2024 GALILEO Annual Conference

Following up on last year's Hosting a Homeschool Happening session, we have continued to redesign our outreach efforts towards homeschooling parents, students, and instructors across to connect authentically with this traditionally difficult to reach community. In January 2024, librarians from the Digital Library of Georgia in connection with members of the Firefly Homeschool Community, delivered an in person workshop to a small middle and high school co-op research and writing class.

This session was an improvement on 2023's hybrid event by meeting the students where they are with resources targeting their specific class assignments and individual paper topics. Additionally, this set of students presented research displays in March of their papers to the larger community at a co-op regional STEM+R Fair. A second wave of meaningful connections was possible as a part of this larger resource fair. Again, meeting the community where they are (at a specific date and time of an event with a captive audience) reiterated the workshop from earlier this Spring. A resource tabling setup at this fair provided information to students presenting, their parents and other families attending the event to share about the state's free resources, distribute educational posters, bookmarks and handouts, and to make certain this group is aware of the variety of databases (including DLG, DPLA, GALILEO, and National History Day resources for K-12).

Takeaways will include lessons learned about how to build successful outreach and promotion mechanisms and to review and reassess our support of the homeschooling community. We will share the data of number of students, parents and families that benefitted from 2024 outreach efforts versus 2023's data and demonstrate the growth of support and our own understanding of how to better engineer events to reach this group. We will close again with an open discussion that invites the audience to share their own success stories about how they have developed engaging and rigorous educational programming for Georgia homeschoolers.