beccablog, teacher-librarian

Annual Report for 2009-10

Our Annual Report highlights the various ways the LMC impacts students at Blue Valley West.  We noted many positives, expressed areas of concern, and discussed progress on our SMART Goals. 

We welcome any comments and suggestions to improve the report.

We won first place in the AASL I “Heart” 21st Century Skills contest.  Thank you to those that voted for us! 

Click here to see the website.

Amanda and I created a short video for the I Heart 21st Century Skills Contest sponsored by AASL.  The top three videos are posted on the following site along with a link to vote.  If Youtube is blocked at your school (like mine), see our video below.   Don’t forget to vote!!

A Library Provides an Opportunity

 21st Century Skills: A Library from Becca Munson on Vimeo.

1. iGoogle: A great place for all my feeds. For students, they can easily customize the page for their needs AND place our widgets on the page.
2. Twitter: I receive so much information from Twitter. New ways to get information into the hands of students by posting on our website too. twitter/bvwlibrary      twitter/beccamunson
3. Google Reader: Makes my life easier. Would like students to use it more - but we are getting there.
4. Audacity: Great for student projects. Free. Easy to use.
5. Edublogs: We have several blogs - for students and staff. BVWest Reads, BVW Productions, BeccaBlog, Jag Stacks
6. Delicious:  Keeps me sane as I organize my finds and research what other people are doing.   Next year, we are moving all our links for the library projects to delicious.
7. Voicethread:  A tool our teachers have really embraced especially our social studies teachers.   
8. Widgetbox:  Love this site to create widgets and apps for iGoogle and Facebook.  However, it is now fee-based.
9. Slideshare:  Collaborative.  Takes a powerpoint inside the walls of the school and makes it available to anyone, anywhere.  I think students get that…
10. Wikispaces:  Way to publish projects, easily collaborate with others.

Others to add:  Animoto, Toondoo, Wordle, iMovie, Voki, Ning

Click here for the real Top 10 List of Learning Professionals.

Just updated the library newsletter http://bvwlibrary.edublogs.org .

Twitter in Education - How?

Shout’Em

Neat Sites

Teacher Spotlight

I added a Twitter feed on the library web page.  Why?  Well, I was reading my blogline feeds today and saw a recent post from Hey Jude, a powerpoint from Nathan Wright and Hilary Brown discusses Library 2.0 .  Although a lot of the information is directed to public libraries, the examples of how public libraries are using twitter stood out to me.  The Wabaunsee Community College Todd Library not only includes quotes, links to helpful sources, but also usage statistics.  How could this be used in the school library? 

1.  Post usage statistics in a way to get students to use the site (see current post) and to make others aware of the sources used most often.

2.  Instead of shouting out, “this is the best source” or reminding students of a specific link - post it on the Twitter which then shows on the front web page.

3.  When students set up an iGoogle account, have a twitter badge ready for them to post on their page - you can provide updates, new books, instructional information, etc. This one seems pretty easy to set up and if you have younger ages, you could provide a fun picture too.

I posted the code on our library web page, so students would easily see it.  Hopefully, we will receive some feedback from students and evaluate the usefulness of this tool.

Now I need to ask myself if the site is too busy for the 21st century learner - or do they appreciate polls, librarything, wikis, gadgets, widgets, and other links…

Animoto is a great site for student projects.  To me, it beats out all software - Photostory, Movie Maker, and even iMovie.  Why? 

1.  Can be accessed from any computer with Internet access.

2.  Although it won’t take video, it creatively displays photos, so you don’t even notice.

3.  Only allows small amount of text per slide. (Typically, students like to create glorified Powerpoint slides - so this keeps them from loading a slide with a ton of text.)

4.  Provides music - and actually pretty good music.  According to our students, the selection is much better than what we have found from other royalty free sites - less synthesizers for sure.

5.  Transition provided.

6.  Easy to finalize and share. 

7.  Seamless way to set up an educational account and get students on the site with all-access.  See education information before creating a log on. 

For Africa Studies project, classes used Animoto for the first time.  First, students located information about serious issues affecting the countries of Africa.  Then, students searched for organizations that attempt to impact those issues positively.  Students reviewed their notes and determined how to communicate those ideas in Animoto. 

To find images, students could access unitedstreaming.com or the provided public domain images links.  Many students also emailed the organizations and asked for permission to use their images.  (That was probably the most eye-opening moment for many -  an organization could refuse to give permission.  Thankfully, many organizations did respond positively.  One organization was so impressed by the final product that they asked to post the video on their website.)

Handout for Animoto

Example Animoto (For complete class list of examples, go to the following wiki.)

Typically, we provide monthly reports to our administrators - we keep stats, count classes, and make copies.  These go in their mailboxes until the next month.  However, this year we changed to semester reports and added a new feature, assessed indicators.  We looked at our KS State Reading Assessment tested indicators and noted each time we hit an indicator with a class.  Our administrative team noticed this report - so we will carry on this new tradition. 

1st Semester Report


Watch CBS Videos Online

This is a double-post from the JAG Stacks newsletter blog for teachers at staff at West. 

With new 2.0 tools, there are new ways to visualize text that can possibly enhance understanding and engage students.

Tagcrowd and Wordle provide visual representations of words. 

How can it be used?  Go to SIRS Researcher, Election 2008, and copy-paste the text of the two candidates.  Wordle or Tagcrowd will provide visual representations of the topics or keywords the candidates emphasized.  Want to see the bias of an author?  Copy-paste the text from a journal article into Tagcrowd and again, you can visualize the important concepts stressed by the author. 

Tagcrowd and Wordle can work with any text document accessible through you computer including Word, Powerpoint, and Internet Explorer. 

How-To Video