No Shhing Here

Better late than never, right? For May, our book displays celebrated National Bike Month. If your school sponsors a "bike to school" day, this kind of showcase is a great way to promote it. Because I was late taking photos this month, certain parts of our display are looking a little weary. Not everything we come up with is a home run - check out our sad "bike tires" - repurposed trufella tree trunks. Though, the bike was a hit - kids loved ringing the bell on the handle bars. Eventually we scraped the "tires" and just moved the signs to the columns on either side of the desk. We used tricycles and scooter type toys on the display shelves, along with Fourth of July table decorations. We used the theme to display books that in some way deal with wheels, including NASCAR, skateboarding, and cards. We REALLY wanted to include a couple of stationary bikes, so kids could pedal as they read, but we couldn't find any, so we scrapped that id...

Over the weekend, I presented at the 2012 NYLA/SSL conference . It's New York's state level school librarian conference. I got to listen to some great speakers, including Joyce Valenza and David Wiesner. I presented with my librarian co-worker (and neighbor), Leslie, on using apps for instructional purposes - our workshop title was App-ealing Instructional Practices - aren't we creative? :) At the presentation, we handed out bookmarks featuring the apps we used. Here's Leslie's suggestions for elementary apps:  And here are my suggestions for secondary apps. If you follow my blog, many of these probably sound familiar.  I've covered Doodle Buddy, Index Card and Book Creator in this post , Explain Everything in this post , SimpleMind+ for note taking , and Evernote as part of our listening skills unit . Also, I did a guest post for the SLJ blog Touch and Go . I talk about applications for many of the above apps - check it out here. Do you have a ...

Are you sick of hearing about note taking yet? If so, you're not alone - our students are right there with you. We've finally wrapped up our study skills unit, and had the kids take a survey to assess the experience. We needed to know what was successful and what was unsuccessful. So we asked. When you ask a 9th grader to list the ways in which you bombed as a teacher, be prepared, 'cause they aren't afraid to tell you exactly what they think. Here are a few of my favorite gems from their survey: "The entire system of SimpleMind [a concept mapping app] was, in my opinion, superfluous at best, and a waste of technological resources and time." "...Grading the cornell notes on a RUBRIC is RIDICULOUS...I found that totally ridiculous, stupid, and unnecessary. like seriously, who grades notes?" "Most students simply don't like doing the extra work that goes into study skills, so even though you taught us the information we will probably...