Websites

Bookopolis

Bookopolis is a website for students (and teachers and parents) to use for book recommendations, tracking reading, creating a list of books to read, and connecting with friends. Students can create an account to look for new books to read. They can search for books by topic, grade level, award winners, etc. Books can be rated and/or reviewed by other students. Parents need to approve the account and anyone who they want to have as friends. Students can also keep a reading log online. I plan on trying this with my class this year. I regularly have students who lose their monthly reading logs and this would provide another avenue for them to keep track of what they read. It would be something I can show to the parents during Back to School Night. 

FlipQuiz

The FlipQuiz website allows you to create game boards for review or a specific activity. The boards are a nice interactive Jeopardy format and the questions and answers (if you choose) are shown on the screen. This would be a great way to review a specific unit or topic. I could see using this as a librarian or a classroom teacher. I used to have a Jeopardy board I created with poster board, Velcro, and markers. However, that has gone missing and it was limited in the number of questions and topics I could include. FlipQuiz looks like it has many more options and then I could save the boards for re-use with other classes and in the future. I've also tried to use PowerPoint templates, but this appears to be much easier to work with.

Storyboard That

Storyboard That looks like a fun website. Students can use it to create their own stories and comics. They can add the background and then add the characters and the text. They can also create a web diagram or other layout if they don’t want the traditional layout of one pane after another. There is also an app available for iPads. A librarian or classroom teacher could use this to have students create stories about their lives or demonstrate something they’ve learned. I could see incorporating it into our biography project in 2^nd grade. Instead of asking students to create a person, they could create a story demonstrating the important things they’ve learned about that person’s life. We could also use it to illustrate the different character building blocks we talk about at the beginning of the year.  

Blog to Follow

I had trouble choosing one blog to follow. I've been to Adventures of Library Girl before and do plan to return there, but the blog that really intrigued me was The Library Voice. I enjoyed that Shannon Miller posts a lot about incorporating technology into lessons. Her post on Symbaloo and potential lesson plans sounded really interesting and I signed up for the webinar she's doing on Thursday. Symbaloo is the tool I used to create and organize my PLN for 678 and I really enjoyed playing around with it. One of my goals this year is to incorporate technology much more into my classroom and continue that integration when I'm a librarian. She also talks about resources to usse in a makerspace. This blog has a lot of resources that I could see myself using and delving into. I look forward to keeping up with the new information she posts.  

Presentation tools

Thinglink is something I could see using as a librarian to offer resources and/or describe student projects for my students and parents. It offers a nice way to organize information without cluttering up the screen with everything at once like when you try to put it on a page. My group for 678 is using Thinglink for our summer reading program design. We have one image with all of our books that we are using to link different resources for each book. Students would be able to access everything for our program from the one image. I could also see using Thinglink to share a project or special activity with my parents and students.

Haikudeck looks like it would be a lot of fun to create presentations on and that it could potentially be much easier to use than PowerPoint! It also might be something that would be much more student-friendly than PowerPoint and easier for them to make their own presentations to showcase their work or ideas.

With the popularity of graphic novels, I see a lot of potential with Pixton. I've watched students draw their own comic strips for the last few years. I can just see their eyes lighting up and the wheels start turning when they are given the opportunity to create comic strips on the computer! I was able to create a simple one without too much trouble, so I think it would be possible to teach them how to use the program. Most of them will probably catch on much faster than I did.

3D Printing, Coding, & Robotics

As our students start to see more and more of these additional technologies outside of school, it's really important that schools try to incorporate them. I think these are all things that would fit really well into a Makerspace in the library. The Makerspace at Camelot Elementary School in FCPS uses Scratch programming and MXT Robotics. This YouTube video shows how they use those programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=32&v=Hcnww3N-vHA. The students' eyes just light up when they talk about what they've been able to create in the Makerspace.

I have also seen first hand how kids can get excited about coding. Every kid in my school participated in the Hour of Code this year. They came back from the computer lab talking very animatedly about what they got to do. We work so hard to get students to explain their steps and break projects or ideas down into smaller steps. Coding requires them to go through that step by step process. I know not all schools have computer labs, but as a librarian hopefully I could offer the option of doing some coding to at least the students who are interested in it.

Robotics is something that, as a teacher, I'm pretty sure there would be plenty of students who know more about it than I do. While that's a little scary, what better way to give a student the opportunity to excel. I've had students come in and tell me about what they've built or done in robotics club. We've seen a few movies come out recently dealing with robotics such as Big Hero 6. It would be nice to be able to tie in some of their personal lives into what we're doing in class. We build circuits in 4th grade and I know they build on that throughout their science careers. Adding robotics would take those ideas to another level.

3D printing is another piece that would be nice to integrate into the classroom. Students could be required to design something for the printer that goes along with a particular project. I've done that before, but they've only been able to draw it or create it out of some kind of other material. Imagine the look on their faces when they see something they've designed come to life on a printer!

As much as it would be nice to incorporate these things into school, I imagine that funding for them is something that might be hard to come by or at least something that needs to be found through grants or other alternative funding.

QR Code Scavenger Hunt

http://www.classtools.net/QR/qr_generator.php?fold=2&fname=EmYV3&diff=0

The link above will take you to the QR codes for my Jackie Robinson review scavenger hunt. I had to open it in Google Chrome in order for the codes to show up, but I did check to make sure that the codes work. Not sure I can trust my second graders to walk around the school with iPads looking for QR codes, but they would really like it!

The QR code below is the first one for the directions. There are 5 more at the top link that have the questions for the scavenger hunt.

PowToon Video

As I was searching for a topic to use for my video and looking through all of my pictures, I had trouble settling on one idea. We're getting ready to leave in a couple of days to go to the beach with my in-laws. This year we'll have 12 of the 17 cousins with us, so it's always interesting to see how long they last on any given day. For the most part, they do quite well but we always end up with some of the questions on slide 3. However, the beauty of being at the beach is that you can always come back the next day!

Going to the Beach PowToon video

Video Tools

Of all the tools I tried, I played with PowToon the most. I ended up pushing through and creating my video on it. I was fairly please with my final product, but there were a lot of things I had to figure out on the fly and some I couldn't do. I tried multiple times to change the images I used on the 3rd slide which were the default images. However, I couldn't find something that still fit with my generic kid theme for that slide. If I had an upgraded membership, there would have been a lot more options for me to choose from. I also initially recorded my kids saying "Can we come back tomorrow?" and tried to add it to the last slide. However, then I realized that it wasn't possible for me to add that only to the last slide, the voiceover had to be as long as my slideshow. It was interesting to get my kids to wait until just the right moment to say it again! Needless to say, this is not something I'm likely to give my students to try. I might consider it with older students working in groups, but I don't really think early elementary kids would handle it well. I could see using it to create some cute presentations. It certainly has a lot more options than powerpoint and if I wanted to narrate the whole thing, it would be really easy to add the voiceover. The recommendation is actually that you write the script and record it first and then do the slides and timing based on your voiceover. That's something that would be interesting to try.

I also played with Animoto. I found it a good program to work with and didn't have too much trouble with it. I know many teachers who use it or similar programs to create end of year slideshows for their classes. I am not very good at taking pictures on a regular basis to have enough to do a slideshow at the end of the year. However, I could see using it as a way to promote a special activity or project. We did the marshmallow challenge at the beginning of the year as a class building and cooperative learning activity. I talked about it with the parents at Back to School night, but this would be a fun way to show them what the students had done.  

Two of the tools that really intrigued me were the iTunes apps Sock Puppets and Toontastic. We have a cart of 30 iPads at school that I would really like to incorporate into some of my instruction. Since these apps are free, they would be worth taking a shot at trying. I think the students would really like being able to create their own Sock Puppet and Toontastic videos. Both apps could potentially be used for our biography projects, where the students research someone and then usually create a large poster cutout of their person. They could use these apps to "interview" their person instead.