Tales from a Loud Librarian

As librarian, I try to be the go to person to help teachers when they are looking to design a lesson where students create an electronic product by recommending sites that might fit the objectives of their lessons. Oftentimes, I am familiar with a tool because I have used it, seen it used or know other teachers who have used it successfully with their students, but I have not always had hands on experience using the tool myself. I believe that, as teachers, we cannot nor should not learn how to use every website out there, so that we can give our students opportunities to practice critical thinking by figuring out a tool on their own or collaboration by learning from their peers. Unfortunately, tools do not remain the same over time--no longer free or limited capabilities in free version or merged with another site or newly blocked at school, etc. I decided that it is a good idea for me to spend some time "playing" with edtech and creating my own products now that school...

my infogr.am blog post is here New tech tools are great, and when Infogr.am launched several years ago, several of the teachers in my building began to use it with their students. We had some success and failure with this tool used to create infographics, so I reached out to them through twitter. We have kept up a relationship ever since, and this past year I became an ambassador with Infogr.am. They asked if I would write a post for their blog on the use of their tool in  the classroom.  Click here to read the post that I wrote for them . 

Easybib and ALA joined forces to create this infographic illustrating where students get most of their information when creating citations. Note the sites students seem to use the most -- sites that are user-generated. Librarians can help steer students to accurate and reliable resources. 

I found this infographic that lists 27 things that a school librarian can do for their school community. Click here to find the infographic by Mia MacMeekin. 

This all began a couple of weeks before the holidays, but I have not had time to get it written down. It is such a wonderful example of 21st century learning that I wanted to share. A number of teachers have talked about asking students to create infographics to illustrate data. I was even helping 6th grade math students find websites to help them create graphs for an infographic project. The teacher just hadn't decided yet what the theme of the infographic would be, so curating sites on Sqworl was as far as they had gotten.  In the meantime, a class of juniors and seniors taking AP Environmental Science were using the start-up Infogr.am to create infographics illustrating various environmental land-use issues such as flooding, national parks, etc which they had previously researched. I heard that the students were not happy with the online software, so I visited the class to tweet out the students’ issues to the makers of Infogram. I was surprised at the speed within which I ...