Library Media Tech Talk

I have been seeing many teacher librarians talk about book tasting activities on social media over the past several months. With our specialized student focus on increasing interest in reading this year, book tasting is something I've wanted to try with our high school students. Just a few days ago, we attempted our first such event. It was a great success, and I will share the journey of its development in the paragraphs below. Brainstorming During lunch, we have been sharing the idea of a book tasting event with students for the past few weeks. I've been surprised at how many of them liked the idea. We began thinking that this could be an excellent service to provide teachers in their classrooms. Such book "catering" events could be a creative way to advertise our newly genrefied fiction section to teachers and students. For information on our genrefication process, please read Kaitlyn Price's (my teacher librarian colleague) blog article here. Plannin...

 I first wrote about our adventures with Breakout EDU after I discovered it on summer professional development trips last year. You can read about our first library orientation Breakout EDU here.  Since that time, we have learned so much about how to facilitate such sessions. To illustrate this, I want to present 3 things I've learned about Breakout EDU over the past year. I hope you will find these points helpful as you begin planning your own sessions. 1. Have enough boxes for everyone - The first year we conducted Breakout sessions, we didn't always have enough boxes for everyone. As I recall, we might have 12-15 students assigned to one box. We discovered it was more difficult to keep everyone engaged with higher numbers on one box. This year we have used more boxes for classes when possible. By keeping 7-10 students assigned to one box, we noticed a higher level of engagement during our library orientation sessions this year (2017-2018). The students also seemed to e...

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...