Summer Tech Work

Our school district has been rolling out new MacBook Airs to teachers, 4 per building at a time several times a year.  My name cam up at the end of the school year and I recently completed the short class required to receive the new machine. It's pretty awesome.

As part of the class we had to create a short video and post it to the district collection of videos.  I figured since I was spending time on it, I might as well make something I can use in the library so this is what I came up with.  I plan on using it the first week of library, probably just have it playing on a loop as the kids come in and then talking about what I read as they share their summer reading.

I'll be adding to the video over the next few weeks because summer's not over and I'm still reading.

Some Tech Stuff for the Summer

So after the first summer tech discussion at Katie's house, I came away inspired to try one new thing and to practice and old thing...nothing happened. After I read about the second tech discussion at Karen's house I was once again inspired to try one new thing and practice an old thing...this week...something happened!

I finally took the plunge into Twitter, Franki has been bugging me for about a year, maybe more, to get hooked. I kept putting it off because I wasn't sure why I needed to join. Truthfully, I still haven't figured that out, but after talking with Karen, I learned that was one thing that took place at the last tech discussion. Everyone who didn't have a Twitter account, now does. I didn't want to be left out, so here I am. If you have any suggestions for things I should do with this Twitter thang, let me know. Right now I'm mostly just lurking and have only tweeted on my Twitter once. That was the new thing.

The old thing I practiced was the book mosaic idea I came up with last summer. Basically the idea is to put together a collection of 9 pictures that represent a book in some way. I've done them for The Small Adventures of Popeye and Elvis, Savvy, and Make Way for Ducklings. I also created one for a family vacation. I hadn't done one in a while so yesterday I sat down and created one for Countdown, my first pick for some Newbery attention this year.

Learning Technology--Mosaic Book Puzzles

OK, so a while back I posted a mosaic of our trip to Myrtle Beach. I said then I put it together just to see how the program worked and if I thought I would be able to use it with kids. I gave my self several weeks away to see if I could remember the steps and now have created a new one based on one of my favorite books from last year that just happened to win a Newbery Honor. See if you can guess what the book is based on the pictures.

This is one of the ways I plan to use this mosaic thing with the kids and I hope to create several more of these puzzles before the summer is over. Then I'll post them on the new SmartBoard in the library and see if they can identify them. Hopefully that will get their attention and some of them will want to create their own for their favorite books too.

By the way, welcome to colleagues Lisa and Shelly who kicked off their blog Two Learning Journeys. Two outstanding posts to begin with, I especially like the first with the Flip movie of diving in. Welcome to the pool, ladies!

21st Century Classroom Add On

After reading Karen's post about the Kindle, I've been kicking around the idea of adding on, because there was one more piece to the story that involved me and the library. Since we are in the last two weeks of school and the kids can no longer check out books I asked that they come to the library with a book to read every time. I know, crazy, reading, books, in the library, what am I thinking!? Anyway, last week as Karen dropped her kids in the library she brought Jay to me with his Kindle. She asked if it was OK if Jay used the Kindle instead of a book in the library. She thought it would be OK, but wanted Jay to make sure before he assumed anything. My response was something along the lines of, "of course it's OK, it's a book isn't it?"

I've thought a lot about that conversation over the last week, and have read some of Franki's posts on 21st century classrooms and I have to say, I'm a bit nervous about all of this change. When I moved into the library last year I stated plainly that my focus is THE BOOKS! I'm really not very good at technology, truthfully it frustrates the heck out of me, so I decided that in our library computers would be used to search for books and that's about it. Oh sure I've done the obligatory internet searching and basic introductions to various programs, but honestly, the students generally know more than I do and they ended up teaching me things. I'm OK with my kids teaching me things, in fact, I love when they teach me things, but I was way out of my comfort level with this.

Fast forward back to the present and I'm being hit with all sorts of new technology that I have to figure out how to bring it into the library appropriately. For example, we now have Smart Boards which I love and have found several awesome uses for and want more. The introduction of the Kindle by a student, something that I'm not sure about, I'm kind of old school about books, I like turning pages and watching my book mark move from front to back. And a Flip camera that I purchased with the encouragement of Franki, it's a fun toy and I know I want to use it, I just wish I had more training with it. All of these are exciting new technologies that I know are going to really draw kids in, but my job just got harder. My challenge next year is to use the technology and still keep the kids loving books. Summer can't come soon enough so I can start thinking about next year!