In case you’ve missed it, my dear friend, Michelle Luhtala hosts a series of free, monthly webinars for the professional learning community, Emerging Tech: Using Technology to Advance Your School Library Program. The series is sponsored by Follett Software Company. About a week ago, Michelle’s virtual panel discussion presented a comprehensive array of perspectives on online [...]
Interactive video is a powerful new tool that allows teachers and learners to enhance video they make themselves–as well as the videos they discover on the Web–with text, images, maps, links, and other media. It transform video from static to dynamic, enabling the traditional medium to morph from monologue to conversation, often crowd-sourced style. It [...]
We’ve all been talking about e-books for a long time. And I am still unsure of a solution. I know e-content needs vary. But what our STHS students ask for most is nonfiction and reference-type content to support their research. So, in terms of e-content . . . I personally get less of . . [...]
I’ve blogged about them individually before, but this feels like the beginning of a genre of teaching tools. A newish subgenre of curation tools–the playlist–allows us to carefully select, annotate, and sequence all types of media resources for learning. I tell my students that loose-leaf notebooks no longer cut it as containers for research. Reading [...]
I discovered Crayola’s Crystal Effects Window Markers purely by accident at Five Below. No one wanted them as a prize at our Poetry Slam and I am so glad. Last week, my student assistant Amber yawned at the suggestion of book reviews, logo making, working on our website, and other activities that I myself consider [...]
April is Poetry Month. Last week, just a little early, we hosted our first ever Springfield Slam. The kids from Literary Mag, Gay Straight Alliance, and Gallery Club, who helped me organize the event, assured me, Dr. V, there will be poems. I worried anyway. No need for that. There was a poem or two [...]
For those of you out there who are planning a Passover seder about now, you may want to rethink digging up the old wine-stained Haggadah’s (Haggadot?) you store in the dining room hutch. You may want to expand your traditional storytelling repertoire. And you may want to make a little space at your table for [...]
School of Open Project Showcase from Creative Commons on Vimeo. As teacher librarians, we need to be aware of major shifts in the intellectual property arena. We need to be experts on the exciting developments in the culture of openness. And we need to prepare classroom teachers and digital age learners for similar understandings of [...]
Yesterday, I was touched when I read a letter by a retiring principal in Diane Ravitch’s blog. In his letter to parents, Don Sternberg (Wantagh Elementary, Long Island, NY), shared that he felt he was abandoning my students at a time that they might need my voice the most. Sternberg writes of his concern that [...]
However compelling the research is, it can be hard to make the case with a 30-page study, or even a executive summary. Sometimes you need the visually attractive, embeddable, tweetable version of the elevator speech. Over the past couple of months we’ve seen a research translated and chunked in the form of infographics. We’ve also [...]
Recent Comments