THING 9 DATABASES AND SEARCH TOOLS

I checked out most of the links in thing 9.  I plan to try out the saving feature that is now available in gale products to google drive.  I had forgotten about the way back machine.  I also appreciated the google tricks and the 6 Steps to Teaching Students to Search.  I plan on using and sharing the 15 must have google lesson plans to teach Students effective Search Skills with the other librarians in my district.  I did try out some of the google lessons and didn't do as well as I thought I should have!  For this assignment, I put the kid friendly search engines off of my page:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/home


I have enjoyed this class.  I have completed ten assignments and would like to continue but realistically I have a great deal going on right now and I don't think I will have the time.  I look forward to taking your class again next year.  I loved the organization and I loved learning new things that have helped me in my job.  It is really hard to get technical support at my school.  Most of the time I have to do a work around.  The information that is available in this class allowed me to succeed at working around the technology limitations of my school so that there are more tech opportunities for kids.  For example, I used to use the voice thread and didn't realize that you had to pay for it so it stopped working and I couldn't get anyone to help me with that.  I learned about movenote in your class and switched to that.  When I had trouble with that, I was able to switch to screencastify another tool that I learned about in your class.  Every day I have students who want to do the weekly library update and now they are able to.

THING 8 SCREENCASTING

I read all of the information posted in this assignment.  Since we use google chromebooks at school, I decided screen castify was the best choice.  I have used google hangouts in the past.  I decided that I wanted to do something that I could use so I made a slide show about how to use the on-line catalog to access EBOOKS that were currently available at the library with a specific reading level range.  I had fun doing this and I think the product I came up with will be useful to students and faculty at my school. I must confess it will help me as well as often I forget how I did something and don't feel like spending the time to reacquaint myself with the process.  The link to my product is here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxP7Yj1HGRPKOEdNWEZodmtPdTA/view

I also made this available off of my webpage:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/

THING 7 AUDIO TOOLS

I read all of the information posted in THING 07 Audio Tools.  I used movenote in an another assignment.  I use movenote to record student recordings of short booktalks and to update parents about what we are doing in the library this week.  I have had some trouble lately getting the video to come up. Unfortunately, I had the same problem when I went to use flipgrid.  It would not recognize my video camera as being there.  Right now I have I have a test run located at:

https://flipgrid.com/b6421b

But it does not have a video.  I had our tech person look at this as well because it is the same thing at school, the camera is not recognized.  My suspicion is that the Tech Director locked it down.  I plan to start another flipgrid account with my personal gmail account to see if I have the same problem.  In the end, I spent a great deal of time on this but much of it was with technical difficulties.

Thing 30 Games like Jeopardy

I went out of order for this assignment as I had been toying with doing something with Jeopardy.  I had recommended this site to a friend of mine who is  a high school special education teacher to do with her kids when she was being evaluated.  She had much success with the site, student engagement as well as a great evaluation.

I do a modified version of jeopardy.  At certain times throughout the year, I use student work and we either play bingo with it or we play a version of jeopardy where the student has to get the answer correct and a basket in the garbage can to get a point for his/her team.  If a student does not know the answer he/she can call on someone on his/her team to answer.  I have had great success with this game in particular as all students are engaged and it can get very exciting, especially if we have to have play sudden death.

This year with first and second grades we read two of the Caldecott runner ups, Duz It Tak and They All Saw  A Cat.  With second grade at the next lesson, I had the kids come up with their recommendation for a Caldecott winner.  This lesson coincides with opinion writing that is currently being studied in the classroom.  Below is a picture of one of the student's work

https://docs.google.com/document/d/171yWjpZo5wClB_YtgmONSBo4hOmEYQZXqFdi4sfGnYE/edit?usp=sharing

I then scanned in all of the student work for my five second grade classes and I made jeopardy boards for each class based on the work that the students' generated.  Below is a link to the addresses for the five classes.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R68HOD7l9QsjzfEGijdQ2w5XiiAgU5NmSB7AjgA2fbM/edit?usp=sharing

I will then have an answer sheet that students can choose from.  I will probably use slides to make that.  Hopefully, the sites won't be blocked!  I am hopeful as they are not in the high school.  We'll see.

Thing 6 Curation Tools

I read all of the information about curation tools and what I am most interested is the fact that curation tools use higher thinking skills and are a way to check to see if students know the research process and it also allows for creativity.

I read the articles and I checked out some of the tools and picked lessonpath mainly because it works through google and what I use for school has to be able to be used through google chrome.  I had trouble with this tool. I ended up making two, I am not sure how.  I also couldn't figure out how to change the order of the slides.  I inserted a video and realized that it does not want the embed code but the actual utube address. I wanted to see if I could use this for a fourth grade project that I do.  I would have to resolve the problems I had before I could conceivably do that.

Here is the link for the project that I created:

http://www.lessonpaths.com/learn/i/dr-seuss-8/dr-seuss-biography

Thing 5 Presentation Tools

THING 5 PRESENTATION TOOLS

  I did not know that there were templates for google slides which I learned from the list of resources for this assignment.  I was excited about Tellagami, as I work with elementary students grade K-4 but this tool only seems to work on Apple products.  I have to be able to use google if there is any remote chance of the application working in school.  I was impressed with the Kentucky Digital Library and I liked the visual presentation of all of the tools in Joyce Valenza's site.  One of the articles highlighted the fact that people remember 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read so visual presentation is key to learning.  I also liked the reviews of the tools that were listed in the article entitled. Powerpoint Alternatives.  I would like to check out slidedog at some point as I am interested in how you can put up many different types of media on the same site.

In the end I used Movenote and paid the $5.00 which is a very good deal.  On my website,  I have had a link to a voice thread that does not really work this year so after messing around for a while and making some mistakes, I did manage to insert my Movenote into the spot that I had the voice thread.  I did not upload a video of me talking, too scary as it is early in the morning and a snow day, but I would like to play with this feature.  I wonder if you can have an avatar instead of an actual video.  I typically have students do this feature on my webpage and I don't want their picture on there.  Here is the link to my page:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/

Hopefully it works for you too!

I read the articles for this assignment and looked at all of the tools.  I have some familiarity with Animoto and I have had a voice thread off of my webpage at school.  It has not been working too great and probably has something to do with the fact you cited that it is no longer free.  I also signed up for storybird and am looking forward to using that.  

I wanted to do something for this assignment that I could use at school and in order to do that I needed to test what would work on the chromes that are used for school.  So Animoto was out as it is not accessible through the firewall so I settled on Pow Toons.  

Attached is the Pow Toon that I did for a project that is upcoming with fourth graders.  I found it fairly easy to use.  I had some difficulty deleting the hands that transitioned that I didn't like and whenever I tried to insert a voice over the whole thing crashed which is probably on account of the chrome books and the IT department. 

 I had fun doing this and here is the link:

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/fPkVm00CTT6/barackobama/?utm_source=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Transactional-Publish-success&mode=movie#/

Cooltool3Twitter

Thing 3 TWITTER

I took the five week twitter class through UB this fall semester and so I have some familiarity with twitter.  I have made lists.  I have used piktochart.  I have a hashtag @mybookbests.  I have seventeeen followers, mainly the people I took the class with.  

I am still not comfortable using twitter and I find the volume of information overwhelming.  I read through all of the materials that were posted for this assignment and I thought they were excellent.  I learned how to get rid of accounts I was following in my lists that were not useful.  I also joined a couple of new twitter feeds.  I especially like @weareteachers and @pollyaida.

I also took the advice about building professional learning communities and I joined the librarian part of the upcoming ISTE conference.   Two of my colleagues and I have a poster presentation at the June 2017 ISTE conference in San Antonio.   I also joined a couple of the facebook groups that you mentioned that I was not already a part of, namely SLATT and the International librarian facebook page.

I loved using piktochart and I know there are other tools like that and we may use one of them to create our year end annual report.  I can see how twitter could be very useful, however, it is blocked at our school.  I was just informed of a work around.  I was told that the link is not blocked in Schoology, so I plan to create a Schoology page for my library and apparently I will then be able to access facebook and twitter through it.  I have always wanted to use twitter to tweet out book reviews to my students and the community.

I found all of the information posted in the assignment to be very useful and I will be referring back to it.  I also learned how to copy my page from twitter, drop it in paint and then upload it into this blog which was an achievement for this technically challenged neophyte.