Innovation Makerspaces: Secondary Programming Guide

You can create a Google Form that your school community can fill out requesting your help. Embed the form into your website or libguide. Let teachers, students, parents, and administrators know you are available and ready to help. See this form for a sample.

You can meet with classes set up by other teachers via Google Classroom to help students create a plan for their class projects, find materials, and evaluate information for relevance.  

Set up a newsletter for your school community with any new information you learn and want to share about new resources, new services you are offering, etc. You can use a free program like Mailchimp.

Have your students start a blog. If they don't know how, go to Wordpress or Google's Blogger, learn how to use the programs, provide them with step-by-step instructions, and have them keep a blog, or diary, of what life under the pandemic is like. Combine this with a lesson on primary sources. See this article in MiddleWeb on how students' journals can become primary sources.

If you teach, or want to start ,teaching online information literacy classes, you can use the COVID-19 Misinformation Tracker site as a timely resource for your assignments.

See 10 Tips for Hosting a Digital Book Club from Bustle or book riot and let your community know about it.

Create a digital tutorial for your students on how to use the different NOVELNY databases. Then provide them with a challenge. Assign a scavenger hunt in the database having them look up the answers to questions you ask. This will require them to use the different features of the database.

Curate resources but be careful to vet them first. Teach yourself as many new tools as you can and then tell your teachers exactly how they can incorporate that tool into their teaching, or how that tool will help them. By learning the tool, you can also provide tech support to your teachers in the same way we know our databases inside-and-out. 

Set up a daily schedule of when you are available for real-time virtual assistance.