Recap the events in your media center over the past year. Embed your Animoto video in a holiday card. You'll be promoting your library, but it will look like you're just wishing your coworkers a happy holiday! A perfect solution for the librarian not comfortable tooting her own horn!
"Annual Report"
Create a year-end celebration of all the activities that happened in your library during the school year.
Booktalk
Grab your students' attention with an MTV-style booktalk!
Book Promotion
Each year School Library Journal selects the best books of the year. Use Animoto to introduce these books to your students.
Instead of a written report, students can present their research orally and illustrate it with photographs or drawings. This project was created by a 5th grade student.
Think about this for School Library Month or National Library Week... Have your students write down words to describe what they think of your media center. Use their words to create a Wordle to display on your library's website.
This Wordle was created by Gail Petri using words from a Library of Congress primary source document about the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. Notice that the words have been sorted to appear in alphabetical order!
Wordle gives us another way of looking at something. This Wordle by Jen Wagner was created from the text of the Gettysburg Address and is one of the examples shown in her Ways to Use Wordle in Your Classroom slideshow.
Polls and surveys can be embedded on your library website.
This is a screenshot of a poll created by Jennifer Wetzel for her website.
This is a working poll I created for practice! Go ahead and vote-- and then notice how you can view the results by clicking on "View Results" (what else!?)
More screenshots. See the actual polls at the Unquiet Library.
Ever feel like your students might pay more attention to you if you were on TV? Now you can find out! (Okay maybe you won't be on TV, but your message will be!)
Here's an elementary school example. Students created Vokis of characters from the book "A Wrinkle in Time" and then talked about the story from that character's point of view. A nice alternative to a book report or book review!
Create screencasts to give instruction or promote library resources.
Videos
Producing a video to promote your libraries and its programs is no longer out of our reach. New products, such as Flip cameras, have made it easy to create a simple video and upload it to the web. And there are plenty of places to upload and host these large files. Here are a couple examples of library videos:
This video promotes the Collingswood Public Library's "Beat the Director" Race. It was professionally done, and has been viewed over 7500 times on YouTube. If you are in a middle school or high school, you may have students who can do work almost as good as this! So fun!
Once you've created all this digital content, a Glog, or digital poster, is a tool you can use to put it all together. You can use a Glog as the menu page of a wiki, or as a final product for a student research project. You can embed videos, graphics, and sound files on a Glog, creating an attractive digital scrapbook.
This one is a timeline-- but it's not linear! Pointing hands direct the viewer through the events in chronological order. Note the embedded video on the "American War of Independence" in the lower left corner.
Another way to keep your stuff in order-- or to create pathfinders for kids! LiveBinders uses the old 3-hole binder and index tabs as the metaphor for organizing websites you want to save. You can make your binder private, or choose to share it with others. Here's an example for this workshop (use access key CJRLC2010):
I'm wanting to spruce up my pbworks pages without much fuss; however I'm finding I am pretty picky with want I want. I think I'm going to end up using glogster.
Comments (3)
Smithc said
at 4:46 pm on Jul 12, 2010
Hi Shayne. Still in library mode, I see. Hopefully you were just fooling around on a laptop while relaxing river front!
kathy cook said
at 7:47 pm on Sep 9, 2010
I'm wanting to spruce up my pbworks pages without much fuss; however I'm finding I am pretty picky with want I want. I think I'm going to end up using glogster.
Ms. Russell said
at 8:46 pm on Sep 9, 2010
Good choice, Kathy! That's what I did with my school library page, too: http://kroms.pbworks.com .
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