NCSLMA Conference

I just found out that I have been accepted to present at this year's NC School Library Media Association conference with my good friend and collegue Diana Lisle (AIG facilitator)! The title of our session is "Literacy in the 21st Century" and we will focus on our successes, tips, and tricks related to digital storytelling with our students. We will show authentic student work from Animoto, PhotoStory, Prezi, Voicethread, and any other free resource we use before the October conference. I hope to see some of you at this conference in Winston Salem! Here is an example of a Voicethread I did with a small group of 3rd graders who just completed their unit on Plants. The students took photos throughout their unit of study and were asked to create a Voicethread presentation using the photos and their knowledge to demonstrate what they learned about the life cycle of Wisconsin Fast Plant.



I like Voicethread because it gives students the option of commenting using their voice or text. It is a great tool that allows students to collaborate as a group while giving each student their own voice. Has anyone else out there had success using Voicethread with your students?

Voki en Español!

I've used Voki in the past to send people messages, but I've never embedded it in a site. Today while I was creating a Voki in the image of my dog Ollie, I noticed the language option in "text to speech". This got me thinking about the families at Club. About 30% of our students come from Latino families and a  number of these parents speak minimal English. I used Google Translator to translate my message to Spanish--check out my Spanish speaking Voki in the side bar! Because I'm not fluent I have no idea if it makes perfect sense, but at least it gets the general message across. I want all the families at Club to feel welcome in the Media Center and anything I can do (no matter how small) will hopefully make a difference. Eventually I hope to add a tab at the top of my page that says "en Español." While I may not be able to make all of the content on this blog available in Spanish, I could at least include pertinent information about the Media Center under this tab.

Here is a recent pic of my boston terrier, Ollie. He was the inspiration for my Voki :)

Facebook with Elementary Kids--Yay or Nay?

I tried to post this as a comment underneath my previous "Tweet, Tweet" post, but I had difficulties. It looks like Alison Lesueur at Holt Elementary is asking the same questions about the reality of using Facebook in the elementary schools as I am. Read her post and my comment. What do the rest of you think about using Facebook to promote your classroom, school or Media Center?

Tweet, Tweet!

I never thought I would be joining the twitter world... and while I'm not ready to join for personal reasons, I am ready to test out the twitter waters professionally. I really have no idea how many of the parents at my school use this form of social media but I hope to be pleasantly surprised. Over the past year I've toyed with the idea of creating a facebook page for the Media Center, but I do not want to encourage my students who are not "of age" to join as well. SO, that makes me think twitter might be just the ticket to spread the word to parents about all the great things going on in the Media Center. I think twitter might be a quick and easy way for teachers to keep their parents involved and informed too! Students could even help type the tweets! :) On a side note, I am proud of myself for figuring out how to add the twitter widget to the sidebar. I've tried to shorten the length of the box but every time I make the number smaller, nothing happens... I guess there will be time to figure that out!

Jumping back in!

After a brief (haha) hiatus, I am back to try the blogging thing. You will notice all my previous posts are from at least one year ago... I stopped updating my blog because I didn't feel like anyone was reading! Our school website was not current and families did not visit it (and thus my blog because it was housed on the school site). Now that our school website is taking a new direction, I am inspired by the DPS technology challenge to begin again. Thanks to Jerry W. for exporting my blog content from Wordpress to Blogger. Although not everything transferred smoothly (when you see the word "gallery" there used to be a group of pictures), I am happy not all work was lost.

I will be using this blog as my media center website this year and hope to attract many parent and student followers. I love digital storytelling and want to share the wonderful creations by my students, as well as keep parents up to date on the latest media center happenings. I am happy to see several Club teachers are also taking on this challenge and I look forward to collaborating with them! Now that my first challenge is complete, it is on to challenge number 2!