LIS 568 Week 11

I must admit, the thought of designing a website for a school that hires me is kind of intimidating.  I do not consider myself to be an artistic person.  So after Googling "how to create a school website" I came across a link for the best school and teacher website builders.  Out of the 3 mentioned, Wix.com was the highest rated.  Wix provides 100s of templates to choose from for other non artistic people like me.  This will help make your website cool to the students in your school who don't necessarily view you as cool.  Wix also allows you to have a blog which might aid in generating traffic to your website.  After all, where is the fun in navigating a website if students don't have an opportunity to voice their opinions???? :-)

I recommend visiting Wix when the time comes to create a school website.  You do have to sign in and create an account of course before you get started.

Here's the link to the article:

https://superbwebsitebuilders.com/schools-and-teachers/

LIS 568 Week 10

The thought of having emerging technologies in the classroom does not excite me the way it might others.  I guess it has something to do with the type of person I am and what I've seen over the past 2 years of being a substitute teacher in 2 suburban public school districts of Buffalo, NY.  While I enjoy both of these school districts, I am aware that the school districts struggle to come up with funds to help pay for technology advancements.  I have seen how they pack in 28 kids into 1 classroom for their "computer special" once a week.  I've also seen how one class was unable to use chromebooks because another class were using the chromebooks that are shared throughout the grade level.  These are real issues to think about when trying to come up with ways VR can help further education in the library.  How can a district that has had to cut teacher jobs over the past few years justify spending money on VR equipment in their school?  Well here is a way to help start the fund raising and have it professionally done:

  https://www.givergy.com/us/fundraise/fundraising-events/?gclid=CjwKCAjwwJrbBRAoEiwAGA1B_bQigJ3k6INILQGRgZMlRO2jqva1ZUGo6gEe6NKL6H82sMNfQ_y9HBoC0w8QAvD_BwE

LIS 568 WEEK 9

When thinking about copyright infringement and possibly being sued, it can be a scary thought.  I will use a website called "BIGSTOCK" to help protect myself and the district I will work for.  BIGSTOCK is a website that has over 68 million stock photos and videos that have been approved for use and free of copyright infringement.  This website can be very helpful and useful when developing a school website or a teacher's website for his or her classroom.  Using the images and videos from BIGSTOCK will ensure no lawyer will come knocking at the school's front door.

https://www.bigstockphoto.com/

LIS 568 Week 8

Information literacy can be an intimidating topic for anyone including fellow librarians and classroom teachers.  Even a well organized and detailed presentation from the school librarian can often leave a fellow classroom teacher confused on the topic.  But alas, I found a website with all kinds of fun medias that a teacher can browse at his or her leisure without feeling embarrassed by asking the librarian questions after the presentation.  S.O.S. for information literacy is a place that has multiple platforms for teachers to view and get ideas from to help themselves to understand and to teach information literacy.

 http://www.informationliteracy.org/

LIS 568 Week 7

Sometimes it's difficult coming up with creative ways to share information to colleagues and to students.  When I coach high school varsity baseball, I take pride in being organized for myself and for the players.  I came up with a way for the pitchers on my team to keep track of how much they would throw off of the mound while we practiced in the gym during February, March, and April.  I used a boring spreadsheet.  Now that I've come across Venngage Templates, I will be using that for next season.  There are so many templates to choose from.  The way the templates are set up, you can have half of the page as a chart and the other half with bullet points or anything else relevant to the task.  This can really help a teacher that might be struggling coming up with an idea of a worksheet or a study sheet for the students in his or her classroom.  Venngage Templates is definitely something I'll be using moving forward.

https://venngage.com/templates

LIS 568 Week 6

Thinking about ways to help guide young readers to read information in it's entirety lead me to the Super Why app.  I have an almost 7 year old son and a 4 year old daughter, both love super heroes and the idea of super heroes.  Super Why is a show on PBS that is tailored to educating children.  Like many other popular shows, there was an app made.  This app can be used to help young readers complete their reading tasks and other tasks.  I think that a school librarian could use this app to generate reading interest among the students.  Many kids enjoy the super hero idea and this app can allow the students to act like a super hero and read through tasks completely.  This can help teach kids the value of completing tasks and show them how rewarding it can be.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/super-why!-for-ipad/id362179828?mt=8

LIS 568 Week 5

I laughed when I read Susan's post on how people really can't multitask.  My wife has been telling me for years that she can multitask and always points it out when she feels she's succeeding at it.  Well I forwarded the article that proves multitasking isn't possible and it will be interesting to see what she tells me about it.  😁

I then searched on Google for ways to help keep focused on a task.  I came across  https://www.focusboosterapp.com/  and was impressed.  It's an app that can be installed on any device.  It makes you stay on a task for 25 minutes and then an alarm goes off.  It then gives you a 5 minute break.  I feel that allotted time is substantial enough to get a good chuck of a task completed.  The 5 minute break then allows you to check your email or texts or whatever else a person constantly checks.  I feel this app can be helpful in the classroom for students working on a chrome book or any device in the school.