Tales from a Loud Librarian

Example of the Flippity game board  the student's made At the beginning of the semester, I read this post describing how to create a Jeopardy-like quiz game using a Google spreadsheet  and  Flippity . I thought this would work really well with a social studies class. I approached Mrs.Hampton, who is teaching 6th grade world history this semester, to see if she wanted to try using this tool with the students to make a quiz. We really wanted the kids themselves to create the questions, so we knew that we had to wait until she had taught them several units before they would have enough knowledge to create the questions for the quiz. We also decided to make the categories of art and architecture, family life, land forms and climate, religion, rulers, and science and medicine rather than the categories by country so that it would not matter how far into the textbook she taught before the planned activity. The students could ask questions about Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Ind...

Students finding newspapers on Worldbook Online I did this same lesson last semester with the students in Mr. Johnson's social studies classes. I thought it was very successful, so I wanted to share it with you. Everyday when students arrive in Mr. Johnson's room, they begin the day with a gist. They are suppose to find a news article on-line and then write 10 words summarizing the article that they read. For the first few weeks of the semester the students were allowed to go to any site they chose to find news articles. With the world at their fingertips, the students still selected CNN, BBC or Fox News ninety-five percent of the time. I know that I am a dinosaur, but I explain to the kids when they visit the library for this lesson that I was lucky to have access to my local newspapers in my school library much less newspapers from India or Japan. I then show them how I have collated a number of sites that they can use to find newspapers and news magazines from across ...

When Lisa Valence and I heard that we won the Gale TEAMS Award in September, we thought that we would receive $2500 and that would be it. Who knew this was an honor that would keep on giving and giving, even several months later. Gale Cengage sent us to the American Association of School Librarian's Conference in Minneapolis in October and held a reception there in our honor. We have a year's subscription to Library Media Connection magazine, and we are waiting to receive the cash award along with $500 in Gale products and some Linworth products, too. Library Media Connection asked us to write an article for their magazine describing the collaborative project that we submitted for the award.  The icing on the cake is this marvelous video that Gale had produced about Patrick Taylor Academy and the project that we designed to teach the social studies research paper. The video was shown at the Gale booth in the exhibit hall during the AASL conference (over and over ag...