Library Media Tech Talk

Several months ago, I wrote about ways to connect your library with Skype.  If you haven't read that piece, take a moment to get familiar with Skype in the Classroom and the cool connection possibilities they offer. Since writing that article, I have had the opportunity to have some wonderful virtual tours with National Parks around the United States. I would like to share how we did this with several 9th-grade Geography classes during the spring semester of 2017. The Need Geography was offered to 9th-grade students during the second semester of the 2016-2017 school year. Two of the teachers that would be presenting these classes came to me because they knew we frequently connected via Skype in the library. They asked if we could help them connect to National Parks around the country as part of their classes. The teachers knew this would be a wonderful way to expose students to different land forms and places around the country in a new way. I was very excited to...

The last quarter of this year was full of PARCC testing. It was a challenge to have our usual library collaborative programs due to the library being used as a testing center. However, Mr. Brian Johnson, Library Media Specialist at Springdale Junior High and I managed to squeeze in one last Google Hangout before the school year ended. Last year we successfully started these Hangouts with our two schools. Brian appropriately named them "Lakeside Squared" since both of our schools bear the name Lakeside even though they are located more than 200 miles apart. We had been messaging each other for weeks trying to come up with something unique to bring our two schools together. We finally settled on bringing Spanish classes into our libraries for the Hangout. Springdale students peform their Telenovelas for us The goal was for the Springdale Spanish classes to share their Telenovelas (brief dramatic skits) via webcam. Over the course of our messaging and planning, it develope...