There's a Library in Your Hand!

Destiny Quest:

 Search for library books

 Have kids see if a book is in before they walk to the library

 Look at New Arrivals

 Create “Someday” lists so kids have a plan of what to read next

 Place Holds on books to have delivered to you

 Have kids rate and review books

MackinVIA and Follett Enlight: 

 Search for and read ebooks

 Look for “unlimited” copies to be able to read together as a class

Logging In:

Destiny Quest: usd345.follettdestiny.com, then choose North Fairview

Use your first initial last name (kpatton) for your username and your employee ID as your password

 Students use their PowerSchool name and password for their login

MackinVIA:  www.mackinvia.com 

     Check with Mrs. Patton for login information 

State Library of Kansas:  www.kslib.info

Digital Book eLending: 

o  Mrs. Patton can create an account for any Kansas resident

o  OneClickdigital Audiobooks: great for listening on an iPod or other device

o  3M Cloud ebooks: read a book on your computer, iPad, or other device

o  Tumblebooks for Kids: available here, but use our school subscription through the North Fairview Library website  for school use (www.tumblebookslibrary.com) Ask Mrs. Patton for login info

Ø Explore Our Resources:  Research for Kids

o  Middle Search Plus:  magazines and primary sources for middle grades

o  Britannica School:  online encyclopedia

o  Kids Search:  primary sources, magazines, and more

o  Searchasaurus:  primary source research tool

o  Kids.gov:  variety of topics safe for searching

o  EBSCO eBooks:  nonfiction books

o  Fun for home:  Mango & Tumblebooks

Don’t Forget Other Resources:

Available from our library website at tinyurl.com/northfairviewlibrary under the “Library Resources” tab

World Book Online:  Early World of Learning, along with various levels of online encyclopedias, including a Spanish version

Images and music to use in student projects and much more!

 

App Share--Doodle Buddy

We have started a weekly tech morning at our school to learn about apps that teachers will find useful in the classroom.  My first one to share was Doodle Buddy.  It's simple enough for kindergartners to figure out in a matter of minutes, and versatile enough to use with older kids. 

Get the app free from iTunes!

Here are some ideas I found that would be great uses for Doodle Buddy in the classroom:

Language Arts:

·      Practice writing spelling words

·      Illustrate vocabulary words and use in a sentence

·      Retell the beginning/middle/end of a story

·      Show your favorite part of the story

·      Choose a DoodleBuddy character and create a poem about it

Art: 

·      Recreate artists’ work

·      Illustrate lines to a song (for example, What a Wonderful World).  Each student gets a different line and then put them together (have kids save and email to you) in an iMovie. 

·      Self portrait:  take a picture of yourself and open in DoodleBuddy.  Use the brush or chalk to trace your features.  After you have traced yourself, change the background to white and save to use with other projects or just as a picture of yourself!

Math:

·      Create multiplication and division families using the stamp feature (5 groups of 10 frogs, then write the problems 5x10=50; 10x5=50; 50/5=10; 50/10=5)

·      Make addition and subtraction stories using the stamps (3 ladybugs + 4 snowflakes:  3+4=7)

·      Creating patterns (1 bird, 3 birds, 5 birds, 7 birds) show +2

·      Fast facts:  call out math facts and the students write out the problem on their board with the correct answer.  For those that can’t do mental math, use the stamps to show the problem graphically. 

·      Take a picture of a measuring cup and use that to quiz students on measurement.  You give the measurement and they shade in the amount that should be filled.  You could do the same thing with a ruler or thermometer. 

·      Create a counting template with numbers down one side and stamps on the other for kids to match the correct number to the right number of stamps.  Save it to have kids be able to use it repeatedly. 

·      Use the dot board in the backgrounds to help kids correctly form shapes (like an electronic geoboard).

Science:

·      Take a picture of a plant and label the parts in DoodleBuddy

·      Draw today’s weather and write the word that describes it

Social Studies:

·      Illustrate the Native American clothing, shelter, symbols, etc.

·      Draw the symbols of our state

·      Take a picture of or import a United States map and fill in the state names/capitals. 

Other ideas:

·      Letter/number formation:  practice writing on the screen

·      Singular and plural nouns:  divide the screen into two columns, one for singular and one for plural.  Choose stamps to show the difference (such as 1 dog stamp in the singular column and 4 dog stamps in the plural column).  Then write the word dog and dogs.

·      Sight words:  read a sight word and have kids write it

·      Create bingo cards—different ones on each iPad:   http://eiplayground.blogspot.com/2012/04/doodle-buddy-bingo.html

·      Create backgrounds or pictures for other projects, like iMovie. 

Need kids to turn it in?  Have them save and email their finished project to you. 

Feeling brave?  Kids can work with each other, each drawing on their own iPad with the connect feature.  Think tic-tac-toe!  Then graduate to collaboratively creating stories and illustrations!

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.