A special thanks to Tina Heitman, library media coordinator for Davis-Townsend Elementary, for this blog post on the Give 5 Read 5 campaign. "The NCDPI first launched the statewide Give Five - Read Five campaign in 2013 to address summer learning loss. As a part of this annual campaign, parents, business leaders and community members donate five or more new or gently used books to local elementary schools so that students have books to take home at the end of the school year because research from Harvard shows that reading five books helps students to better retain literacy skills over the summer." http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/give5read5/ This will be the second year that Davis-Townsend Elementary School has participated in this statewide initiative! Here are the steps we take:
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by Tracy Varner, Library Media Coordinator, Reeds Elementary On Friday, March 11th, the Reeds Battle of the Books Team took on some wonderful seniors at the Davidson County Senior Services in another battle—“Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?’’ What an awesome day it was!! The seniors had no mercy on our EBOB students, and our EBOB students gave it right back! Seeing the interaction between young and old was such a great experience! As they began each round, they shook hands and the battles began. Team members were allowed to collaborate with one another to discover and work out the answers to each question or problem. I have to admit, some of these were really hard. The competition was fierce, but in the end, it was a tie score! Afterward, the Davidson County Senior Services treated our students to a pizza lunch.
This was such a great learning experience for our students. The people at the Davidson County Senior Services were so welcoming and kind to our students. I would highly recommend letting your students participate in an event similar to this, if not with this particular organization, maybe another one where they could interact with seniors. The Top Ten - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires
Register at: www.scholastic.com/bookfairs/reading-summit/concord-nc
Thanks to Brene Duggins and Sheila Allen for this post about FREE YA audiobooks from SYNC. When someone on the Internet tells us that we can receive something for free, we have learned to be skeptical and rightfully so. But SYNC Audiobooks for Teens is totally free, no strings attached. SYNC started in the summer of 2010, to introduce the listening experience to a teen audience and to demonstrate that Required Reading can be completed by listening. Sponsored by AudioFile Magazine, the titles are delivered by OverDrive, the same program the Davidson County Public Library uses to deliver audio titles.
We have been with Audiobook SYNC since the beginning, Brene (1st year) and Sheila (2nd year). Through these past 6 years we have learned a lot, the biggest takeaway is that this is a wonderful opportunity to share the love of books with students and teachers, especially those reluctant readers that are more open to listening to a book rather than actually reading it. Some of the titles that are available each year are the beginning of a series, personally we have found that after listening to these we end up finding the rest of the series to read. The great thing that you can share with students and staff is that this FREE resource is available to EVERYONE! No strings, just download the books each week. Remember to get them when they are available because once they are gone, they are no longer available to download! We listen to them in the car, doing yard work, in the bed, and even when taking a walk or run! Another tip is that you can download them on multiple devices. Laptop, iPad, Phone, etc. So how do we get started…. Starting May 5th - August 17th, 2016, SYNC will give away two audiobook downloads each week (30 titles). Each week one contemporary title is paired with a similar classic title. These books are selected for students 13+ and cover a wide range of topics. It’s easy to start, go to www.audiobooksync.com and signup for alerts when a new title is available. Titles change each week at 7am ET on Thursday mornings. Download the Overdrive app on your device(s) and follow the onscreen prompts.
To help you spread the word, SYNC has an Educator Toolkit with posters, bookmarks, and trifolds ready to use. By starting the downloads in early May, we can help students find and download the audiobooks on their personal devices. Download them all, download a few, they are yours to keep. "Teen Tech Week is a national initiative sponsored by YALSA and is aimed at teens, their parents, educators and other concerned adults. The purpose of Teen Tech Week is to ensure that teens are competent and ethical users of digital media, especially the nonprint resources offered through libraries, such as e-books, e-readers, databases, audiobooks, and social media. Teen Tech Week encourages teens to use libraries' nonprint resources for education and recreation, and to recognize that librarians are qualified, trusted professionals in the field of information technology. Teen Tech Week began in 2007 and has a general theme of Get Connected @ your library. Millions of teens do not have access to a home computer and, were it not for libraries, would miss opportunities to gain important digital literacy skills. Libraries offer a bridge across the digital divide.Libraries also recognize that digital media plays an important part in a teens’ life. That is why more libraries than ever are helping teens build critical digital literacy skills, which they will use to obtain scholarships, secure jobs, effectively manage their online identity and more." - From http://teentechweek.ning.com Several DCS high schools are participating. Here is Lorie Steed, Library Media Coordinator at Central Davidson about #TTW16 in her library: This is our school’s first time celebrating Teen Tech Week, and I wanted to share what we’re doing because looking at what other librarians have done really helped me when I was trying to come up with ideas. We decided to come up with a different theme each day: Augmented Reality & Quiver: I wanted to start with something quick and easy that also incorporated the “Create It at Your Library” theme, and the Quiver app fit the bill. After printing off free sheets from the Quiver website, I loaded the app onto a few iPads so students could scan their colored pages once they completed them. I then partnered up with Wendy Lewis, who had her students color their sheets ahead of time so that when they visited the library between class changes as they usually do, other students could watch them bring their creations to life. I really like this activity because even if students don’t have time to complete it at school, they can pick up the sheets and download the app onto their phones to use at home. It’s also a fun way to take the popular coloring trend to the next level, and to illustrate how technology can be used to create something rather than just consume what others have created. Book Trailers: One of the suggestions from 50 More Ways to Celebrate Teen Tech Week that I really liked was to have students make their own book trailers and post them online, and since Junior Library Guild is currently sponsoring a book trailer contest, I decided to get the word out about this contest and invite students to participate. Students can come to the library during our 30-minute activity period on Tuesday to view examples of movie and book trailers, learn what makes a good book trailer, and get introduced to Animoto and WeVideo, two free web-based video-creation tools. This is also a great digital citizenship lesson since students must use royalty-free images, which they can do by taking their own pictures or video, or by finding royalty-free content through Creative Commons or limiting Usage Rights under Search Tools when performing a Google search. Learning to create an effective book trailer is not only fun, but also an opportunity to develop a skill that could turn into a business opportunity as more and more authors are hiring freelancers to create book trailers to help them promote their books. The Rest: The rest of the week’s activities are more low-key, and that was intentional. As I understand it, part of Teen Tech Week is to inspire students to create with technology, but it’s also about highlighting resources and getting kids into the library. The retro video games on Wednesday and the Google Cardboard demo on Friday, as well as Thursday’s bottle-cap necklace kits, are meant to help us make connections with students we might not have made connections with yet. We’re also including quick technology tips on the daily announcements to remind students of resources they have access to here at school, including World Book Online and Ancestry K12, as well as free online resources available to them through the Davidson County Public Library system, including five free song downloads a week through Freegal, and ebooks through North Carolina Digital Library. We want to help students build a lifelong relationship with the library and one way to do this is through our partnership with our wonderful public library system. You can find detailed information about the multitude of digital resources available through the Davidson County Public Library system here. Lexington Library and Makey Makeys: We actually kicked off Teen Tech Week a couple of days early, on Friday, March 4, as Joanna from the Lexington Public Library brought a Makey Makey for students to try out when they visited the Bookmobile, which comes to our school the first Friday of every month. Students learned about how electricity works while also having fun playing Mario using bananas as a game controller! This activity was a great success and resulted in the highest number of Bookmobile visitors we’ve ever had; a couple of business and science teachers even brought their classes in to try out the device. You can find out more about Makey Makeys at the Lexington Public Library in this article from Lexington Dispatch, and about a special program going on this Saturday at the Lexington Public Library from 12 - 2, in which students can experiment with the Makey Makey devices and create mosaics that will utilize conductive inks to make their art interactive. What activities have you have planned for your students during Teen Tech Week? Please share them here! According to openeducationalresources.pbworks.com, "Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world." You may already know about LearnNC, CreativeCommons or Khan Academy which are great examples of OER. However not all educational resources are "open" or "free". Although OpenEd resources have been around a few years, only in the last few weeks did NC officially announce the #OpenEdNC initiative. See the original article from NCDPI here: http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/newsroom/news/2015-16/20160226-01 For more information about the #OpenEd initiative, visit this website from the U.S. Department of Education: http://tech.ed.gov/open-education/ What are the 5 R's of OERs?:
See the video below for a 3 minute explanation about OERs. What are the benefits of OERs?: see full article here. |
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