Library Media Tech Talk

For many years, I have taught research skills to high school students. I have always wanted to make it a more interactive experience for learners when teachers bring classes to the library. This year, Mrs. Mari Simmons requested to bring her 8th grade ELA class to the library to begin their World War II research project. She asked if we could teach them about some of our many resources in the library. Mrs. Simmons had recently received a Chromebook cart for her class to use. This was an added bonus since I had been anxious to incorporate devices into such a lesson. In this article, I want to share how we designed a research lesson around the Chromebooks and Google Classroom. HyperDoc in Google Classroom I brainstormed during the weekend prior to the lesson. I kept thinking back to the HyperDoc session I attended at the Google Summit during summer 2016. It seemed an interactive document like this might be a nice way to keep Mrs. Simmons' learners engaged all through our...

📌 Updated May 2026: This session was originally designed in 2016. Breakout EDU has expanded considerably — see the bottom of this post for current platform notes and tool updates. I was first introduced to Breakout EDU while attending the Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert Forum in Denver, Colorado this summer. After experiencing a session at the conference, I knew it had lots of potential for library programming. I shared it with Kaitlyn Price, my new partner teacher librarian at Lakeside High School. We couldn’t wait to try it out for 8th grade library orientation! I am grateful she is joining me for this blog post. P lanning (Kaitlyn & Stony) We actually started talking about this potential early in August. Tiffany Whitehead even brainstormed with us in a webcam session prior to school starting. She gave us many good pointers (she had done several last year with her students). Then school started, and things got very busy. Brainstorming session with Tiffany...

I'm in my 5th year as a library media specialist (LMS) at Lakeside High School. I am so fortunate to have great working relationships with our faculty. Both Misti Bell (also a LMS at Lakeside High) and I are frequently asked to present sessions on research tools and technology. It is exactly what I envisioned when I entered this career field! I hope the school library will always be a place teachers and students come to seek assistance with research and tech tools! Recently, I had the opportunity to do a full day of sessions to one section of our 8th grade English classes. Mrs. Mari Simmons requested that I share Britannica School and EasyBib as preparation for a small research project on poets that her students will complete using Prezi . I enjoy sharing these tools with all ages, but especially 8th graders because it is their first taste of the research process at the high school level. If we can get them comfortable with this process at the beginning, it will make a huge...