Some examples are shown below. Contact me for information about presenting at your conference or professional development, in-person and online.

Email: robbiebarber at gmail dot com

“Birds Aren’t Real”: How Students Can Work Against Misinformation. “Birds Aren’t Real” is a college student’s joke that became a college movement. It is an example of how students can enact real change. This session is on explaining the movement and offering ways in which middle and high school students can fight disinformation and promote advocacy.

AI in My Pocket. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is out of the lab and on your personal phone. What does that mean to you and to your students? Does cheating on school work increase? Does fake news flourish or disappear? Or, can we use AI to do better research? Students are currently exploring their limitations by using AI for papers, quizzes, and even to write college essays. Some teachers are embracing this new technology, while others try to prevent it. This session is about understanding what AI is, how it’s used, and what its limitations are.

Showing Off: End of Year Reporting. End of Year reporting for School Librarians, EdTech Instructors, and Academic Coaches is far more important than you may realize. It provides advocacy, support, and key information. In this session, we’ll provide examples and allow the audience to share their experiences.

Your Information Leaks: Student, Parent, & Teacher Responsibilities. Now that we have online classrooms, we should probably keep them up, right? After all, students can communicate via email, find copies of information, find copies of the assignments, and turn in assignments online. This is great! But who has our information? And what should we be doing about it? Let’s explore privacy, settings, and what to share with our community.

Picture This! Digital Literacy of Images. Teaching students about fake news, digital literacy, and understanding the data, requires a deeper dive into images. Who creates the images? Who changes the images? How does changing the image change the story? Let’s look at pictures and even some charts to find out what our questions should be.

• Fake? Or Alternative Facts? 80% of teens resend without thinking about it. Teaching the skill of evaluating something on social media in seconds is vitally important. Long lectures won’t work. The answer is to look at crowdsourcing and media bias. Quick looks at vocabulary and images helps us understand what to question.
• 30-Second Elevator Speech. In addressing community members, school librarians and edtech coaches are required to defend our positions, over and over again. We will explore techniques and games to help each person put together their own elevator speech. This is a group activity where we can organize and support each other.
• Bathroom Communications. It’s frustrating! Teachers need to learn the technology pieces but they don’t have time and don’t pay full attention when they do. Maybe the problem isn’t teaching the technology but giving teachers a way to learn the little pieces of technology. And, humor. Definitely adding humor.
• Teaching Teachers Technology in Under 5 Minutes. The majority of teachers are generally overwhelmed with school-specific requirements and spending time discovering and engaging with technology may seem overwhelming. This is about setting a routine and playground space to allow teachers time to try something new without overwhelming them.
• and much, much more.