Library Media Tech Talk

Brian Johnson is the Library Media Specialist at Lakeside Junior High School in Springdale, Arkansas. We have wanted to collaborate for quite some time and finally made it happen this past Friday, May 23rd. Two of my students had recently led 2 wonderful book club meetings on Veronica Roth's Divergent over the past several weeks. Brian and I decided to bring our libraries together on a Google Hangout during our final book club meeting and allow our students to visit using this great method of communication! We wanted to make it a student led session. If you aren't familiar with Google Hangouts, click here . It is much like Skype. At a minimum you will need a webcam, microphone, and Google account. I learned about it this past year at one of our local (Dawson) Educational Coop Technology Coach trainings. We decided to meet two days before the actual book club meeting to test all our equipment. We ran into some bumps, so I'm glad we did the test session.  We didn't su...

One of our big collaborative project events during the first semester is centered around the Dust Bowl Era. 8th Grade English classes read Out of the Dust  by Karen Hesse. To help make this period come to life for students, we started this as a one day project in 2012 and continued it in 2013 (as a two day event). We had a table with dishes set up in the library with dirt all over the top. We also had signs and posters from the period (Coca-Cola, Grapette, other various advertisements). Pictured from left to right: Stony Evans (LMS), Ray Borel (Library Assistant), Mari Simmons (8th English), Shea Gregory (8th English). As a change for 2013, we decided to create an introductory skit using iMovie. We dressed and acted as characters (farmers) from the book. Here is the video: If you can't see the video link above try this:  http://goo.gl/L1E3hg We also dressed as these characters for the first day of the event. We had 5 different learning "stations" set ...

We had the opportunity to work with 11th grade English teachers to bring a Common Core enrichment activity to their students. They had just read The Great Gatsby  and the goal was to bring the culture of the 1920s to life in the LHS Library Media Center. We started brainstorming ideas for this activity about two months before the event. Library Media Specialist, Mrs. Misti Bell and Library Assistant, Mrs. Peggy Schaeffer did the bulk of the work on the design of this wonderful program! You can see the layout in a big part of the library below. The decorations and setup they chose were distinguished! The library looked like a ballroom! It was decided to include the following "learning stations" in the library: Art Deco, a Charlie Chaplin silent movie, a Wordle station (students could write words or quotes from Gatsby ), iPad Gatsby game/ app, Prohibition video, and the Charleston dance. Students had approximately five minutes at each station (we split them up into equal...

After a successful "Library of Yesteryear" program , we decided to celebrate the present with a lunch program called "Library of the 21st Century". This was also a great time to pull out our iPads/ iPods (we featured the Morpho app), e-books (Kindles), audio books, and print materials to remind the students of our numerous services. It was also a good time for library assistant, Mr. Ray Borel, to use his talent creating promotional posters to compare and contrast the previous program with the library of today. (You can see one of my favorites below this text!) In addition to having various"stations" around the library showing off all our current technologies, we also invited students to make presentations. Several students brought their own laptops and showed their favorite OS (Windows 7 and Windows 8). A few brought laptops and played games! You can see the tables were full of technology users in the pictures below. We have only scratched...

image from  http://www.toledolibrary.org/ Last year we started programs at the Jr. High Library during National Library Week that went over very well with the learning community. We began by having a theme of "The Library of Yesteryear" so that we could show students how libraries have changed over the past 2 or 3 decades. We wanted to give them a taste of the rich history of school library media centers! We decided to dress in stereotypical "librarian" clothing and find artifacts we could display in the library media center during our lunch programming. We also decided to "shush" students for the introductory session. This is the second year we have used this theme successfully. Students and faculty have given us great reviews for reaching out to the learning community in this way! This is a great opportunity to promote your library and generate some interest! Students and teachers love to get in pictures! Pictured from left to right : ...

(image from www.loc.gov) I attended a session about Copyright and Fair Use led by Dr. Michael Mills (University of Central Arkansas) on the last day of the AAIM Conference. Dr. Mills brought up some great concepts that everyone in education should know about and incorporate into their good practices! The first items he presented dealt with the different areas for seeking digital media to use. He suggested using the following "stair steps": A. Use personal collections first (when possible). This is a great point. Students and teachers all carry some type of camera (and videocamera) on Smartphones. We should use them to increase the body of digital media available on the Internet! Take pictures and upload to a site such as Flickr (place the Creative Commons license on your photos so others can use as long as they cite you as the owner)! B. Use public domain and government resources when possible ( you can specify this in a Google Advanced search by going to a .gov s...

April is National Poetry Month. When I went to the high school for lunch duty (in the library), I noticed that my job partner (Misti Bell, LMS) and our assistant (Peggy Schaeffer) had been working on some great displays for National Poetry Month! My favorite displays contained "Book Spine Poetry". I had never heard of this and had to add it to the blog tonight. Book Spine Poetry is where you grab books and arrange the titles on the spine so that it is a type of poetry. Here are some of their examples today: Peggy did this one and it was my favorite! One of Misti's I got motivated and did this one at the Junior High Library during second lunch. Several students at LHS were making their own poetry by arranging books like this the entire 30 minutes of lunch! It was great to see them excited! Give it a try! I'm thinking about making a contest of this activity at the Junior High Library tomorrow during lunch. I really must share some concep...