Today I had the pleasure of attending the TASL (Tennessee Association of School Librarians) Co-Op in Medina, TN at South Gibson High School. Let me just say this: I learned so much today! Too much, in fact, to put into just one blog post. So, in order to share what I’ve learned, I’ve decided to break it down into 4 different blog posts I’ll be writing over the course of the next week.
Oh, and before we begin with information from the first session, let me say that I won a copy of a picture book called “Pennies in a Jar” by Dori Chaconas. It will go perfectly with my idea from my previous post about having students put a penny in a jar for each read aloud the class does together and then donating the money to a charity of the students choice at the end of the school year. Serendipitous!
Okay, so if you’ve never heard Librarian Kristen Hearne present, then you are missing out. She is breath of fresh air for the technology focus that librarianship now encompasses. She was full of great, useful ideas for educators with her session entitled, “It’s all about the Graphics.” Her Twitter handle is @khearne.
First, she noted that the educational presentations and professional documents we put out into the world need to be visually appealing to both our students and their parents. This is particularly true since most of our students are visually-based learners in the age of technology. One way to do this is to spice up your work with fancy fonts from www.dafont.com. For backgrounds for things like PowerPoint presentations use www.fabnfree.com for papers (shapes are what you use for a blog). Other backgrounds can be found at: www.psd-dude.com and www.mygrafico.com.
For those of you who are tired of spending money on posters at the teaching supplies store, a better suggestion is to make your own. Use www.teachfactory.com to find her printable and inspiring posters. Posters can be printed up on a 24×36 poster for a few dollars if you don’t have a poster maker available at your school.
In search of copyright free photographs to use on your school website or page? Check out www.morguefile.com for thousands of photographs to use for your webpage. It’s also a great resource for students searching for copyright free photographs to use in their school projects.
Next, my favorite part of the presentation, was on the topic of digital newsletters. Using the website www.smore.com, you can create beautiful, professional-looking newsletters that you can: embed into your blog or school webpage, share on social media, include text, photos, and video, and track statistics of how many people have viewed your newsletter. This is an excellent communication tool that I will be exploring more of this fall for my own school library.
Another highlight was some of the apps that you or your students could use to spice up their photographs. Apps available include comic book, aviary, wordfoto, snap seed, comic life, and free collage. Check them out on the app store.
Lastly, she talked about infographics. Infographics (the product of taking data, sorting it, arranging it, and presenting it in a visual way) are something that I intend to incorporate more now with the implementation of Common Core. She recommended websites like www.infodoodle.net and www.glogster.com. Other apps for inforgraphic creation include: grafico, mindmeister, maptini, and photostats.
I hope by sharing these websites and apps from the presentation, that you can incorporate them in your teaching practices as either teacher or librarian (or both!).
The Middle Shelf 