Can't Wait Until Friday!

Yesterday was our county's annual Digital Learning Conference for all of the digital learning coaches to learn new techniques and resources. We, in turn, return to our schools and share these ideas with our faculty, teaching them how to utilize digital resources in the classroom.

My number one new favorite thing to use is...ZAPTION!

Zaption is a way to take video clips and short videos and make them interactive "tours". For instance, if we are able to have our One Book, One School project next year, youtube has the video of a great talk given by the author of the book. Clips of this video (it is over an hour in length) can be uploaded into zaption and then discussion and comprehension questions added throughout the tour. Students would sign in to watch the tour, and the video pauses at each question. Once they have submitted their answers, they can continue watching. Teachers can log in to see who has watched it, what their answers were, and see graphics about the answers to different questions.

Imagine knowing you are going to be out the day of a key lesson. Maybe the substitute will be able to teach it, but maybe not (especially if you teach calculus or physics!) so create a video showing the lesson, but insert questions to check for comprehension and attention. When you return, you will know who "got it" and who didn't.

There is also a gallery of tours you can use. In order to see  your students' responses or to add/change questions, copy the tour into your own account. It's really that easy.

www.zaption.com

It's National Library Week!

To celebrate National Library Week, let's discover some fun facts about libraries!

Did you know:

• There are more public libraries than McDonald's in the United States! 
• American students make about 1.5 billion visits to their school library every year!
• Reference librarians in the USA answer nearly 6.6 million questions every week! If all those people stood in line to ask their question, the line would stretch from Maryland to Alaska!
• The oldest continuously running library is in Sinai, Egypt: the S. Catherine's Monastery Library. It was built in the middle of the 6th Century.
• The world's largest library is the Library of Congress: 158 million items on over 800 miles of bookshelves.
• The most "borrowed" without being checked out book is the Bible, followed by the Guinness World Records Book.
• At some point in their lives, former Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, former First Lady Laura Bush, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, author Beverly Cleary, and author Lewis Carroll were librarians.

 "10 Interesting Facts about Libraries." Library Outsourcing. Library Outsourcing, 2014. Web. 16 Apr.       2015. <http://libraryoutsourcing.com/10-interesting-facts-libraries/>.

 "10 Fun Facts about Our Nation's Libraries." New Victory Theater. The New Victory Theater, 17 July         2014. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://newvictorytheater.blogspot.com/2014/07/10-fun-facts-about-our-

         nations-libraries.html>.

  "Quotable Facts about America's Libraries." American Library Association. ALA Library Champions,        2012. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.       

          <http://www.ala.org/offices/sites/ala.org.offices/files/content/quotablefacts2012_FINAL.pdf>.

Up to the Last Minute of Research

We've almost made it to Spring Break (even though it's been shortened due to snow.) And the media center is chock full of busy students researching up to the last minute today! To elaborate on the end of last week's post regarding finding sources (since many classes have been squeezing in the still fairly cold yet 137 degree media center):

Let's say you are working on a research project on the American Civil War. Perhaps you decided (or were assigned) a topic comparing the South's slavery laws with South Africa's apartheid laws of the 1980s-90s.

Your first stop in the research zone will probably be the Gale database or the Academic Search Complete (EBSCO) database. Despite the advanced search function, you cannot find an article about American slavery and South African apartheid. After several minutes of frustration, you have two choices: give up or figure out a new way of searching. Let's stick with number two.

Just because you cannot find an article (or 5 or 7 articles, depending on the required number of sources) does not mean you have a bad topic. It is very rare in life to find sources that give you exactly what you are looking for without more effort on your part. You just need to think at a higher level. In elementary school, you read the information and regurgitated it for your project. In middle school, you read the information, spit it back out and possibly added an opinion. From now on, you will take the facts and use them to support your theory while analyzing and synthesizing the information!

Find articles about slavery in the South. One might be on the history of the slave trade, another on the defense of slavery as given by the Antebellum South. Perhaps you can find an article that shows the effect of slavery on the family. Now search for South Africa and apartheid. You want to find articles explaining how the government established and defended this system. Most likely you will find articles showing the long-term effect on the cultures of the different ethnic groups and on the family structure.

Take notes on the articles.

Now start comparing the two systems. Are there commonalities in the effects? Did they politicians use similar or different defensive arguments? Were the laws regulating these systems similar or different?

And THAT is what you can write in your paper. (Just remember to properly cite those sources!)