Learning Technology

Much has been written on the kid lit blogs recently about the use of technology in the classroom, or in my case, the library. Franki and Mary Lee have dedicated many posts to The 21st Century Classroom on A Year of Reading and I have posted about finding time to learn the new things and putting them to use to improve literacy. I know that I need to increase my use of technology in the library this next year, but since I'm not willing to totally give up the books, I'm looking for ways to merge the two. Mary Lee has been posting a mosaic she creates periodically and I really liked the looks of them. The thought occurred to me that the kids could create them using features from their favorite books and then others could try to identify the book based on the pictures. I used Flickr's Big Huge Lab to create this mosaic of our recent trip to the beach to try and learn how to do it. It was fairly simple, fun and not too time consuming. The only trouble I may have is that our school filters won't let us use Flickr for the project. So I'll continue to look for a school friendly program or site to use.