Technology Tuesday: #DLDayRap Challenge

I am a big Jimmy Fallon fan so when I saw this tweet in my feed I had to click on it.

Kasey Bell  has some great ideas about how Jimmy Fallon uses games to engage his guest and audiences and that similarly, we could engage our students.  

In honor of Digital Learning Day  tomorrow, she has thrown out the #DLDayRap challenge -tweet out a rap of your Digital Day Learning with the #DLDayRap.  Kasey tweeted out this one...

Inspired by the Grammys, I decided to take a crack at it.

It was better, but when I put it in Twitter it was of course way more than 140 characters, so I had to delete a whole line.  I tried again...

I got creative with emojis and abbreviations.  And then one more.  

Yes, I cheated on this one.  I screenshotted it and put it in as a photo because I just couldn't get it down to 150 characters.  

This was a fun way to think about a topic and it is definitely difficult to taper down raps to 150 characters, especially when you also have to leave room for the hashtag. I think I am going to add this challenge to my makerspace this week and see what the students can come up with.  

Feel free to take Kasey up on the challenge and post your own #DLDayRap to Twitter.   

Our Elf is Back!

Last year, Seuss, our library "Elf on the Shelf" made his debut appearance at Woodstone (read about that here).  He arrived back in our library the Monday after Thanksgiving with a new task for us. This year, he was going to be reading nonfiction books each night and leaving us clues to what Dewey section he visited.  I have the same contest going.  Kids submit their answers on my library page and when we come back from the winter break I will draw a few names for some prizes.  Here are a few of our elf nonfiction clues.  Can you figure out the call number?

Technology Tuesday: Kahoot

I changed up my 3rd grade orientation a bit this year after learning about an interactive website called Kahoot.  But let me back up a bit... a learned about Kahoot last year, but never tried it out.  I thought my teachers would love it, but needed a good way to introduce it to them.  So before we left for summer vacay, I asked them for a fun fact that people might not know about them.  When we came back for our week of inservice, we played.

Kahoot is a classroom response system for learning in a game based atmosphere. Create a free account and then let your gaming begin.  You type in questions(and/or upload a picture) and then multiple choice answers.  You can choose the number of seconds plays have to respond to the question and whether or not they get points for the correct answer and the speed of their answer.  Once it is saved you are ready to play.  Launch the game and project it on a screen.  Players go to www.kahoot.it to login in on a computer, mobile device, iPad etc.  They type in the game pin assigned to the game that is projected on the screen and then enter a nickname.  When the game starts, the question is posted for a few seconds and the answers are revealed with a color and shape assigned to them.  The same colors and shapes appear on the players devices.  Players choose the matching one to enter their answer and after the timer goes off, the answer is revealed.  

Ok so back to how I used it.  On the Friday of our inservice week, teachers brought a device to one of our meetings, I launched the game and they had a blast learning interesting things about each other.  Like our principal could do back flips on a balance beam in high school and one of our third grade teachers was an ordained minister.  Fun times, and they all were talking about how they could go back and use it in their classrooms.

For my orientation with 3rd grade, I put a question and a picture about the library.  The kids worked in pairs to answer the question within 30 sec and then I was able to elaborate a little more on the rule, program or area of the library.  

Based on the amount of cheering and high-fiving between the questions, I would say this was a success.  How do you present library orientation to your students?

Elf on the Library Shelf

The "Elf on a Shelf" craze has hit my library! I had a brainstorm over Thankgiving break to get an elf for my library.  I wanted to tie his poses into reading somehow so I decided to have him pose with parts of books from our library. And then I had another crazy idea to make a contest out of it.  I'm not sure what I have gotten myself into as I am not the most creative person when it comes to crafts and making things but here is what "Seuss" has been up to in my library.  

On Monday when I came in here is what we found.

I read the note, which was a poem telling about the elf and why he was there, on the announcements that morning.  Seuss told us he was here to play a game with us and that every night before he went to sleep he would read a book in our library and then leave us clues to what the book was.  If we guessed all the books by the end of winter break he would be able to come back next year. I told the kids that I was going to need their help and to check my library webpage for more details.  

http://neisd.libguides.com/WoodstoneElf

On Tuesday, this is what we found.

I had about 55 kids submit guesses for what book Seuss had read Monday night. Today here is what clue we found.  

The kids have been really excited each day o see what Seuss has done (even the 4th and 5th graders). I did ask the teachers for some specific items I might need for later books. As I said, I am not so gifted in the creativity department and 12 more scenes is stressing me out a bit, but we'll see what Seuss comes up with.