuits, Jr., Ozobots, Sphero and Cubelets were my favorites that I could see being usable for anyone, no matter experience level. All the sessions gave great ideas and resources and left me feeling excited for what we could accomplish with these tools. This is a conference I hope to go to again and cannot recommend enough!
