Library Media Tech Talk

Over the past few years, some of the most exciting activities we have held in the library have been Skype connections. From Mystery Skype to virtual tours of national parks , our teachers and learners never seem to get tired of connecting to distant places. One of the most recent connections was with a young author in another state! How We Connected I remember running across teen author, Ashley Royer (@RTFbook), on an Internet search last year as we were looking for potential connections for our students. After reading about her, I discovered she had accumulated lots of fans on Wattpad and later became a published author. Her book, Remember to Forget , has been in publication since 2016. I decided to connect with Ashley via Twitter during the spring of 2017 to get more information about her book. She actually signed the copies we purchased. Since the end of the school year was quickly approaching, we were never able to connect her with our students. This...

In a previous blog article, I shared about the planning stages of a maker project initiated by two of our 8th-grade social studies teachers. If you haven't read it, you might want to start here.  The first day in the library was spent showing students all of the maker tools we had available in the library. These included  Legos, K'nex, our Makerbot 3D printer, Unity (a 3D game creation tool), Makey-Makey, Green Screen, Oculus Rift devices, and Minecraft. The Instruction The teachers provided the following instructions to their students on Google Classroom (see below or click here for the document ). Maker Collaborative Project Schedule: Wed, Jan 10th: Student Intro Day to Maker options (Library) Fri, Jan 12th: Brainstorming / Research day in class Wed, Jan 24 - Fri 26: Library days to work on Maker component Tues, Feb 6th: Presentation Day Project Guidelines: For this assignment, you will work in a group of 3-4 students to complete a project t...