Staying Current

Websites...

Wow!  I could spend hours going through all of these websites watching the videos on how to use them it took me a while to narrow it down to my top 4 choices.  I mainly focused on the ones that are usable with elementary age students since I teach in elementary and hope to be a librarian in an elementary school.

Meograph - http://www.meograph.com/ - is a digital storytelling tool that can be used for presentations or telling stories.  Meograph uses pictures and videos together with narration and music to create a presentation.  I am going to talk with my librarian this year about a collaboration between the classroom and library when we are working on our Holidays Around the World unit.  I would like to have the librarian work with the students on researching certain holidays and in class we will learn about them and have activities dealing with each holiday.  We can take pictures while we are creating crafts, eating foods, etc and put the things they learned in the library together with the things we have done in class to create a Meograph about their experience. Grades K-12

eduCanon - http://www.educanon.com/ -  is a tool where teachers can add multiple choice questions throughout a video they are showing to the class.  The students can select their choice and then it will tell them whether their choice is correct or not and give a justification (if the teacher provides that).  Questions can be added throughout the video and videos can be shortened to just show portions of the video (if the whole video doesn't need to be shown).  This would be a great tool to use as an introduction to the Library at the beginning of the year.  The librarian can video herself giving a tour of the library and the video could stop at certain points to ask questions about what they have learned so far.

Kahoot! - https://getkahoot.com/ - is a game-based classroom response system.  This tool is different than many classroom response systems because the students do not need special equipment.  Any device that can access the internet will work.  Students do not need an account, they will just join the "room" the teacher has created using their personal (or school provided) device.  I really like this because a lot of times there is not a full set of electronic devices so you could gather a couple of iPads, some laptops, desktops, etc. and all students could participate or if your district participates in bring your own technology the students can use their own device.  I would use this in the classroom for creating games/quizes to use as review or as an assessment of student's prior knowledge.

Stoodle - http://stoodle.ck12.org/ - lets you collaborate online with a white board page where you can draw, type, add pictures, videos, etc.  It also has a microphone so participants can talk to one another.  It offers the capability of video conferencing as well.  I think this would actually be a great tool to set up a "homework helper" club with students.  Students in 4th or 5th grade could sign up to be "homework helpers" and they could stay after school to be available online at a certain time for others to ask questions or get help with their homework.  

Blogs and Such...

This week gave me an opportunity to reflect on all we have learned in this course and how I plan to stay current.

We have used this blog a couple times throughout this course and prior to being tasked to think about how I would stay current I was already planning to continue following this blog - http://www.freetech4teachers.com/ - this site is a great resource for compiling free technology resources for teachers/librarians.  I plan to share this website with my coworkers when school starts back.

Another blog that I enjoyed reading was "The Library Voice" by Shannon Miller.  She offers lots of information and online copies of presentations she has done in the past.  A collection of library and technology resources and she is big on helping children have a "global voice" via blogging.

I'm so glad the folder on Keeping Track was included in this weeks assignment because I hadn't thought about how I would keep track of the amazing resources we have learned about this semester.  I will probably use Pinterest to keep track of all of the sites we have explored since I already have a Pinterest account and I am familiar with using it.  The other tool that I am considering is Symbaloo because I like how it just shows a small symbol for that website and it is a quick reference to gather all of the sites we have learned about.