Technology Tuesday: Summer Twitter Challenge for Teachers

This summer I challenged my teachers to explore twitter.  I wanted them to have a relaxed time to figure things out at their own pace.  I knew the first thing they would say is "I don't know what to tweet about!" So I tied in Donalyn Miller's #bookaday hashtag.  I told the teachers to tweet a picture of ANYTHING  they read during the summer.  It could be a picture book, a grown-up book, a young adult book, a magazine, a blog post... anything. They just needed to put the #bookaday with the tweet. We talked about how they could write a little bit about the book if  it was a picture book or chapter book they might use with their class.

It was really fun!  About 15 teachers participated.  

On the first teacher day back in August when we met as a faculty, I handed out Twitter Badges and a gift certificate for our Fall book fair - the $ amount was the amount of books they read... they ranged from $5-$50!!!).  

Now those teachers that participated are more familiar with tweeting and are starting to tweet things about their class this year.  It will be fun to have more connected educators on my campus.  

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.   

Technology Tuesday: Virtual Valentines

Here's a fun connecting opportunity that I saw on Twitter this year and sent to my teachers.

This group pairs up classes to exchange virtual valentines across the miles and learn something on the way.  

Here is a blog post from one of my 5th grade teachers that participated in the program.  

Mrs. Foreman's Virtual Valentines

Being Connected: Another Virtual Author Visit

Thanks again to twitter, the students at my school were involved in another virtual author visit.  This time with Kate DiCamillo.  Last year, Jarret Krosoczka tweeted about a live event he was going to be doing.  I sent the information out to the teachers and almost my whole school watched as he talked abot writing, illustrating and Platapus Police Squad.  You can read about that here.

Back in August, John Schu @MrSchuReads, tweeted about a video conference opportunity in October with Kate DiCamillo.

 I immediately emailed my teachers about this awesome opportunity (even though we were not yet back in school from summer vacation)!  

When school did start, one of my kinder teachers asked if I had any recommendations for a read aloud to do with her class.  I mentioned the Mercy Watson books and reminded her about the upcomming video conference with Kate.  She jumped on the idea and started reading her kids book one and they were hooked!  She would tell me that her kids LOVED the books and couldn't wait for the end of the day when she would read.  They sat mesmerized, still and quiet while she read. They loved how Mercy loved buttery toast and asked questions about why Eugenia didn't like Mercy.  She said in all her years of teaching kinder, she had never had kids respond to a book like that.  So of course when she finished book 1, they wanted to read book 2. So they did.  And another kinder class started book 1. 

Today, they came back from lunch and were so excited to see "Mercy's writer" on the screen and the books that they had read displayed behind her.  Everytime Kate mentioned Mercy, they would gasp and giggle.  They "oohed" and "ahhed" when she mentioned the "buttery toast".  It was really something to be able to connect them with an author of a story they had just adored.

Meanwhile, in 5th grade, more amazing things were happening.  One teacher told her kids about the video conference and that they would only be able to watch the beginning of it since their lunch happened to fall right in the middle of it.  Tonight on her blog, this teacher wrote "After I saw the expressions on their faces, I offered to have them get lunch from the cafeteria and come back to the room during lunch.  They all had smiles on their faces!"  She emailed me after school and said that her kids loved it.  They had watched the whole thing and told me that they had eaten lunch in the room, and that it was the first time ever in her teaching career (21 years) that she had eaten in her room.  Wow!  The power of being connected!  

I love being able to find these opportunites for my students and it is only because I stepped out of my comfort zone and started tweeting that I became connected and in turn can connect my students and teachers.  

Live Video Feed with Jarrett Krosoczka

Another fabulous opportunity for my students discovered on Twitter...

Last night I noticed a tweet about a live opportunity Jarrett Krosoczka was offering for students today.

 I immediately emailed my teachers about it.  As usual, most were skeptical, but my two go-getter, willing to try anything, 4th grade teachers jumped at the 11:00 opportunity.   They even asked questions during the feed and Jarrett answered them!  

Wanting to get more teachers on board, I asked these two to reply to my email about how cool it was (sneaky, I know, but hey, it worked!)  and I brought it up with them in the teacher's lounge at lunch since he was doing another one at 1:00 our time.  

Once they heard how easy and fabulous it was, the rest of the teachers were all on board.  During the feed, Jarrett introduces his Platypus Police Squad books and how he draws the characters.  Some of my kinder students were even drawing along!  

 

He also showed how he changes characters facial expressions by drawing different lines around the eyes.  Here is a 2nd grader practicing.

What a super way to connect with kids and get kids excited about reading.  With summer coming up, I know what books my students are going to be looking for at the library.  

 

Here are some actual quotes from some 5th graders about the experience.  

"We are learning about his books online without him actually being here"

"We loved that it was interactive"

"Not only did he talk about his books, but he showed us how he illustrated them too"

"He gave us a sneak peak of his next book"

"We got to look at a live screen at a famous author that students across the country were able to see at the same time"

Thanks Mr. Krosoczka for a fabulous 20 min that our students will remember!  

Twitter Chatting with Students

Last week, one of the middle school librarians in my district, Irene Kistler (@irenekistler) and I were talking about how fun it would be to have the students in our district be able to chat and share via twitter.  She had been tossing around the idea after seeing a tweet from New Zealand .  We decided to make it easy since it was our first time and the week we came back from spring break.  We had 2 questions.

Q1:  What did you read over spring break?

Q2:  What did you do for fun over spring break?

Irene had a form that the students could fill out and then bring to me to get approved.  Then I took them to the computer and let them tweet.  I had the chat up all week on my Smartboard in the library and the students were thrilled to see their tweets pop-up on the screen.  

We also wanted the students to be able to give a shout out to a teacher, so we added that as a 3rd response on the form.  Not all of my teachers are on twitter, so I emailed the tweet to them if a student mentioned them.  

Irene and I let the other librarians in our district know about this and some of the G/T teachers.  As a matter of fact, one of our G/T teachers, Terri Eichholz (@terrieichholz)  wrote about how she used this idea in her classroom here.  It was fun to go through and read the tweets from different campuses. The part that I was missing though, was the students being able to read and respond to others' tweets. Irene had a great idea to have a week of questions and then a week to be able to read and respond. We are in that process now, so it will be interesting to see how that turns out.  

Today, some of our 4th grade students that were in the library during checkout had the opportunity to participate in the #stu2stuchat set up by Sandy Otto (@sandyrotto).

I had seen Sandy publicize this post over the weekend and made a note to check it out.  I happen to have 4th graders checking out at that time so I called a few over to check it out and a few turned into more.  

A couple of our students tweeted, but they really enjoyed seeing what other students were reading. We have plans to join the next #stu2stuchat on April 8th.  

I love that we are venturing in to connecting our students and letting them see things outside the walls of our school.  

Technology Tuesday: Skyping with Maryland

So last week, I wrote about how one of my students skyped with a few students from Maine. (read here).  Today, after rescheduling from a Maryland snow day yesterday, a whole class was able to skype with another class in Maryland for World Read Aloud Day.

I first heard about World Read Aloud day on twitter.  I asked a few questions and a very nice librarian in Maryland named Mr. Winner answered my questions and volunteered to show me the ropes if I signed up on his schedule.

He sent me the link to the google doc and you notice he is on p. 65.  Yes, it goes on and on, teachers and librarians everywhere looking for schools to connect with for World Read Aloud Day (or Week). 

Mr. Winner and I  discussed via twitter which book we would like to read and  thought we were all set, until Mother Nature got in the way and cause a snow day in Maryland yesterday.  

Lucky for me, Mr. Winner had a cancellation for today and we were able to connect anyway.  He had a 2nd grade class and I had a 1st grade class.  After walking me though a camera glitch, we were finally connected!  One of his sweet 2nd graders introduced themselves and told us a little about their school and then we did the same.  We had decided that we would partner read Shh, We Have a Plan by Chris Haughton.  He read a page and then I read a page.  

    

Then his 2nd graders took turns each reading a page of Hug Machine  by Scott Campbell.  We still had a few minutes so one of his students asked us a question and then we asked them a question. 

We said our "good-byes" and "thank-yous" and disconnected.  

Afterwards, the kids were full of questions about Maryland.  I pulled a map up on the computer and showed them how far it was from Texas.  Earlier in the year, we had talked about communication in the Colonial Times.  That was a great thing to bring up again to talk about how that connecting like we did would not have been possible back then and that people had to wait weeks or months to exchange letters and news and here we did it instantly.  

I am so excited to connect some more and see how my teachers might take an interest in this.  I know I am late to the skyping bandwagon, but I love the possibilities of connecting kids to other kids to talk about geography, parts of the world, books, research... the list is endless.   

Technology Tuesday: A Giant Step for Me

At the beginning of the year, I posted 3 goals that I had for myself this year, professionally.  One of those goals was to network more and develop a PLN.  I am happy to say that I have been doing that through the use of Twitter.

Twitter is an amazing tool for professional learning.  I have gotten so many great ideas in the few short months that I have become a tweeter.  I have participated in many chats, some as a "lurker" not saying much and some as a participant sharing ideas.  

Last night, however, I took a giant step and MODERATED a chat for the first time!

At one of our district mini-sessions on twitter, we talked about chatting and how we, as a district, should chat more since our elementary and secondary librarians never meet together.  Well, that was all that needed to be said to get my little wheels spinning.  I sent out an email to the librarians saying that I would like to have a chat about the management and check out of Nexus tablets that a lot of us had gotten from a bond.  I set a date, time and hashtag and hoped people would "show up".  Last night about 10 of us chatted for about 45 min.  Sharing concerns, ideas and brainstorming management of these eReaders that we were going to be checking out to students.  

What I loved most about the chat was that there were some new chatters that had never even posted on Twitter before.  They saw how easy it was to become involved, even when their intention was only to lurk.  I am hoping that we will have many more opportunities to do this within our district as all librarians know that while this is the best job in the school, it is also the loneliest in the sense that you are the only one on your campus.  

Now on to learn about Tweetdeck...

#OneLittleWord

Yesterday, in the Friday newsletter from our District Librarian, there was mention of Todd Nesloney's new Educator Learning Series Challenge.  Todd Nesloney has become one of my twitter heroes, so of course, I immediately clicked on the link and as usual was totally inspired to jump on board.

The first challenge is to come up with #onelittleword to guide us through the year ahead.  I pondered this and have come up with my #onelittleword.

This year, I am reaching.  Reaching new goals. Reaching for new experiences.  Reaching for new connections.  Reaching for new learning.  Reaching out to my teachers to join me.  

What is your #onelittle word going to be?

Connected Librarian Day

I am finding so many cool things to help me grow as a librarian from being connected on Twitter. Last night I participated in two sessions in the Connected Librarian Day Conference.  

 These sessions were streamed on Blackboard Collaborate.  The first session was "When Sherry Met Matthew: Finding Your Educational Soulmate and Helping Kids Rule the World.  This session was presented by Matthew Winner and Sherry Gick.  These two are an amazing team who are not even in the same state.  Matthew is in Maryland and Sherry is in Indiana.  However, the connected on Twitter and planned some connected activities with their students and are what they call "educational soulmates".  I love that term!  After a tremendously successful collaborative experience they cal "Earth Pals", they are opening the same type of experience up to others in their GeniusCon arena.  Read more about it on Sherry's Blog.  

The second session I participated in was Jennifer LaGarde's (aka Library Girl) "Imagining Library Spaces of the Future Today".  I heard Jennifer speak at our Texas Library Association Conference last spring.  She is an amazingly inspirational speaker who makes changing the face of libraries seem easy.  In this session, she talks about ways librarians can help students become thinkers and learners, solve big problems, engage and collaborate.  My favorite quote from this session was "in libraries of the future students CREATE instead of CONSUME".  I haven't figured out what that looks like in my library program yet, but I am sure I will get plenty more ideas from my new PLN on Twitter!

Technology Tuesday: Tweet! Tweet!

It's official!  I'm a "tweeter"!  I have tweeted 8 times in the past week about things going on in my library.  I just decided to jump in and see what happens.

I signed up for a twitter account last April at our Texas Library Conference when I went to a session about the "Nerdy Book Club"and immediately regretted it.  While I was pretty sure that the presenters, Cynthia Alaniz @utalaniz and John Schu @MrSchuReads, were speaking English at the presentation their twitter posts were in a completely different language.  Full of @, # quick phrases and links to websites.  I could not decipher and immediately vowed never to go there again.  

But then, I came back to school in August and got curious about it again.  I opened the shunned app on my phone and searched for a few of the other librarians in my district and started reading the things they were posting.  Now it wasn't so foreign.  They were just posting about the things happening in their libraries.  After "lurking" for a week or so, I worked up the courage to create an account for my"professional" self.  Then I started asking questions to my go to girls for social media... Cari Young @myschoollibrary and Angie Oliverson (Ms.O Reads Books). (I even FB instant messaged my director on a Saturday night).  She sent me to this blog Summer Learning Series 2014.  Here Todd Nesloney @TechNinjaTodd, a principal and tech guy extraordinaire, challenges his teachers to learn something new every week.  It was great!  I loved reading his personal story about twitter and he links to some other great resources about getting started.  And so off I went...

My First Tweet

Besides informing my community about the things going on in my library, I can already tell twitter is going to help me with my professional goal to network with other librarians and teachers.  

You can follow me @laffinglibrary