EdTech Review: Oooo! Gimme SMORE!

Image from smore.com

It's not hard for me to get excited about something I know will help get the message of READING across to students, parents, and teachers.  At the end of the last school year, I found just that!  Sending home more than just a summer reading list was my goal.  I wanted to supply parents with resources to not only find books, but to foster reading love and fun.

Throughout the school year, I'd been sending home library media paper newsletters in the form of infographics (more about this in a future post).  Deciding to provide more content for the summer newsletter, I searched for digital newsletters and came upon Smore.  You can sign up for free and create 5 newsletters (called flyers) with this plan (to view education pricing for unlimited flyers, click here).

With Smore, my newsletter was nicely formatted and included images I could upload, links, and buttons (for summer reading lists).  There is SO much more that is possible to add--such as audio, video, events, etc.  You can share the newsletter via email or other social media platforms.

I emailed the newsletter to all teachers.  I asked them to share this with the parents of their students.  Since not all parents have email, I created a PDF through Smore and printed it for teachers to share.  Also cool, I was able to track how many people viewed the emailed newsletter.

Here is what my newsletter ended up looking like (note: the formatting is different because it's embedded in my blog: link here for original formatting).

EdTech Review: Biblionasium

I remember geeking out over finding Biblionasium last school year in some random thread or blog post.  I IMMEDIATELY emailed every teacher that had 1:1 in my school (3rd-5th).  Amazingly, my mind was rational and I told them all I would love to collaborate and use this tool NEXT school year!  What?!  I didn't say right here, right now?!  Ah-MAAZ-ing!  That's what I think of that moment and the edtech tool I had just discovered.  

Biblionasium is a kid-friendly online book tracking site, similar to Goodreads for adults (friend me).  Teachers can sign-up for free and they can add their students or send a parent letter the site provides asking them to do that instead.  Students keep track of their reading, review books, and recommend books to others all within the privacy of the Biblionasium world.  Teachers can track reading logs, create goals, challenges, groups, and run reports.

This is how I'm beginning to use Biblionasium...
I set up a group to:

• share with students what I'm reading (I have a physical display of this in my library, too)
• promote new books in the library which I can share with teachers and students
• share books with Lexiles 1000+ that are appropriate for 4th-5th grade (and so I could get rid of the shelf on my Goodreads)

I'm looking forward to what others ways not only I can use this site, but all the ways students and classroom teachers will use the site during the school year.

Between the Lions Online Stories

One of my go to free resources for the kindergarten students that come into the library in the morning before the school day begins is virtual books projected on the Promethean Board.  I use several sites, but the one I want to talk about today is Between the Lions website via PBSKids.  These virtual books range between being actual animated stories to a well-done presentation of the illustrations from books.  They are as long as 40 seconds to about 6 minutes.  The nice thing is that once you hit "play" for one video in a category, it will end up playing the rest of the videos that come after it in the category. 

The site has the stories divided by 11 subjects, such as Folktales and Fables or Animals.  The students enjoy viewing the books because a lot of them are recognizable stories, such as The Three Little Pigs, Violet's Music by Angela Johnson, and Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka. Funny enough, I'm constantly playing King Midas for them because it's characters are marionettes and they think it looks silly (and so is this version of the story). 

Did I mention this is available for free? ;-)


Image from Between the Lions webpage/pbskids.org