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 ...