Happy New Year

It has been awhile since I have posted on my blog.  The new year has started and it has started with a bang!   I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and is ready to face this wonderful new year.  

At school we are getting ready to vote on our Bluebonnet books and are looking forward to our Book Fair at the end of January.  I am starting the last two classes for my Librarians Certification and will be posting blurbs of Young Adult books I have read this semester.

Keep Reading!!

Promoting Your School

Wow!! Can you believe school is just around the corner?  I am looking forward to seeing the faces of new and old students and getting them into the library and into new books.  I have created an exciting video on Animoto to help promote my school.  I hope you enjoy it.

Final Reflection

Even though this says final reflection, it does not mean that I am done with my blog, I am just done with my summer class for my Library Science Certificate.  It really has been an eye opener and fun doing this blog and learning about all the technology that could be used in the classroom or library.  I still wake up at 3:00 in the morning with my brain going a mile a minute with different ideas on how to use some of this in the library.
Most of this was new to me, like Instagram, Vine Video, Comic Strips, and Twitter; well okay a lot of it was pretty new to me.

I really enjoyed doing the Vine Video and the Comic Strips the best.  They were fun and short.  Not short in a "oh good this is almost done", but in "oh, wow this really got my attention". I really believe the students will also like these and can do many short projects with these.  I am thinking about using the comic strips for a book talk between two people, or even just name the different parts of a book.  I even think that using the Vine video for different parts of a book would be fun.  I would also use the QR Codes so that I could share this with parents and teachers.

The thing that worries me the most is trying to keep up with all the Book Communities we signed up for and Twitter.  I know keeping up with one would be great and that would be my goal for the up-coming year.  I really would like to keep the Facebook page going for our library and Goodreads since I liked their site.  I might even try to keep up with Shelfari since I have it on my blog.  I will also keep posting to my blog, I am not sure what I have to share is important, but maybe someone will need what ever information I put on here.

Thanks for a wonderful class.

Parents, Teens, and Online Privacy

Madden, M., Cortesi, S., gasser, U., Lenhart, A., Duggan, M. (2012, November 14). Parents, Teens, and
      Online Privacy. Pew Internet and American Life Project.  Retrieved July 23, 2014 from
      http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/11/20/parents-teens-and-online-privacy/


How concerned are you with your children and the Internet?  Many more parents are concerned with their children using social networks now than they were 3 years ago.  Parents of younger teens, 12-13 years old are more concerned than parents of 14-17 years old of what they are doing on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  They are also more concerned about what information advertisers are learning about their children when they are on the Internet, how their child manages his/her reputation online and how they interact with other people.

Parents are helping their child set up the privacy settings, reading privacy policies, using parental controls, and talking to their child about online profiles, especially the parents of the 12-13 years old.  Parents are also befriending their children on Facebook to stay connected with their child and what is happening on their page.  More parents are also using social networking sites than they were 3-4 years ago, especially parents under the age of 40. Other things that have parents concerned are interactions with strangers online and the impact on their future opportunities.

Parents will also go on the Internet and search for their child to see what information they can find out on them.  If you haven't done this you should do it on yourself.  I did it and it pulls up the basic information, name, date of birth, addresses, and people who may be related to you.  If you want more specific things you have to pay for that information.  Which I was glad, because the site searched for marriages, traffic tickets, felonies, and quite a bit of other information that should not be that easy to get to, especially for free. I did try looking up my two sons and it only brought up their birth dates, which is enough information for the Internet.

28 pages

Teens and Technology

Rainie, L. (2014, July 23). 13 Things to know about Teens and Technology. PEW Internet Project.
         Retrieved July 25, 2014 from http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/07/23/13-things-to-know-about-
         teens-and-technology/.

Technology has influenced many teens in different ways.  Teens today are on their cell phones/smartphones more than they are on laptops or PC's.  They use their phones for almost everything, chatting, texting, social networking and the Internet.

A research was done with over 2000 advanced placement and writing teachers to see how the use of technology has effected the way teens look up information and if it effects have helped students or hurt them.  Teachers are saying that yes technology is helping students become better researchers, it gives students access to more information and they are more self-sufficient when doing research.  But, then there are those teachers that say the students are getting to much information and don't know how to decipher it, they have shorter attention spans and students hope to find information quickly and easily.  If students where being graded on their research skills using technology their grade would be fair to poor depending on what is being evaluated.  The bottom two skills were able to tell the difference between reliable or unreliable information and patience when looking for that hard to find information.

With technology at our fingertips we as teachers have to realize that we can not keep using the old methods of teaching, we have to broaden our thinking to include more interactive lessons were students are engaged in their learning.

So with this technology are we creating a society where the students can multitask, find answers that are in-depth and find them quickly or are we creating a society where the students have short attention spans, lack the ability to make deep relationships and lack the ability for finding in-depth answers to questions?  What do you think?


55 Slides

Instagram and Vine

Here is my first Instagram pictures and Vine video.  These are some other ways to get technology into the classroom.

Here is a picture of some Fondant Sea Creatures I created last Saturday.   Sitting in my backyard watching the pool. It looks so good!!


Here are our dogs doing what they do best.

Look at em go! https://t.co/PIJyjweEuI
— Deborah Politsch (@DeborahPolitsch) July 29, 2014

I have not been on Instagram or Vine before.  It was quite interesting, to tell the truth, I had to get my son to help with the Vine Video.  I do like some of the suggestions for using Instagram in the classroom. Such as pictures of the students with their projects, field trip pictures, and sharing books that they have read.  Of course like all web based programs you have to be careful for the students safety. If you have not done this before try it out.  The Vine Video is only 8 seconds long, but you can tell a lot in that short of a time.

Screencast

Screencast are fun and a different way to grab students attention.  The two that I tried out were Screencast-O-Matic and Screenr.  Both we pretty simple to use as long as you have Java installed on your computer and your computer doesn't block the site.  I had a lot of trouble with Screenr, even though I had Java installed, it still wouldn't record until I set the security level down to medium.  Screencast-O-Matic lets you record for 15 minutes while Screenr only lets you record for 5 minutes, both of these where in the free mode.
I did my Screencast-O-Matic on how to use our library search catalog.  I will be using this at the beginning of the year to show the students how to navigate through it.



On Screenr, I made a screencast on how to use MakeBeliefsComix.  I had to add a few things to the comic before I started because I only had five minutes and ran out of time the first go around.



Like I said before both were easy to use once I figured out how to get Java to work on Screenr.  On both you just push record and then put the box around the area you want to talk about and then hit record and start talking.  For me though, I think I would use Screencast-O-Matic more because you get more time and it worked well for me at school.  I did not try Screenr at school, so I don't know if I would have less problems with it there or not.