No Shhing Here

For the first time, I collaborated with a classroom teacher on a lesson about media literacy and mental health. Digital footprint? Cyberbullying? Been there, done that. But mental health and screen time? This was something new. The impetus for the lesson was three-fold: 1) We hosted the fabulous Julie Smith for some "cyber coaching" for all students in grades 8-12 (if you are looking for a DYNAMIC speaker - seriously, she kept an auditorium of 862 students ENTHRALLED - Julie Smith is your girl. She knows more about Snapchat than they do, AND she's not at all preachy). 2) It was media literacy week, and 3) I received a grant from the NYS Educational Media Technology Association, allowing me to pay for some programming.  I initiated a collaboration with our building's health teacher because I wanted to provide students with an opportunity to actually DO some of the things Julie Smith talked about while also diving a little deeper into the connection between scre...

Our district overhauled the ELA and Social Studies curriculums within the last three years. Because school librarians were included on the program committees designing the curriculum units, we were able to specifically infuse Barabra's Stripling's inquiry model as described in the Information Fluency Continuum in the research units designed by the committee. Because the inquiry model is new to many staff members and students, its implementation requires a little bit of a PR campaign to encourage widespread adoption. I think it's helpful to have strong visuals to both promote the model and reinforce the phases during instruction. To facilitate this, I created two series of posters devoted to Stripling's model - both an elementary version and a secondary version.  One of the inquiry bulletin boards I use to promote the process in my building.  In my building, you'll find the posters on hallway bulletin boards, computer lab walls, and classrooms ranging f...

It's been ages since I've blogged (the whole having babies thing), but now that the oldest is off to kindergarten, I'm finally finding a little wiggle room in my daily schedule to do stuff I love. Like blogging. My new adventure for this fall is trying the Breakout trend. Educational Breakouts have been popular for a few years, so I'm a little late to the game. Over the summer one of my very favorite English teachers decided they wanted to try something new to change up their teaching routine, and since Breakouts were filling my Pinterest feed, we collaborated on designing a Breakout for her classroom. After digging into the whole process with her, I decided I was grooving on the concept, and planned my own Breakout for my library orientation activity. The results? Breakouts are awesome. This is the MOST engaged I've ever seen my students. I've had MANY of them tell me how much fun they had and ask if we could do it in other classes. Above: I LOVE watchi...