Online Resources

Thanks to my library friends from around the world on library listservs, I found a couple of very useful sites today that I know I will be going back to and I'm sure teachers in my building will find useful as well. 

First, I didn't realize the resources that the Library of Congress has for teachers.  Their searchable site has primary sources, lesson plans and activities organized by state, grade level and more.

Another site that will be useful in our school has a wealth of SMART board resources, SMART Board Goodies.  There are reading, math, and science resources to use on SMART boards, organized by topic and grade to make it easy to find what you need. 

Tizmos

I still have lots to process from the conferences I've been to over the past few weeks.  So many great ideas that I'm excited to share and implement.  One awesome "side-effect" of attending conferences is simply checking out the websites of the presenters.  After checking out the website of a presenter from the KRA conference, I ended up at websites geared to the entire presenter's school.  There was a K-2 site and a 3-5 site, both of which were "Tizmos."  Tizmos look like a fantastic way to share websites with kids.  I am a huge Symbaloo user and store all of my favorite sites on my Symbaloos, but I can see using Tizmos with kids because it's more graphic and would be easier for them to follow.  Someday I will set up Tizmos for our school....once I find a little extra time! 

I have so many exciting ideas from the 2013 Kansas Association of School Librarians conference! I can't wait to get started with some and share some as well! The first thing I did when I got done with the conference (or actually, before I was done) was to start exploring ebooks from my regular library vendors and a few new places.

One of the new places I tried was Mackin, a company that graciously gives libraries 37 ebooks to try out for free. They can be used an unlimited amount of times and simultaneously by multiple users. I have been scared to try ebooks for fear that it would be hard to integrate into our library system and difficult to figure out how to check books out. Was I wrong! Thanks to Mackin, I literally had 37 ebooks in our library catalog in a matter of minutes. I have no hesitation about buying more ebooks so I hope our staff and students are ready to embrace reading and using ebooks!

I have created a video to show how to access ebooks from Destiny. I will distribute login information to our staff and students over the course of the next couple of weeks.   North Fairview library patrons, contact me if you need your login information!

By the way, another one of the great things I learned at the conference was how easy it is to use Screencast-o-matic!  I will definitely be sharing videos to show how to do things more often now!

Library Lunch Bunch

Tonight I read about Library Lunch Bunches, an idea from Carolyn at Risking Failure. She invites kids to come to the library during their lunch time to eat lunch and listen to a read aloud. It's a way she can share longer books with kids. I love this idea because I miss reading those middle grade books with kids. I get to share picture books with all grades, but when I taught sixth grade, a favorite part of my day was reading aloud books the kids loved. I'd love to figure out a way to do this in my library!

Google Forms

Last week, I attended a session on using Google Forms. I never thought of the wide range of uses this could have for a teacher. I've already made a survey for the teachers in my building about who is using the Book It program this year. I've been wondering, and it's always nice to know what expectations different classrooms have. Now I'll have that information in one place! Another use I'll be using Google Forms for is for our book fair. We always track reading minutes and I've tried several different methods. It almost always comes down to me adding up minutes by hand and takes lots of time. I've now created a Google Form that has students enter simple information so Google can do all of that legwork for me and I can focus on all the other things I need to do. One idea that was shared might be helpful for our SPED teachers. It was a simple form about student behavior: Is the student sitting correctly in the chair (yes or no) and Is the student working on the assignment (yes or no). Paras could use this simple form to report on how students are doing, especially by linking the form to an app button on an iPad or iPhone. When they submit the information, it is put into a spreadsheet that can be shown as a graph to visually see how a particular student is doing. The spreadsheet also has a date and time stamp so you can look for patterns and problem times.