More iPad Apps to Love!

Pad fever is starting at our school. From kids who tell me they have one at home to a few teachers who have purchased one as well, there is some serious iPad love blossoming at ISB.

Here are some of my new favorite apps to add to our growing collection on the Hub iPads (our lovely PTA donated another iPad to us a few weeks ago, and we are overjoyed!).

Cut the Rope (.99 cents)
Love the strategy involved in this game. Your job is to feed a Christmas creature a piece of candy by cutting various ropes at the right time. It looks deceivingly simple, but it's a great challenge, and I see tons of potential for collaborative use (much like Gravity HD). Plus, the creature is super cute!

Lego Creationary (free app)
You cannot go wrong with Legos & kids, and this app is great for spatial skills. You roll a 3-D dice (even that is cool!) and then watch a Lego structure being built. As it is being built, you decide which of the pictures shown it will be, all within a time limit. This one is crazy popular during our recess times with all ages of students.

Alphabet Car (free app for the lite version)
This game, designed for the wee ones, is fun because the iPad itself becomes the steering wheel of the car. You try and drive the bus into various letters to spell 3-letter words. 1st graders had a lot of fun with this the other day.

I'm pretty sure our school is piloting iPads in the early childhood classrooms next semester. Can't wait to see some of these apps in the classroom setting.

Star Wars, the Aftermath

a view from outside...I love these funky windows in our Hub.
Let's just say that the Star Wars Marathon was a big hit! Like, 125+ kids and a lot of parents in one space but still heaps of chaotic fun. The Lego activity was the most popular, and I found that kids did not want to leave that center. Overall, it was great fun, but I need to do some future thinking about how to organize these for a smaller amount of kids. I guess if too many kids being excited about something is my biggest problem, that's a good problem to have.
A surprise addition to our event was the visit of many Star Wars characters. Our middle school put on the play last year, and a group of students offered to come and walk around in costume and in character. It was the perfect addition to the party and a perfect addition to my Princess Leia outfit!

One of our centers was a graphing center. I did a quick search for something free and easy to use to show the data, and this one from Kids Zone was very straightforward. Any other easy-to-use sites that anyone knows of to create graphs?

More Celebrating Characters We Love

Last school year's Percy Jackson event was such a success that I started thinking of how to offer something similar for the younger grades this year. When I took more than three seconds to think about what characters make the kids crazy excited, I thought of Star Wars. Our Star Wars basket is one of the first students run to in the Hub, and I try to continue adding to it when I find a new book at a bookstore.

I enlisted a small group of 2nd and 3rd grade Star Wars fanatics to help me design the special day, and they decided that we call it the Star Wars Marathon (I love that the event is 45 minutes after school, and we are calling it a marathon!). Again, I'm keeping it simple with six different stations and having kids rotate at their leisure.

Here are the stations--all names created by our organizing team

1. Death Star Coloring (color your favorite character)
2. Mustafar Battle (show off your light saber moves)
3. Star Wars Structures (putting a ton of Legos out and some ideas of how to make something Star Wars-ish)
4. The Quest for R2D2 (take a quiz to show what you know)
5. Force Jump Training (a non-violent Star Wars online game)
6. Jedi Archives (our graphing station to view our favorites)

Using Photopeach, we made a short promotional video to get people excited about the event. I adore Photopeach.


While all this planning has been going on, the 4th and 5th graders have already begun planning the next event--without me because I was helping with the younger students. I am told that Diary of a Wimpy Kid will be the next Celebrating Characters We Love. Talk about a gradual release of responsibility...

Wallwisher & New Title Browsings

It's been a while since I've used Wallwisher, and I wanted to introduce a new 4th grade teacher and her class to the tool since it is fairly simply to navigate and has tons of uses in the classroom. We started our lesson with a quick title recommendation, and then we moved on to the Solon Community School District website hosting tons of wallwishers and video reviews created by the students. Many of our students went straight to the video reviews and they loved them. The room was buzzing with kids checking Destiny to see if we had the title, and then coming right to me if we didn't to ensure I put it on the order. I added quite a few to our list of new books to buy.

QR Codes in the Library

Wow. Wow. Wow.

I've been hearing rumblings of something called QR codes, but I had no idea what they were until Kim posted this video on Twitter the other day. After watching, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Jeff is calling 2011 "The Year of the Code," and I think he's on to something.

QR codes are perfect for the library--just perfect. The condensed version of QR codes are that they are barcodes that hold a lot of data and can be scanned using a mobile device or laptop. You decide what information you want on the barcode: it can be a URL or a written message. When you create a QR code (I've been using Kaywa to make mine), you print it out and tape it to any surface to be read by a QR scanner. Below is the QR code for my book recommendation blog.



To get a QR reader for your laptop or mobile device, there seem to be many choices of apps. Here's one to try.

Ideas swimming in my library brain:

1. Messages on QR codes about why kids like certain books. I print and tape onto the book cover.
2. QR codes linking to various book trailers.
3. Communicating better with parents about book recommendations via QR codes outside the Hub

Exciting times for libraries and librarians...

Hunger Games Book Club

On the heels of our recent Mimosas and Mentor Texts came our second book club for Hunger Games. This time, our gathering consisted of teachers from high school, middle school, elementary, administration, and even our director's wife who is a huge YA fan. I believe the conversation was richer and deeper because we had people with such diverse experiences. Here's what I took with me from that night:

*The realization that we bring our own adult expecations to the books we read. Some of us wanted Katniss to develop as a character throughout the book, but she simply did not. Others felt this was the point of the book, and we had a great conversation about it.

*In big schools, we become so focused on our own divisions that sometimes we miss out on meeting people. It was wonderful to spend some quality time with different folks and to hear different opinions about the same book.

*I had little knowledge of the YA genre, but the evening finished with a sharing of recommended titles and a desire to continue this book club with another choice soon.
*Having cheesecake at a gathering always makes it better. My fabulous husband sent a parachute down from the 2nd floor to announce the arrival of the "gift," much like Haymitch in the book. It added some yumminess and some humor to the night.

Overall, I'm finding that these teacher book clubs are pretty casual on the organizing front but pack a real punch for deepening understanding and building community. Love them!

Image Attribution: Jokin BCN

A Little of This & A Little of That

One thing I absolutely love about Twitter and blogging is how many amazing ideas are out there being shared. And copying is ok, even encouraged! Today's lesson with 5th graders was a little bit Becky and a little bit Mary Lee & Franki--Becky posted about Big Huge Labs trading cards and Mary Lee & Franki blogged about themselves as readers. I combined the two and had the students brainstorm 5 things about themselves as readers and put them on the trading cards. They not only dug deep about their own selves but they learned some very useful tech skills:

1. How to use Photobooth
2. How to take a screenshot
3. How to upload a photo

My next step is to get their trading cards on a slideshow and have it running on our small digital screen in the Hub for all to see.

Here's my wondering-- is it ok for me to share the slideshow on my blog if the students only have their first name listed? I prefer to share their work rather than my example, but I am unsure. Advice welcome!