Today’s students are used to constant entertainment, making it challenging for teachers to capture their attention. But a disengaged classroom is even scarier. Join Amanda Zieba, the Word Nerd from YouTube, as she shares practical, engaging strategies for middle school ELA classrooms and libraries. Learn how to create fun, captivating lessons without the pressure of a song-and-dance act. From reading routines, writing practices and reading recommendations to using technology and kinesthetic learning, discover techniques that make students WANT to be in your classroom and ENJOY learning. Increased engagement leads to increased achievement—and happier teachers!
Amanda Zieba, the founder of the Word Nerd Collaborative, a middle school ELA teacher membership, is an author, educator, content creator, transforming the educational experience for teachers and students. She has worked with educators around the world to increase student engagement... Read More →
Monday March 10, 2025 8:45am - 9:45am CDT
BCC Boardroom
In today's digital age, students can be overwhelmed with the amount of online resources available to them. How do we get their attention and engage them in digital reading? Join us for a session aimed at helping you increase Sora's visibility and usage in your school. Your Sora expert will provide practical strategies and tips for promoting Sora effectively. You'll also get access to ready-to-use resources and hear case studies about educators who have successfully engaged their communities with Sora. Don't miss this chance to enhance your digital library promotion and make the most of Sora in your school.
Discover exceptional texts to support and supplement early literacy instruction. While underscoring phonics, phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, you can now use TeachingBooks to identify popular picture books by more than a dozen phonics and phonetical awareness classifications (vowel and consonant sounds, alliteration, rhyming, and more). Additionally, TeachingBooks has developed exclusive activity sheets that can be used with trade books, so that teachers, families, and librarians have worksheets to extend reading instruction. TeachingBooks is provided to all Wisconsin schools, public libraries, universities and residents through BadgerLink, Wisconsin’s Online Library funded by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
Discover how ebooks and audiobooks can help support your school’s unique curriculum needs. From ELA favorites to digital class sets and more, let OverDrive Account Manager, Lena Rose and TeachingBooks Implementation Specialist, Kym Davick, fill you in on how the Sora reading app combined with TeachingBooks resources can help set your students up for required reading success. Attendees will learn the benefits of creating school-specific digital collections and how powerful Sora tools like notes, highlights, definitions reading data are making a positive impact on reading engagement, as well as how to find the resources for your Sora Books on TeachingBooks as you hook readers, prepare lessons, or plan for books groups.
TeachingBooks is provided to all Wisconsin schools, public libraries, universities and residents through BadgerLink, Wisconsin’s Online Library funded by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.
We know the value of professional development and how important it is to have connections with our state organizations, but does every teacher in our district? This session will provide ways to connect with the English teachers in your district through the Wisconsin Council of Teachers of English by sharing the highlights of the WCTE 2024 Fall Convention, “Expanding Our UniVERSE: Creating Learner-Centric Experiences.” Poetry and verse novels were at the heart of WCTE’s Convention, and both can be used to ignite passion in students and ignite a love of reading. Attendees will leave with practical ways to utilize poetry and verse novels in the classroom and library, ready to share with teachers in their district.
Looking to revitalize your library programs and engage your middle or high school students? Join us for a collaborative session where together we'll dive into practical strategies and share ideas for planning and implementing exciting library initiatives. In this session, we will discuss programming ideas for events like National Library Week and monthly reading challenges. We will share ideas around how to create eye-catching and themed displays to spark student interest, and we will explore low-effort, high-impact activities for your library and makerspace through passive programming. This interactive session will provide you with fresh inspiration, practical tips, and the opportunity to connect with fellow librarians. Let's work together to transform your library into a vibrant hub of learning and creativity!
I am the Library Media Specialist of Central Heights Middle School in Sun Prairie, WI. I started my career as an English Language Arts teacher for 10 years and now have been living it up in the library for 8. I started my library career at a middle school in Madison Metropolitan School... Read More →
Library Media Technology Specialist, Madison Metropolitan School District
I am the Library Media and Technology Specialist at La Follette High School in Madison. Prior to my current role, I was a middle school and 4th grade classroom teacher in Illinois and the Verona Area School District as well as a K-5 librarian in Verona. This diverse range of experience... Read More →
In this session, discover how a collaborative partnership between the Title I Reading Specialist and the Library Media Specialist can create impactful family engagement events that support literacy development and strengthen school-community connections. We’ll explore strategies for designing and hosting events that involve families in their children's learning, foster a love of reading, and provide valuable resources for parents. Attendees will leave with practical ideas to implement family-focused literacy events in their own schools. Whether you’re looking to enhance your existing programs or start from scratch, this session will provide the tools and inspiration you need to create memorable, effective family outreach events.
In today’s libraries, providing students with engaging, vetted, and accessible content is more important than ever. Newsela Library empowers librarians with over 17,000 leveled texts across 20+ genres, including videos, multimedia, infographics, and more. These resources are designed to foster student motivation and understanding, support collaboration with classroom teachers, and promote digital citizenship.
This session will highlight: How Newsela can increase student engagement and motivation How to curate and customize content for teachers to support background knowledge in novel and book studies. Ways students can actively engage with Newsela Content and Tools How to locate and save relevant content on Newsela including resources for digital citizenship, curriculum complements, and more.
Are you an elementary librarian on a fixed schedule? Are you wondering how to understand the layers of your position? We have got you covered! Join us for the ABCs of being an elementary librarian. We will discuss all the things from A to Z, like budget, lesson plans, STEM, engaging readers, ordering, inventory, displays, collaboration ideas, book processing, utilizing volunteers, and so much more. You will be given an A to Z organizer to customize during the presentation for useful ideas you can take back to your own library!
As an educator, your time is extremely valuable and free time is a rare commodity! Why not save the time and money you could spend tracking down high-quality digital resources and let Britannica support you! Meet Teach Britannica, an open-access resource that provides lessons, instructional strategies, and graphic organizers that connect Britannica School's usage (available to all WI educators through BadgerLink) to classroom instruction, positively impacting learning communities.
Attendees will leave with easy-to-implement lessons and strategies, paired with updated Britannica resources to help with lesson planning, serve as sub plans, and deepen engagement with high-quality, non-fiction content in the classroom.
In this session, attendees will: - Actively discuss their classroom practices and how to implement new resources into lesson planning - Partake in the gradual release of a lesson from Teach Britannica, with a worked example, group work, and sharing thoughts and ideas with colleagues - Conduct a gallery walk to showcase worked examples of Instructional Strategies that can easily be implemented in the classroom.
Director, Customer Experience, Britannica Education
Chris began his career in education as a high school Social Studies teacher in Chicago. Since then, he's served in various roles in education management helping teachers navigate the complex world of assessments, data, and curriculum & instruction. Throughout it all, he's been dedicated... Read More →
This session will demonstrate how you can use Titlewave to analyze, weed, and build a library collection.
Titlewave is an online collection development and curriculum support tool for librarians and administrators, and it features professionally curated content and support tools that help you find the best educationally relevant materials.
This session will provide a deep dive into Titlewave and will provide time for questions.
