Cool Tools 2017/2018

It's very difficult to believe that another school year is close to ending - it seems like the year just began yet at times it has seemed to drag on forever.  Last year at this time I was very worried about moving to a new school with only a few teachers that I had worked with as well as a lot of worry about working with the primary grades since I had only worked with intermediate level students.  Although there were a lot of nerves in the beginning this has turned out to be a fantastic year if a bit crazy at times.  Last year I really tried to focus on modules that would help me work with the younger kids in addition to gaining new ideas for the older kids.  My take away from last year was working on teaching digital citizenship and digital footprints in the fall with all classes.  I also learned about "kid friendly" search engines rather than having the kids search Google.  I had shared that with my former building and will be adding to the list with my current school

What an exciting module to explore now that my school has 1:1 chromebooks for all students K - 5.  We received them a few months ago and the progress the students and staff have shown on these devices is absolutely amazing since many of us have no training on them.  We all know that we can achieve fantastic things once we know how to do more things - already my mind is turning over the possiblilities for next year!  I spent a lot of time looking at the list of possibilities but decided to try and narrow things down to a more manageable list of things I can achieve next year with the information provided and a summer time to plan. I began the journey with the article "A new generation of Chromebooks..." to see what things are available on the newer devices - of course my chromebook is in school so I could not completely compare what they talked about in relation to what we have.  The article was helpful in that in introduced some things that are most likely on our devices an

I was really excited and hesitant to look at this "Thing" because this particular topic has the potential to be an overwhelming task.  However, it is a relevant topic not only for all librarians but my department in particular because we were tasked with updating our current curriculum/framework.  Prior to my own work on this lesson I asked for Polly's permission to share this with my colleagues to help all of us with our department goal of updating what we do to reflect the new standards.  Last week I shared a few of the articles included in this module so that we could get some ideas of how to approach/complete our district's task of updating our current framework/curriculum.  I found that Paige Jaeger's article would give us a starting point because it focuses on looking at what we currently do, where we need to improve and where we are close.  Together we did a similar activity in our session and we all found that we have already covered a lot of the standar

I have to admit that I was a little hesitant to select this lesson on Bitmoji because I wasn't really sure of how I could use it but I decided why not, let's have some fun!  I have to say I did have some trouble getting it to load correctly on my computer - it loaded to my chrome extensions very easily but would not allow me to set up an account so that I could get started creating my avatar.  I perservered and finally found success by using the link you included under the note about people reporting trouble signing up.  Then it was just a matter of how I wanted my avatar to look - really like me or the image I want to be!  It was fun and I loved the amount of detail and selections you have to choose from - I probably would not have minded  a few more in the clothing section.  I have to share that my youngest daughter walked by as I was working on this and was happily surprised that I knew what Bitmoji was and that I was creating one!  She thought I did a good job making it loo