Vermont Fest 2024

Members of the Golden Dome Book Award Committee will present ideas for promoting the 2024-2025 list. There will also be time for participants to share promotions and activities that they are doing at their home libraries.

Unfamiliar with the new 24-25 Red Clover list? Looking for ways to spice up your teaching with the Red Clover list in your school? Come to this session to share ideas and hear ideas about innovative ways to use this year's Red Clover list in your setting. From high tech to no tech to everything in between, this session will give you practical ideas to apply to your teaching.

School Library Advocacy and Act 150 Slides

The VSLA Leadership and Advocacy Committee will explore the critical role of advocacy in school libraries, with a focus on building strong relationships with stakeholders and decision-makers.

They will also examine Act 150, which requires Vermont school districts to establish library material selection policies and procedures that protect students' intellectual freedom. The session will cover the efforts that led to the passage of the law and its anticipated impact on libraries. Attendees will learn how to prepare for the law's implementation in 2025.

Slide Show


Teachers will learn how to effectively use tools like Gemini, ChatGPT, Bing AI, and Magic Schools AI to enhance lesson planning, curriculum development, and classroom instruction. Discover how these tools can work for you to create differentiated lessons, generate lesson summaries that meet IEP accommodations or provide summaries for students who miss class due to illness, adjust reading assignments to appropriate Lexile levels, create newsletters for families, brainstorm project ideas of various DOK levels, and even provide feedback on simple formative assessments.

These tools can also be valuable for generating and proofreading email responses to challenging interactions. Beyond being a search engine or a tool for asking questions, AI can serve as a collaborative partner, helping teachers continually evolve their lessons to be more engaging.

By the end of the session, participants will gain valuable insights into how to make these tools work effectively in their specific educational areas. They will also have a better understanding of why these tools should not be blindly banned and how to incorporate them into lessons to demonstrate appropriate AI usage.

While most students may not have direct access to these tools at school, the reality is that they are likely using them on their personal devices and accounts. As educators, we can teach and model appropriate use of these tools to help students understand how they can be used to assist learning. For example, we can demonstrate how to ask effective questions to AI to get started on a large research project, such as "Gemini, can you provide me with a list of 10 resources to help me understand the use of electromagnetism in MRI machines?"