Hello everyone and welcome. I’m Brenda Hough
and I’m the facilitator for today’s session.
We have two very special guests with us today,
Mick Jacobson and Toby Greenwalt
are from the Skokie Public Library in Illinois, 
and they’re going to be talking about
Staff Technology Skills and Creating
a Culture of Learning.
As we begin, let me quickly tell you about the
technology we’re using today, ReadyTalk.
You should be hearing audio now through your
computer speakers or headphones,
whichever one you’re using. And if 
that’s not working, if it’s choppy,
or if the sound quality isn’t good enough there 
is a phone number you can call in to, too.
We’ll put that in the chat so you can use 
that, but hopefully for most of you
it’s working well through your computer
speakers or headphones.
I’m going to put a “can you hear us now?”
message on there so we can help troubleshoot
if there are some people who 
aren’t actually able to hear us yet.
Okay, another thing about ReadyTalk is chat.
Lots of you are using chat already
which is great. That’s how we’ll interact today
with you, and you can ask questions there,
share your experiences. If you have a resource
that you think would be relevant to everyone
please feel free to share it there. And we 
have some time set aside at the end
of Mick and Toby’s presentation for questions,
but actually we'd love to have you ask those
questions throughout, and we'll answer 
them as they fit with the flow too.
One thing that people often ask is, “Is 
this session is being recorded?”
And the answer is yes, it is being recorded. And
later today we’ll send you a follow-up email,
and that will have a link to the recording, 
it will also have the PowerPoint slides,
and then any websites that are mentioned today
or that are discussed we’ll include those
in the follow-up too. So no need to try 
to write those down or capture them.
Anything that’s shared, even the things that 
are shared by you the participants,
we’ll be sure to include them 
in that follow-up message.
Okay, as we begin. I’ll tell you about the 
groups bringing you today’s session.
I work with TechSoup for Libraries which is part
of TechSoup. And TechSoup if you’re not familiar
with it is an organization that helps nonprofits
and libraries use technology
to serve their communities. And TechSoup 
is one of the organizations
that is part of a coalition 
called The Edge Initiative,
and that’s what today’s session is about.
Here it is, The Edge Initiative and the 
website for The Edge Initiative.
It’s being funded by the Gates Foundation, and
it’s being led by the Urban Libraries Council.
The Edge Coalition has been developing a 
toolkit with best practices and resources
to help public libraries assess where they’re 
at with public technology services,
and then also make plans for improving.
A big part of this is benchmarks that have been
developed. There are 11 benchmarks
in three categories. You can see the three
categories here on this slide.
And you can see as you look at that it’s not just
things like the number of computers
that you have available for the public, or the
amount of bandwidth that you have.
Those things are in there, but these benchmarks
are looking much more broadly than that.
And these benchmarks are the basis 
of the Edge Assessment Tool.
And that’s something that’s going to be 
available nationwide in January 2014,
but pilot libraries have been testing it including
Skokie. And Mick and Toby are here
because they’re one of those pilot libraries.
Today’s session is based on one of the
benchmarks, Benchmark 8 which says this,
“that libraries have sufficient staff with
technology expertise to help patrons
achieve their goals.” So this is Benchmark 8,
and again we’ll include resources,
we’ll include a link to Benchmark 8 and we’ll
include a link to kind of a paper version
of the assessment tool that you can look 
at now in order to think about or prepare
for that January launch. Again, we’ll include that
in the follow-up message later today.
But with that I want to go ahead and turn it over
to our special guests, Mick and Toby.
I’ll let you introduce yourselves, and have 
you just take it from here. Welcome.
Toby: Thank you so much and thank you for the
warm introduction. It’s really great to be here.
My name is Toby Greenwalt so hopefully you
can recognize the dulcet tones of my voice.
I’m presently the Virtual Services Coordinator 
at the Skokie public library.
Mick: My name is Mick Jacobson. 
I guess I don’t have dulcet tones.
I am presently the Supervisor 
of Adult Computer Labs.
Toby: All of that is changing though. Right now
we are in the middle of kind of a realignment,
kind of spurred around some of the
assessments we’ve been doing about the library,
and some strategic planning stuff. So all of that
is going to be thrown out the window
very shortly.
We’re trying to build – a lot of the stuff 
we’ve done leading up to this
has kind of helped contribute to that, and that’s
really kind of what we really want to talk about.
But first that it is given Halloween, we wanted 
to start with something kind of scary.
So brace yourself.
There it is. We tried to think of the scariest 
things we could come up with.
We couldn't come up with anything. We we’re
kind of beating our heads against the wall.
I came across this image on Tumbler, and you
know the rest kind of speaks for itself.
So I hope you guys aren’t all so terrified that 
you don’t sit down and continue to enjoy
the rest of the presentation, but 
we just had to put that out there.
But on a related note our efforts to find 
a scary image kicked things off.
It’s kind of similar to our circle to really say
something concrete about staff training.
We’ve worked really hard to make learning such
a pervasive part of the staff culture here
at the library that it’s really often 
difficult to really separate out
what we actually did to get to this point.
It’s reminds me of a joke that 
David Foster Wallace uses
to start his commencement 
speech “This Is Water.”
In the joke there’s you know these 
two younger fish that are talking,
and an older fish swims by and he asks, 
“Hey guys, how’s the water?”
And the two younger fish turn to one another,
and go “What the hell is water anyway?”
And that’s kind of a reflection 
of where we are now.
We’ve integrated training and just an approach
to learning into just kind of everything we do
here at the library. So we had to really think
back and reflect on what makes the library –
how we built a training model.
Mick: And how do we cultivate 
a learning culture.
Toby: Exactly. And so hopefully we’ve identified
some of those things for you.
It’s a little different from what libraries 
like Anythink has done.
This is of course kind of the flagship for you
know sort of the participatory librarianship,
creating something that’s a very comprehensive
model for how public and staff interact
with one another. You know they’ve rebuilt 
their entire organization more or less
from the ground up. And different from 
that we're a big standalone library
with a lot of legacy services and staff. So it’s
really been kind of a big ship to turn around.
So we’re going to talk about kind of how we’ve
integrated a lot of different methods,
kind of using the staff we have and then the
resources that are available to us,
both little things whether it’s just small
questions that we’re asking people
or big large formal training programs that we’ve
done that have kind of helped to introduce
new concepts to the staff. And just drive home
the fact that trying new stuff that people
are in a safe environment to try new things.
From our perspective we try to give people 
the tools to support one another,
and once they get the understanding 
they can go and run with it.
Libraries after all are a learning organization, and
knowing how to learn really plays a big part
of that. We want to reinforce throughout 
all of this just the variety of methods
that we’ve employed. There’s no 
single magic bullet that works.
You can’t even like get a 3-D printer 
and print out a magic bullet
because there’s a good chance that
 it may not even print out right.
Mick: Right, because you have to 
calibrate the magic bullet first.
Toby: Yeah, right, the whole thing. Rather it’s
like this mix of big kind of formal efforts,
and then there’s smaller sneakier methods of
integrating an awareness of new technology
or a way to approach, a way integrated 
tools into current services
that really makes things click. Maybe
sometimes – where was I?
So we’re here to provide kind of an overview 
of how those methods work.
And just reflecting on the Edge Benchmarks
because this is not –
the Edge Benchmarks aren’t overly prescriptive
in dictating how you fulfill them.
You know it’s up to you to determine the best
approach for your organization to meet this goal.
So when you say, “libraries will 
have sufficient staff training,”
maybe that means you need a formal training
program where you need staff
that need a lot of handholding or you walk them
through, first you do this and then you do this,
and then voilà you’ve written a Tweet. Or maybe
you can do things in kind of a more ad hoc
set of discussions where everybody comes in
and you say, “show us what you’re good at.”
And then let the other staff members learn 
from one another. Maybe all you need
is like a technology petting zoo where people
can come in and just really get some exposure
to the gadgets on hand.
So your mileage always varies 
depending on what you've got.
So with all of this you really kind of have 
to filter it through your own prism.
Don’t do it just to fulfill the edge benchmarks
really pursue staff training
as a way to make your organization better.
So we’ll be going through these examples 
in a fairly rapid-fire manner.
Again, every library has its own specificities.
Mick: And we really want to get as 
many questions as possible.
I don’t know if it was mentioned the 
Twitter hashtag is #TechSoup,
so we’re going to be monitoring that 
as well as chat of course.
Toby: And we’re hoping to leave at least 
15 minutes at the end for Q&A
because we know it gets into that very specific
stuff quickly. So we want to be able to respond
to as many things as we can. Please send your
questions. Don’t hesitate to leave them in chat
now, so you don’t forget them because our
friends hosting will make note of them
and we will bring them up later if we miss them.
So and likewise if you see something in the chat
and you have your own answer please jump in.
A healthy back channel really is the key 
to enjoying a good presentation,
beyond just hearing the dulcet tones of our
voices.
Mick: Even any presentation because 
we’re not promising to be good.
Toby: Right. So let’s get started.
A big part of training staff on new technology
really requires making an honest assessment
of what it is they need to know before you even
start. It's like questions, what do we know?
What don’t we know yet? And what is it 
that our patrons want to understand
that we’re not fulfilling? And that’s 
really the first real secret.
You’ve got to talk to people.
I know it’s scary, but it’s something 
you really have to get out there.
Mick: And not just the people who are coming to
your desk, the 5% of the population you serve.
You've got to get out there and really talk to
people, and more so listen to people.
Toby: Yeah, you’ve got ask questions 
to really kind of prompt a response.
The way we do reference interviews to flush 
out what are the real details we need,
things like what does your staff feel nervous
about? What is it that your patrons are actually
using? There's lots of given the move to people
are bringing in their own devices,
what are the devices you see? We’ve seen a
definite transition from people bringing
in e-book readers to tablets. You know 
tablets all the way around.
And you can do this in formal fashions, you can
do like create some kind of protocol
where you have a specific question that 
you have your staff ask people,
or you can design a survey. But I’m really
actually a bigger fan of using
just kind of informal gatherings. With regard to
staff , the break room is just a fantastic place
to really talk to people.
Mick: Or the water cooler.
Toby: Or those hallway conversations that 
take place. And you can even do
this kind of indirectly if you don’t – because
obviously you can’t be there all the time
because supposedly we all have other jobs to
do. But you can set up like a graffiti wall,
like just get a thing like butcher paper and 
leave it on the table with a question,
and use that to kind of drive some kind 
of asynchronous conversation
when you’re going through things.
It doesn’t have to be literal questions 
you know it’s like what technology
are you most curious about? What 
gadgets are your kids using?
You can take a more sideways method.
 I’m a big fan of Brian Eno.
He’s a musician, and a record producer. A long
time ago he developed this deck of cards
called Oblique Strategies. And they're basically
prompts that encourage creativity.
It’s like a way of introducing limitations into a
creative environment so that your imagination
can be sparked. You know when often 
when you have an unlimited palette,
you get frozen by indecision. So that’s what
kind of what informs some of the other questions
like what skills do you wish you had? 
Name a technology that scares you?
What do you think is going to change about
your position in the next five years?
Sometimes taking a more indirect approach to
really result in some more illuminating answers.
You know as far as using this to build 
a learning culture, your ultimate goal
is to really not just have a direct you 
talking to them all the time,
but more getting your staff talking 
and sharing ideas back and forth.
And with all of this there’s a good chance 
you’re going to end up being a victim
of your own success. To be perfectly honest,
you’re going to end up getting a bigger array
of responses then you really 
know what to do with.
And that’s kind of the other secret, you don’t
have to do everything all at once.
There’s always pressure. Oh, Pinterest 
is big. Let's put it on Pinterest.
3-D printers are awesome, let’s buy a 
MakerBot. Part of making an effective plan
for serving your public is choosing 
what needs to be given priority,
and what needs not to be given priority, 
but having these conversations
can really go a long way toward 
helping you set those priorities.
And of course keep in mind that just because
you choose not to do something now,
doesn’t mean you can’t always get to it later.
Mick: And if you choose not to do something
doesn’t mean you can’t learn about it
or you can’t  research it. I can’t emphasize that
active researching a topic is the learning as well
even if you don’t end up buying 30 
Chromebooks or whatever it is.
Toby: Exactly, and with that in mind you can
then work on developing a formal approach.
I’m actually going to skip a slide.
I’m a really big fan of experiential learning. 
I find that people learn best
when they actually take the time 
to do the project themselves.
You can sit there and you know it’s like you can
give a man a fish, and teach him for a day.
If you teach them how to fish, you know etc.
etc. We’ll all have lots of fish.
We were big fans of the 23 Things program 
that was started in North Carolina,
and we implemented one of our own 
back in 2007 called “10 things”
because we just concentrated it down.
Mick: Right, the best 10 things.
Toby: Yeah, and these of course were the 
things that were a big deal at the time.
But in terms of getting all the facts involved 
it ended up creating this platform
where everybody could trial these things in a
safe space, send one another questions,
and then also help one another out. Knowing
that in week three we’re talking about
instant messaging, you could get groups 
of people to say let’s all get online
at the same time and set up a chat.
Mick: And you’ll see in the next couple 
slides a lot of the 10 things on here
are going to be we will revisit 
them in a specific project.
Toby: Right, I mean there’s fluidity to all 
of this. These were all, some of these
were social bookmarking that’s with Delicious
fading into obscurity, and things like that
with the intent to pull RSS away from wider use.
Mick: My cold dead hands [cross-talk].
Toby: It’s the kind of thing that a strong
assessment will help you determine
which things to really focus on.
Brenda: Sorry, this is from 2007? Has it been
updated since then or is that something
that you did at that time, and are now you’ve
trying other things since then?
Toby: We’ve been trying other things 
in different ways since then.
We’re actually working on developing a new kind
of staff training to represent the libraries
realignment. It will be very different 
from what it looks like now.
Mick: But the 10 things was a jumping off 
point, and you’ll see from within that
was the baseline knowledge, and 
then we grew the tree from that.
Toby: Right, in library school I was in a
networking class where we built computer
networks. And the instructor’s style was
he would sit down and lecture.
We would each have a computer, we would take
it apart, and then end up with a big pile
of circuit boards and RAM chips and cables 
and etc. And he would say, “okay,
so now you see all of the parts. Go put it back
together.” And then he would leave the room.
And then kind of giving people that 
sense of working without a net.
Really it kind of unlocks, it’s an empowering
move because people realized
that they know more than they think they do.
Mick: And if they don’t they learn on the fly.
Toby: Right, or they turn to one another.
Mick: I suppose the biggest take away libraries
are an organization that’s learning
to learn is the most important thing.The 
future of libraries is self-learners.
Toby: Right. This is another learning program
that we did called “video boot camp.”
That one is blogs.skokielibrary.info/bootcamp.
Mick: I think so yeah.
Toby: And that was really one built around
creating and editing videos for the library.
Mick: So imagine 10 things but 
just about video production.
Toby: Right, and we had staff on 
hand to walk people through.
We broke it down into simple steps kind 
of like how we did with the 10 things.
Instead of one week you did wikis, and 
the next week you did podcasting.
Here it’s like one week you write out a script.
You learn how to co-create a concise message
and focus it down. Next week 
you write a storyboard.
So by breaking things down into 
smaller more digestible chunks,
you can help people learn much bigger things.
And we actually converted this to a program that
we did at the Illinois Library Association
Conference for two years running, where we had
people running through this program in two days
creating their own. And we had staff at all levels
coming to us. We ended up making probably
a couple dozen videos all together across those
two years where people would come in
Mick: Grab a camera and go.
Toby: Yeah, we’d check out flip cameras for
them, and they would go out and do it.
Mick: So basically we learned all of the people
we needed to hire because they’re the ones
who came and asked for cameras and 
wanted to do experiential learning.
Toby: And then we'd coached them, 
and it was delightful.
Moving on though and that goes back to this
idea of really building projects around learning.
The other kind of more insidious motive 
behind having video boot camp
was it enabled us to kind of create a pool of
videos helping people really build stuff.
And you know we’ve looked to other programs.
This came from a gallery exhibition we had
of Caldecott art, and we thought let’s set up a
photo booth where people could pose
with their favorite Caldecott books, 
and we can superimpose the stuff.
That was a learning exercise where people
learned how to create good photos,
how to use the green screen, the 
portable green screen we have.
And then how to put all the parts together 
using GIMP or Photoshop
or the other tools that we have.
Mick: Right, so this specific project was 
we had the Caldecott display of art,
and you would invite a lot of people to 
come and view this beautiful artwork.
And one of our librarians Brad Jones said, 
“hey, what if we set up a green screen
and took pictures of them and then we
superimpose the background
of their favorite piece of art, and then give 
that to them?” We got lots of like dozens
and dozens of great photos. You can 
look at our Flickr pool if you like.
So the whole idea of building products around
learning is like projects are patron based.
You are building stuff for patron’s delight this 
is a delightful thing for patrons to do.
But within these projects Brad and other people
learned the basics of green screen lighting,
which is not easy. You do three 
lamps and stuff like that.
And you've got to set up a green screen 
and you've got to take a picture,
and then you've got to edit it. A 
couple people edited a dozen.
Now we have a couple green 
screen experts on staff.
Toby: We can build on that.
Mick: Right because it was their idea because
they are self-learners, self-teachers,
but other people saw this and thought this 
was awesome, and they wanted to do it,
and they want to learn it as well.
Toby: Yeah, and the nice thing about this
because often times when you’re
dealing with staff you’re going to get people that
say, “well, how is this going to be useful?
What are patrons going to get out of this?”
This was a case where the service dictated the
technology as opposed to the other way around.
Toby: We've got the [indistinct] why 
don’t we do something fun with it,
and that’s where we start to incorporate the
green screen elements into photography.
Mick: So I want to be absolutely clear for all the
people who are starting to roll their eyes,
we do not build projects around the tech. 
We do involve the tech in the project.
And I’ll go into augmentation a little bit later.
Augmentation with technology of projects.
Toby: Let’s go through a couple other examples
on how we’ve done that where the project
really provides the context 
for learning technology.
Mick: This is something called BookMatch. 
So a readers advisory survey sort of thing
like quite a few libraries have it.
Toby: Yeah, if you’re familiar with Barry Trott's
work where you fill out a big expensive survey
outlining your reading preferences, 
this is our adaptation of its.
Mick: So I was on the reference desk the other
day, and I was talking to one of our colleagues.
Her name is Sophie, she is self admittedly 
not a tech person. And I was talking about
how I was going to use this in this talk. And I
was thinking when you learned BookMatch,
you learned how to edit wikis. You learned 
how to convert things to PDF.
You learned the basics of WYSIWYG of what
you see is what you get editing
which is what you need for blogging 
and everything else like that,
so you learned a lot of technology things.
Toby: You learned about surveys, and skip logic.
Just to be clear the backend of the BookMatch
is once I fill in the survey, we paste it into a 
wiki, and then staff work collaboratively
to make a list of about two dozen
recommendations for the patrons,
based on their preferences.
Mick: And she told me, “sometimes I learn stuff
and I don’t even know what it’s called.”
Because you know she learned how to 
edit a wiki that is not a small thing
that is web design in some ways. She learned
what a hyperlink is and she didn’t even know
what it’s called. She just did it because she was
suggesting books for somebody.
So this is a perfect example I think, of
experiential learning and building technology
into projects because we could just 
have a Microsoft Word document.
It wouldn’t work nearly as well, but everybody
would know the technology already,
but for me it was a better tool.
Mick: Another project we did, or are in the midst
of is called called “Skokie Stories.”
This is an oral history project. A lot of people do
oral history projects or some sort of archiving
projects. We decided to do ours through video
and audio. And one of the main reasons for that
was we get to keep people’s voices, a lot of
good reasons for video and audio of course.
But one of the main reasons for me, my staff or
my colleagues, would learn how to edit audio.
We would buy MP3 recorders and 
we would learn how to use those.
We would learn how to use a camera. 
We would learn how to use a little bit of,
how to upload [indistinct] or how to edit
something in Garage Band, or Audacity,
or whatever software, what have you. 
It doesn’t matter they’re learning.
And from here again, we got the video boot
camp and everything else like that
so we were building to this all the time this is
just another example of a local history.
I imagine you have a local history project. I
imagine you’re thinking about a local history
project, how can you build in the tech training?
Not the tech training into the project,
the project and then bring in the tech 
training. If you get my drift?
Toby: Yeah, this is another example just 
how reflecting on the video stuff,
we did tours of the library, and this was another
chance to really encourage people
to really work on focusing their message. 
And then how to stand and talk.
You know how to work on your Elevator speech.
How do you talk about the library?
How do you talk about the areas that you’re
really responsible for and passionate about?
And by putting them on camera, it really drove
home just the way, the idea of how people
present themselves. I don’t want to rehash some
of the other stuff from video boot camp,
but just another example of things we’ve done.
Likewise we’ve taken the same approach with
our roving. We’re starting to implement roving
here at Skokie with people walking 
around with tablets to do service.
Of course, we have patrons more and more
patrons are bringing in their own devices,
and I call them “campers.” They’ll come in, 
they plug into the outlet,
they’ll spread out their books on the table.
They’ll lay out their at least one device,
whether it’s a laptop or a tablet or a phone, 
or some combination of the three.
And they’re certainly not going to get up to
come see us because they don’t want
to lose their stuff, more importantly their spot.
Mick: Spot, yeah. The outlet, 
the wonderful, wonderful outlet.
Toby: Right, and so that model of waiting for
people to visit us at the reference desk
just doesn’t work anymore. So we've been
getting people, we’ve been trying to walk around,
and kind of show people that we’re available 
by having a tablet. It helps me.
I’ve been able to get people in study rooms. 
I’ve been able to do some research.
I’ve been able to pull the materials from the
shelf. And you’ve seen this, other libraries
have really gone into a much bigger degree.
There’s a library in Helsinki that talks with local
actors to show them how to walk,
like how your body language conveys 
being available and open.
I thought that was kind of fascinating. 
But one of the ways we've kind of –
because you definitely run into that. You’ll walk
around and if you’re just buried in your tablet
or you're just walking past.
Mick: Right, or walking fast.
Toby: People aren’t going to be as 
inclined. So you really have to work.
So I have been encouraging people to 
really listen and try to find people
who are doing interesting stuff.
Mick: So bringing this back to learning, we’re
making people walk around with tablets,
and they could get any sort of question about a
tablet because you are an expert on a tablet.
So they have to learn the iPad.
Now, everyone’s coming in asking for iPad 1 on
1 classes, it’s not just E-book 1 on 1 classes
is iPad 1 on 1. Because every E-book 1 on 1
class on an iPad is an iPad 1 on 1 class.
So we’ve have an expertise.
Toby: Yeah, it’s building organically. But with the
listening, we’ve identified people like Carolyna
here who’s actually – what that project is, 
is actually the background
to a website she was building. And so it helps
people to find really interesting things,
and just provides other context things we
wouldn’t see if we stepped behind the desk
the whole time.
Mick: Right.
Another thing, and this is a way of showing
technology training or learning culture.
Toby: And just integrating it 
into our everyday work flow.
Mick: Right. So we have a statistic module. We
built a statistic module using a Firefox add-on,
and what this taught people is that there’s
another web browser not called Internet Explorer
which is only good because Internet Explorer
cannot always do what you need it to do.
From someone who developed 
websites, I hate Internet Explorer.
But what they've been told there is more than
one browser which is a huge step for many staff
members because if something doesn’t work in
one web browser, try a different web browser
and it works magically. So now they 
understand the web browsers.
Toby: They just look different.
Mick: Right, all that code stuff. And also they
learn how to add add-ons to Firefox.
So we’ve got people with their [indistinct]
popping up and everything else.
They’ve learned that your browser 
is not something given to you,
it’s something you can build.
Toby: Yeah, we built a staff, a statistics 
module logging questions at the desk.
Mick: Yeah, instead of using Google form which
we could have totally done just a Google form.
One of our people built an add-on and it’s
installed onto your Firefox toolbar.
Toby: And that way it’s always available.
And then there’s other things where you don’t
always have the skills to learn from within.
We’re going to talk about 
some of those resources.
Mick: Right, formal learning. We do 
a lot. We also do formal learning.
It’s not all holistic Zen learning. 
We’ve done formal learning.
And some of the tools we use are online. 
Well, Lynda.com is one of the resources
we've used a lot, and something I use for 
almost all of my own technology training.
I’m not joking, I do almost all my trainings
through Lynda.com for software,
obviously hardware you can’t really 
learn that well through a website.
I don’t know how expensive it is for everybody.  
It can be a bit pricy for libraries,
but for an individual account which you might
want to get for yourself is not too much money,
25 bucks a month or something like that. And it
has software training for all kinds of topics.
You can learn anything from Photoshop, there
must be 50 hours of video on Photoshop
to 80 hours of Microsoft Word 2013.
Atomic Learning is another solution very similar.
I don’t like it quite as much as Lynda.com
because...
Toby: Honestly, it’s not as thorough, 
not as well fleshed out.
Mick: For me, the speakers are wooden, 
a little bit wooden. It's like they’re reading.
Toby: No dulcet tones.
Mick: No dulcet tones, exactly. 
Another tool I mentioned.
Toby: What’s that obscure one you use?
Mick: Yeah.
Toby: Your free one.
Mick: Can someone help me with this,
YouTube? Have you guys heard of YouTube?
Yeah, YouTube is another obscure technology
training tool that we use all the time.
Toby: And you’d be amazed at how 
many like very specific questions
have like these walk-throughs of 
people just recording the screen,
and letting just sort of follow along.
Mick: So in my staff training, when I order
something, we have something called
a digital media lab here. It is space where
people can create digital media creations
so we have to support that to some level. And
when we buy new software like [indistinct]
or I don’t know, something like that, we 
have to have a baseline knowledge
and that’s where Lynda.com, mostly 
Lynda.com or Atomic Learning have it.
So this is one of our online formal training tools.
Toby: Safari Books.
Mick: Safari Books is another one. 
I forgot to mention that.
Safari Books is online books, e-books but not
downloadable, more like streaming e-books.
We also train in Office 2010, 
and we use a classroom.
Sometimes you just have to use classrooms. I
know for a lot of your libraries a classroom
is not going to work. You don’t have a
classroom, or if you have a classroom
you can’t spread the staff for one person
teaching and a bunch of other people to attend.
But if you can do it, it it can work.
It’s a little bit boring, unless the instructor is
good. So I recommend if you have the instructor,
go ahead and make it a little bit light, make it
learning together when you’re up there.
The words of wisdom that I’ve 
heard for a teacher is
it’s not what you teach that 
matters, it’s what they learn.
So if you’re teaching office 2010, what 
is the most important thing to learn?
F1, isn't that right?
Toby: Alt + Ctrl + Z
Mick: Alt + Ctrl + Z that’s right. Those are very
important tools when you’re in Microsoft Word.
How do you download a resume template? 
So what is it that they really want to learn?
Toby: All of this is meant to reflect 
it like teaching as a process.
Like Mick said, it’s not what you teach it's how
they learn. And you know in some cases,
you’re the one doing the learning. We end up –
we teach. The number of classes we’ve taught
has gone up, has skyrocketed in the 
last couple of years. And as a result
we’re kind of learning, we’re using patron
demand to kind of define what we're learning
before we go into it and tying it 
into existing library resources.
This is a mobile phone class I did 
a couple years ago. You can tell
because the phone has among 
its features is a hinge.
Mick: That’s my phone. I’ve got a hinge.
Toby: But one of the reasons we wanted 
to do this, we had a big demand.
The class was full. We’ve offered it a few times,
but it also enabled us to talk about
what library services we offered for mobile
devices. We built a mobile website.
You start offering text messaging services.
We had a new mobile catalog,
and we wanted to show all of this stuff off.
So it gives staff a chance for some real
dedicated one-on-one time with the public
who’s receptive to those products that they have
been working on. If somebody’s interested in –
like we have some people who got really into
making a Pinterest page,
so we had them teach a Pinterest class. That
enabled them to expand our audience.
Mick: We actually turned that around a little bit.
Toby: Yeah.
Mick: One of my main tools of
making people learn a technology
is that I make them teach a technology. For
instance, we just hired somebody new.
His name is Michael. He’s a very enthusiastic
guy. I'm making him teach audio production.
He’s never done audio production. I'm not
making him teach advanced audio production.
I'm making him teach the
basic audio production.
Or like Toby said, Pinterest. There’s people who
would say, “show an interest in Pinterest.”
And then there’s people who don’t show much of
an interest. And we say, I think you need to
teach a class on Tumblr and then eventually
they learn to pick their own topics.
Toby: And because there is – if a class goes
nowhere. You know you’ve spent several hours
sometimes 8 to 10 hours researching the topic,
learning the ins and outs, writing slides,
writing a handout, and it’s like 2 people
come up you know that makes it tough.
So if you can really build it around
things that can be replicated
whether it’s through other classes or
if it’s handouts that can be handed out
as a means of promoting a service
that it’s tied to do.
Mick: Along with that is screen casting. Screen
casting is a video of a computer screen.
You’re basically taking a video of the computer
screen in order to teach somebody
an asynchronous sort of information need. And
having someone teach a screen cast,
for example from like Reference USA or another
database, means they're going to learn it,
and learn it really well. It’s a good
thing to have new people come in
who you’re not quite sure are going
to learn that database or whatever.
Another thing we started doing is 1 on 1 – well,
we’ve been doing 1 on 1 classes for a long time.
We have staff teaching tons of 1 on 1 classes. I
think we're going to probably break over to 600
to 700 1 on 1 classes this year, and
these are all technology 1 on 1 classes
this is not include the reference
and [indistinct] 1 on 1 classes.
So what I started doing, and what I’m kind of
playing around with is, we encourage staff.
We have a slew of stuff we teach. We teach
everything from the introduction of mouse
to Photoshop advanced. So staff can choose
what they can teach. I’ll only teach iPad
and android or I'll only teach Microsoft Word or
something like that. I’m trying to get people
to level up. I’m still playing around with
this idea of making it a game of vacation.
Toby: Yeah, just put some [indistinct] into
it. Again, building on that process.
We started taking photos of giving people  these
certificates, and then throwing them up
on our Facebook page and the other spaces.
And we always get this tremendous response
where people go,  “oh, welcome to
the Internet.” This is [indistinct] 92?
Mick: This is actually a patron,
not a staff member.
Toby: Right.
Mick: The culture of learning in the community.
Toby: Right, but it reflects the library’s overall
mission of helping to encourage people,
being a platform for personal growth,
and community engagement.
Mick: Absolutely.
Brenda: Can I ask a quick question? A question
that came in is, what percentage of your staff
do this or are able to, or do this 1 to 1 type of
training? What percentage of the staff does it?
Mick: That’s a good question. For adult
services, where most of the training takes place
I would say 75%.
Toby: We have a fairly large staff, and I should
reinforce that. We have about 156 total staff
members, and we're a standalone location.
But yeah, I'd say all together
I would say it’s like 30 people.
Mick: 30 people contribute to this, and
not to mention eight or nine volunteers.
Toby: Right.
Mick: So we teach a lot of these classes.
Toby: You don’t have to scale this
out so big because obviously
and particularly in smaller libraries
it’s hard to get time off staff.
If you can schedule a, if you make just like
Tuesdays at 3 PM every other week
is the 1 to 1 appointment window then
you can actually start making some time.
You may not be able to meet sort of
everyone, but it can at least
give you a chance to get started.
Mick: Yeah, and when you teach 1 to 1 classes,
and when you ask staff and say,
"staff, you're going to teach 1 to 1
classes they will learn the topic
in order to teach the 1 on 1 class
even if patrons don't show up.
If I’m telling a staff member you’ve got to learn
Windows 8 because you’ll be teaching class,
a 1 on 1 on Windows 8 in three weeks,
they’re going to go down and teach it
because you can’t argue with patron services.
You can argue with me about what’s important
and what not, but if a patron says,
“I want to learn Windows 8.”
We're teaching them Windows 8.
There’s just no argument about it.
Toby: There’s a chicken and egg scenario there,
you know what comes first the knowledge
or the teaching? And in this sense we’re kind of
doing both. We’re putting staff out there
in the egg, and forcing them to grow a beak.
Brenda: And then one more, one more follow-up
question, and is it staff at all levels,
all classifications or job titles,
is it all levels teaching classes
during this sort of 1 to 1 training?
Mick: Yes, all levels are teaching.
Toby: Not all.
Mick: Not circulation.
Toby: Right now its adult services
librarians and the tech help.
Mick: And the volunteers. But within adult
services that’s mostly everybody.
Toby: One of the things we are looking out for in
this realignment is helping expand that.
Mick: We don’t see why circulation
people couldn’t be teaching these
or why tech services couldn't be teaching one
hour every two weeks or something like that.
We have a waiting list, and as I
said we’re teaching almost 700.
We can have a month-long waiting list for these
classes because they’re so popular.
Toby: And if they have the knowledge, and the
demand is there. I mean if we have patrons
coming in asking about mark, how to edit a
mark record.
We could find somebody to pull someone in.
And that speaks to another one of our goals
which is to let the library be sort of the conduit
through which people can talk to one another.
We really worked with that with the staff model,
and we’re starting to move that
into some of our other classes.
There’s kind of this appy hour, we’re calling our
“come on, get appy” where people come in
and bring their mobile devices
and talk about what they like,
and what they have questions about. It gives
them a real chance to share their perspective.
Because tablets and phones have moved to a
point where everybody has this very intimate
and personal connection with their devices, it’s
hard to teach these in a very general sense.
It’s like have you ever grabbed your
neighbor’s phone or your spouse’s phone
and you just like “none of these apps
are in the right place. Everything’s weird.
The screen is too bright.” So rather
than try to teach some very homogeneous,
in a very homogeneous generalized way, it’s
more just create the space and let people
really talk about what they’re
passionate about.
That same intimacy leads to people to
developing their own creative solutions.
It’s like “oh if I create this folder for my apps
thent I have something I can quickly –
all the things I access most frequently I have in
one spot.” So if you take advantage of this
it’s that other case where patrons,
and people who participate
know a lot more than they think they do.
Mick: And it creates community as well.
Toby: And we’ve done this as well with
some things like we had a program
called Tech Munchies for a while which was kind
of a lunch program where people would come in
and talk about, and staff members would share
whatever tool they wanted to talk about.
Yeah, Ted Talks was another.
Mick: Yeah, we haven’t actually done that here
but I’ve heard and read about other libraries
during lunch hour or whenever having a Ted Talk
meeting where they listen to a Ted Talk.
If you don’t know what a Ted Talk is,
do Google it and look up Sugata Mitra.
It is one of my favorite Ted Talks where they’re
talking about technology, education and design
which are what you’re doing.
What Ted Talks, and when you say,
“oh, I don’t have time for that.”
Well, maybe stop going to so
many webinars everybody,
but if you listen to one of these 15 minute talks
or 20 minute talks you’re going to be inspired
to have a conversation about whatever it is,
technology, education or designed
which is what we are doing in so many ways.
Toby: And that brings us to kind of the next
phase of where we’re going with all of this
because we’ve worked really hard to get people
more comfortable trying new things,
and to kind of talk with one another as opposed
to just one or two people on staff
being the ones who handle stuff that has
flashing lights and goes ding.
You run into a point where you k
now what do you do
when people start taking your
training resources to heart?
You’re kind of becoming a victim of
your own success in a good way.
Now it’s like once people learn “hey, I don’t
know everything.” I can look for support
and tools, and I can go to YouTube and find a
resource there. I can create my own solutions.
You need to be able to find ways if you’re a
manager to support those endeavors,
and sometimes to find ways to kind of cast the
somewhat critical eye on what they’re doing
to make sure that what they’re doing
fits into the organization’s mission.
Say like they someone’s gotten really into
Tumblr . How do you determine
there’s an audience for it? How do you make
sure the library can help support them
in their efforts to speak to that audience?
Mick: But beyond that like, okay let's
say you create a Tumblr account,
and not many people who are on it happen
to be librarians who are following you,
what is the learning goal of Tumblr is a
question as a manager that I ask myself.
I have a staff member who’s really
into Tumblr, what’s the learning goal?
What’s he learning by doing Tumblr?
Toby: Making GIFs
Mick: Beyond an animated GIF.
That’s one thing.
Toby: That’s a class. You can harness that.
Mick: We'll get into what a success is.
Toby: Right. So here’s some examples of ways
people have taken their skills
and kind of run with it.
This comes from our school services
coordinator. She had been working really hard
to cultivate an ongoing relationship with all
of the teachers in the five school districts
that we have in Skokie because we’re
in Illinois and we have a bureaucracy
on top of another bureaucracy. And she needed
to create a way to reach them more consistently
to make sure that certain instructors
didn't fall into the gaps.
So first we create a blog called Library Links
which is strictly devoted to reach library
resources for educators and parents. And then
we realized a lot of the teachers
didn’t always come to the library to see
this, so we put in a WordPress module
that allows us to send it out as an email. So
anytime she updates it people get like this email
newsletter with the latest blog
post and all this information.
We’ re now working to – we’ve always done
teacher bags where a teacher comes in
and says, “hey, I’ve got unit on ancient Egypt,
can you put together a packet of books for me?”
Well, we’re getting more and more e-books. A
lot of the youth e-books are kind of unlimited
users. It can be viewable on screen by any
number of people. So we’ve been building,
so she’s been taking that to heart
and building kind of digital book bags
where if there’s a unit on the Revolutionary
War we can send them this list.
And she’s been working on this through,
she’s been using Pinterest actually
to create those lists because it’s a
nice way to make it visually appealing,
and driving home a variety of different
resources whether it’s our stuff
or whether it’s legitimate stuff
out on the web.
Mick: Once you start getting successful,
your staff members might want
to augment themselves with
cameras on their head.
Toby: That’s the real extreme librarian.
Mick: That's extreme librarianship
which is what we’re all about.
Toby: It’s too bad you can’t see
the animated GIF version of that.
Mick: If you go Google it, or maybe
we’ll put out a link on Twitter.
But all joking aside, like we’ve been saying
we’re taking projects and augmenting them
with technology. And when you’ve done
everything and have been successful
and people really learn, they’re going to start
augmenting their own projects with technology
such as Holly Jen  who did a TechSoup...
Toby: That’s right she did a TechSoup webinar.
Mick: She did Where is Thumbkin YouTube. And
she got what, 30,000 views on it.
Toby: One of the go to finger
plays that are out there.
Mick: It's a definitive Where is Thumbkin,
and this is what we should be doing.
Toby: Yeah, yeah. That’s kind of how these
things kind of feed into one another,
there is a cycle to this process of once you’re
comfortable with learning you can start building
it into other existing library services
or create other library services.
Mick: And become extreme.
Toby: That’s right.
So we want to leave time for questions so we
want to kind of wrap with some of the core
concepts that bring, we’ve got to earn our keep
as liberal arts majors, both Mick and I do,
so we want to bring it back to the concept.
Oh look! Someone on Twitter found the link.
Mick: Thank you Lisa J.
Toby: First thing, it’s kind of leap then look.
We’ve been talking about a lot of these
sometimes the only thing that’s keeping people
back is just the fact that they haven’t tried it.
We’ve had these classes where people are
learning how to do it sometimes the week before
or even the day before or in my case sometimes
the hour before. I need to plan better.
But the more you get used to this stuff the
quicker you realize how much it builds on itself.
Yesterday it was mobile devices and things like
that. There’s an intuition that’s built
into a lot of these projects. The knowing of
things like ctrl+z, the undo button
is more or less a universal command
across every piece of software.
Mick: Like I mentioned with screencasting,
you can learn screencasting
and you can automatically, well not
automatically but you have learned audio
production and video production. And
you've learned it, you just have.
One of the other rapid fire tips, who is your key
person? Who is some of your key persons?
I call them the Pollyannas. The people who
are going to be positive about change,
about site training. If you can’t name the
person off the top of your head right now
then maybe you’re that person which is great.
I’m not talking about department heads.
I’m talking about people like I
mentioned before like Sophie.
People who make the cookies.
Toby: Who are the connectors?
Mick: Who do you need to get going on this?
Who do you really need to work on?
Identify them, work on them.
Toby: Sometimes it’s going to be
the same person all the way through,
and sometimes it’s going to be someone who
once you introduce the project they take to it
and realize that it's something they really
like and that they really want to do.
And you can build on that enthusiasm
and use it as a way of demonstrating,
again context for how this works.
Mick: And your key people are not Toby and
Mick. Like we are already on board,
get us on board but we’re already
halfway there. We were there yesterday.
Now one thing you gotta know about is
failure. Failure begets improvement.
Toby: You gotta be willing to essentially
fail fast. If a project doesn’t go off,
if a project doesn’t work, take the time
to reflect on it and ask yourself,
“well, is there something here that we
did learn from this that we can harvest?
What can we change to make the next time we
try something like this function well?”
Mick: And be willing to admit failure, like
don’t pin failure on people out loud.
Try to learn from your failure. For example,
there’s a baseball team in Chicago
called the Chicago Cubs that does
not generally improve from failure.
Toby: You’ve might’ve heard of my
favorite team the Boston Red Sox.
And they have gone from last to first.
So people can iterate and move along.
And then finally, you have to treat this all like a
process whenever you introduce a new thing
it’s not like this is going to be the same all the
way throughout. You’re going to make a change,
you might iterate it, you might phase it out
altogether and introduce a new learning module
like the same way Delicious faded.
Mick: But if you learned Delicious you knew
tagging, you learned a whole bunch.
There is no endpoint.
Toby: And again it’s all about building a really
strong positive attitude toward learning.
And once you have that you can
really start, you can tackle anything.
Mick: Right.
Toby: So that’s kind of our spiel.
Mick: Thanks everybody.
Toby: Yeah you can get in touch with our
adorable children if you’d like
or go through our contact information
there, but we wanted to leave some time
to take your questions because I know there’s
lots of specific instances where smaller libraries
or libraries with different organizational
structures or certain people
can raise certain questions.
Brenda: Okay, that was great and I do
have a lot of questions from the audience
so let’s just start going through some of them.
One of them is just tech resistance,
and you talked about staff doing teaching
or requiring people to teach,
do you run into resistance there? And what’s
your advice for tech resistance
and dealing with that?
Mick: I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
But one of the things I’ve done
is that you’ve got to imagine a bank
account, and you’ve got to put money
into the bank account and then take
deposits from the bank account.
So when I’m helping someone with a
printer jam, when I’m helping someone
with one of these tech problems, I’m putting
money into that bank account.
And they have to understand that I’m going to
take money out of that bank account eventually,
and we’re going to ask them to learn something.
Some people won’t see it this way.
I hate to say it, but if you really have a toxic
person on your staff and you have the ability
to let them go, you’ve got to let them go.
Toby: There’s, I mean exactly. Some
people are going to get it, some
people are going to need some coaching, and
they’re going to need to see what context,
what’s the bigger picture about learning about
an e-reader. The fact that the way people
are reading is changing. Why do we need to
teach people how to use tablets?
Because they’re not coming to the desk
anymore. If you can put it in that context
that can help.  There are going to be
people who they’ll refuse to do anything,
and there’s a point where you have to
kind of say, “you need to do this.
This is part of your job.”
Mick: And we are very lucky because our
administration of our organization
is very supportive of this, but we
have worked at other organizations
that are not quite as supportive, and sometimes
you just kind of leap. What’s the saying?
Ask for forgiveness not permission.
Toby: Yeah, exactly. It’s easier to beg for
forgiveness than to ask for permission.
Brenda: Have you added, have job descriptions
actually been changed to make teaching
and training part of the roles
and responsibilities for staff?
Mick: Welcome to my life
everybody this is Mick.
Toby: This is the realignment.
Mick: We are realigning because we see
learning and community and other access
as vital, and they need to be their own
departments. They can no longer be dovetailed
into children’s, adults, whatever. It’s going to be,
and I’m sure we’ll be doing a talk about this.
Toby: Yeah, there will be a lot of crossover
between where the concept of learning spiders
into adult services, and youth services,
and you know the computer lab,
and circulation, and all of those things.
Mick: And it’s not just us, it’s the AnyThink
library, Arlington Heights Memorial public library,
I’d look at them. I would talk to them
about it. There’s a lot of libraries.
We’re seeing that learning is going to
be something that butters our bread
so to speak ,forever.
Toby: So take a more flexible
approach to all of this.
Mick: So does that answer the question?
Brenda: Yeah, I think it does. We
knew that question would come,
that's something that always comes up with
this topic, and that’s a good response.
I think your whole presentation
has given a lot of good ideas.
Mick, can I ask you to type the name
of that Ted Talks speaker into the chat.
People were asking, and I didn’t
catch it either.
Mick: Okay.
Brenda: Yeah, the Ted Talk.  You said there
was one you really recommend.
Mick: Did somebody Tweet that?
Brenda: Technology learning,
or did somebody Tweet it?
Toby: Yeah.
Brenda: Another question, do you
use volunteers for training and if so
do they get training on how to be trainers?
Toby: Yes for the first part.
What do you say for the second?
Mick: Do they get trained to be trainers?
We have them sit in classes
by experienced trainers. So yes, they
do get training. If you’re coming in
and you’re asking to be a technology
trainer, generally we're pretty safe.
We do it. We interview them to make sure that –
we interview them in a serious interview
maybe a 20 minute interview to see who they
are and what they’re going to be all about.
And we have them sit in a couple classes,
and if they keep coming back
we know they’re going to be good.
But a volunteer has sort of a six month shelf life,
a lot of students are wonderful volunteers.
If you’re near a library school, now it’s all online
library schools, hit up San Jose or whoever,
North Texas or whomever.
Toby: Recent college graduates from non-
libraries departments. If there’s somebody
who’s a graphic design department or people
working. It’s going to take them a while
to find a job within their field, and you
can kind of set up some mutual exploitation
where they can build their portfolio and do stuff
while they're looking for a career gig.
Mick: And teacher retirees have been very useful
as well. People who were instructors
at some point or were teachers and are retired
now have come and they work out wonderfully.
Toby: Yeah, absolutely.
Mick: And they could teach me about teaching.
Toby: Yeah, and that really goes a
long way. What else do you have?
Brenda: This is something you mentioned
early on Toby, was prioritizing
and how you have to prioritize, and then it came
up with technology training for example.
How do you decide what classes you’re
going to teach or how do you decide
what you’re going to prioritize
and are so many possibilities?
Toby: Well, no matter how many libraries,
no matter the size of your library,
you’re going to always want to do more than
you’re capable of doing. I’m a really big fan of,
there’s an exercise from web design called
“divide the dollar” where basically
you make a big list of everything you want to do,
and then you get all the stakeholders involved.
So it could be the staff members who are doing
the training or it could be your public.
And you say, you each have three votes or
divide it all and you have 10 votes.
You have like $.10 a piece. And then
you vote on which things you want
and very quickly it helps you identify
where the actual demand is,
so what it is people want to know about.
And it also helps in some cases it means,
the thing that wasn’t the clear favorite
was often times – it’s like everybody's second
choice is overwhelmingly more popular
than everyone’s first choice. So it’s,
and that can also help you make a plan.
Say, I can only do classes on three different
topics. I know what the first three
are very obviously are, but I have an
inkling as to what the next set might be.
Brenda: Okay good. Let’s see, we’re getting
a lot of questions and discussion
about technologies skills and competencies
and finding those for job descriptions,
finding those to use in an assessment, and I
throw that back out to the participants
in today’s session too. Just what resources are
you aware of for assessing competencies?
And the Edge Initiative people have mentioned is
one resource, but if you have anything to add
to that Toby and Mick that would be great too.
Lots of discussion around that.
Jean says, Web Junction, yeah they’ve done a
lot of work pulling together competencies.
Mick: For us we’ve kind of started working
on it. It hasn’t quite coalesced.
Mick: Right, because it keeps
changing so quickly.
Toby: And so, creating a job description where
it says you know Photoshop and Indesign
and these things, that could change in two
years like the way the Adobe creative suite
changes. So we’re really more interested in
finding people who have the open mind
about doing stuff, and knowing that if I
give them a task it might take them some time
to figure it out, but they're
definitely capable of going there.
Mick: So we’re always testing people. It’s not
like an official test, but we’re always looking for
people to say, “hey create a poster about the
new drums we’re going to circulate.”
And I want to see how – what they’re going to
do, how long it’s going to take them to get it
back to me, what it’s going to look like, their
design skills because I’m no designing expert
but I kind of know what I like,
and leave it open-ended.
Are they going to ask me a bunch of questions,
are they going to do it by themselves
and give me something real quick.
And you really do learn quickly
like who are your learners.
Who is going to teach themselves.
So when we advertise for a job, and I know every
state is different, but when we advertise for a job
we have those bullet points
“has audio knowledge”
Almost never do I have specific
programs on there,
but I put down something like
a graphic design ability.
Toby: More and more general.
Mick: Right.
Brenda: Okay, well, we have one more
question. I do want to mention to you
this is the top of the hour. And if
you need to leave that’s just fine,
remember we are sending you a follow-up
message today with the recording and slides
and any links that were shared
so we’ll have that.
The last question that I have Toby and Mick,
is just about outreach and marketing,
and what you’ve done to bring people
into your technology programs?
Do you have a little bit, not technology
training related, but you mentioned
so many great programs throughout the
session, any special things
you’ve done with outreach and marketing?
Toby: I mean, that’s another one
of those this is water things.
We’re very driven toward making sure our
message is out to as many places as possible.
And we focus a lot of community partnerships.
You know, we have a lot of area organizations.
Most full-time staff have a working
relationship with at least one group,
and we really try to leverage that just the
personal networking to help identify other people
who might be a good match for a particular
program. But beyond that
we have our traditional marketing mix.
We have a newsletter, Facebook.
We have social media stuff.
So that really varies.
That’s almost a whole other
webinar to be honest.
Mick: Like I said, there’s no silver bullet for
that either. We struggle getting the word out
about our programs. Some of our programs
that we think are great ideas,
and five people sign up and we’re like what?
So there’s no silver bullet on that,
but the more the better.
Toby: Yeah, definitely.
Mick: We do talk to a lot of community
groups like Toby said.
I’d go talk to Kiwanis or the chamber.
Toby: Take your pick.
Brenda: I know we're at the end of our session,
and we’re getting rave reviews in the chat
so good job Toby and Mick. This has been really
useful, very interesting, really useful.
And I thank you so much for sharing your time
and experiences with everyone.
Again, we do this every month and next month
we’ll be talking about assistive technologies,
so hope to see you again on November 20th,
and we’ll talk about that which is benchmark 11.
We’ll include info in the
follow-up email on that too.
We want to thank ReadyTalk for being
our webinar sponsor today.
There is an evaluation form that will
pop up as we close out of the session,
so please take some time and let us know what
you liked and what you would like us
to do in the future. So again thanks so much
Toby, and thank you Mick. This has been great.
Thank you everyone for your questions and
resources, and we’ll call it a wrap.
Toby: Thank you guys. You're a great audience.
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