Welcome to our WFSU Ready To Learn Virtual Conference Playbook! WFSU hosted this wonderful conference especially for our Florida Public Media stations. We learned so much over the past five years using and assessing the 2015-2020 Ready To Learn resources, we wanted to share and help other stations use this content with their communities. Come along with us and explore the amazing resources and best practices for implementing camps, Family and Community Learning Workshops, Playful Learning for Educators with engaging content, characters and stories from the world of PBS KIDS...
After several Doodle polls and conversations with our Florida PBS Stations, we scheduled our conference for June 22nd, 23rd and 24th! We created a Google document for easy registration.
Next, we gathered as many resources from our Ready To Learn programs. Below are just are a few of the materials we assembled:
We boxed everything up and mailed everything out to our station friends about 10 days before the conference. We asked everyone to let us know when their box arrived just to make sure everyone had their resources.
Our conference began right on time and we kicked it all off with a welcome and introductions. We had education staff from nearly all corners of Florida, Florida Public Media and CPB/PBS KIDS Ready To Learn Team joined us as well.
Just as we began our journey with Ready To Learn five years before, our first sessions were dedicated to communications and strategy. Our special guests were Lynn McReynolds and Kim Elek. These two amazing women are McReynolds Elek Communications. They shared their expertise in internal and external communications, the art of storytelling and communication strategies. Their presentations can be seen below.
We wrapped up day 1 with a question/answer session. Resources created by McReynolds Elek Communications are available to PBS stations, please contact WFSU Education for access and additional information.
We planned for the first two days to have a morning session, a lunch break and then an afternoon session. Day 2 was a scheduled to be a bit longer and we had two special guests.
We took a short recess and encouraged everyone to prepare some lunch and rejoin us for our Lunch Keynote special guest, Misty Penton. Misty is a Muscogee Creek Storyteller & WFSU Partner as well as the Director of the Fred George Museum & Nature Center. Not only has Misty facilitated programs with us, but she worked side-by-side with us to create a Virtual Museum, we will share more about that later!
Our afternoon session was all about Family and Community Learning Workshops. This new model of family engagement has been one of our most popular programs and has really opened up new opportunities to engage with our community! Watch the session below as we highlight FCL programs with Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, PBS KIDS ScratchJr., Play & Learn Science, Ready, Jet, Go!, Ruff Ruffman and Molly of Denali.
This session wrapped up our Day 2! Before we knew it, it was time for Day 3. Every single one of our programs happens with our partners. This last day was dedicated to sharing how integral partnerships are for our Ready To Learn work to, well, work! We partner closely with Leon County Schools, the Early Learning Coalition of the Big Bend and the Community Classroom Consortium. For more information, please watch the next session:
This session did last longer than anticipated and we went quite a bit longer than scheduled. We would have liked to have had even more time sharing information about all of our partnerships and we encourage you to visit our wfsu education website to learn even more!
WFSU RTLCon was a fantastic success and there is more to come! Our Florida stations meet monthly to keep each other informed about all the terrific work we are doing in our communities and whenever possible, to include one another on our virtual programs and events. Our next project together will be a Florida wide virtual EdCamp, planned for Spring 2021. Before you leave this presentation, we invite you to Explore Native Florida: A Molly of Denali-Inspired Virtual Museum: https://wfsu.org/education/molly-of-denali-virtual-museum/