Library Media Tech Talk

The first of the school year is always a wild experience full of change and excitement! August went by extremely fast, and now I'm trying to figure out where the first half of September has gone. I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on a few of the library events over the past few weeks. Each of these are programs we have hosted in previous years, but it is the first time we have attempted them in our new library spaces. I will also provide links to detailed blog articles we have written about the events in the past. The Dust Bowl ( Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse) This is a collaboration we have done with 8th grade English classes since 2012. The program is designed to introduce students to the 1930s (and Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse) by immersing them in a variety of media from the era. This year we featured four learning centers: 1. FDR Dust Bowl Speech (Audio File) 2. Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl Blues (Music Video) 3. Book Check Out/ Artifac...

This was the second year for the Library Media Tech Talk Blog. The blog was created in March 2014. We hope that our posts have been both interesting and helpful to all educators! As 2015 comes to a close, I want to share our most read articles of the year. Top 5 most read blog posts of 2015 1825 pageviews:  Our First Mysteryskype! 1535 pageviews:  Our First Makerspace Day In The Library 1154 pageviews:  How My Wife Became Super Librarian 926 pageviews:  Tweet Us Some #Inspiration 819 pageviews: Students "Teach The Teachers" Prezi At Lunch In The Library Thank you for reading this blog! Happy New Year, friends! Please Subscribe  if you are enjoying this blog. Please, put your email address in the box on the right side of the page. You will receive notifications when I post new blog entries! Contact Me/ Follow Me Email:  stony_evans@lakesidesd.org Are you on Twitter? Follow me : @stony12270 Follow our library (LH...

My librarian co-worker (Mrs. Misti Bell) and I had the privilege of attending the Arkansas Association of School Librarians (ArASL) conference in Little Rock, Arkansas on July 27th. This was a special occasion for a few reasons. The first being that the ArASL Chair-Elect, Mrs. Sloan Powell, extended an invitation for us to present at the conference back in May when she read the blog post on our "Makerspace Day" in the library. (The link to this page is at the bottom of this article.) The second reason is that the keynote presenter was Mrs. Leslie Preddy, the current President of the American Association of School Librarians. Leslie did a wonderful job sharing about the many resources that AASL offers! It was also great to hear her talk about the Makerspaces she has established in her own middle school library. I came away with five important points that Leslie shared about starting a Makerspace: 1. Begin with what you know 2. Start small 3. Think hands on creativ...

I was greatly inspired by a TL Virtual Cafe session I attended online a few weeks ago (thanks to the Twitter PD community at #tlchat). After hearing so many great ideas from library media specialists/ teacher librarians from all over the country, I decided to give it a try in our own school library. We have been slowly assembling all the needed pieces to start a Makerspace this year! We had planned to have this program during our two lunch sessions (1st lunch- grades 10-12 and 2nd lunch grades 8 and 9). A last minute schedule change kept us from having the program for grades 10-12 this time. We decided to have 5 Makerspace stations in the library. They were all very successful, and the students that participated were very engaged. We had a 3D printer station led by two of our students from EAST. They had designed a replica of the Willis Tower (formally the Sears Tower) using Google Sketch Up Make and Netfabb. We decided to print several of these, and we gave them away at the...