Online Book Communities

There are many websites that will help you create your own book collections and share your critiques with friends and social networks. I have explored a few sites and I hope that my views on them will help you to decide which is better suited for you.

First, I'd like to talk about the ones I felt were a little more on the personal side, much like a Facebook profile. These were not very kid friendly, so if you decide to incorporate these into lessons as a teacher, I really hope you continue reading to the end before you make a choice on which one is best for the classroom. For instance, BookLikes.com, has a beautiful wood like theme that looks a lot like Facebook. Nothing about it to me made me think of books though. Still, all in all, would be great as a personal booklisting and to share from there. The other would be GoodReads.com, very simple layout not much to see, even though I have expressed my appreciation for the more simpler things in life, I would think that in some cases, more would be better.

The next site I'd like to talk about is Shelfari.com. I really like this site, had a very elegant look to it and had many useful features, such as being able to add your book list to your blog. Other features that are that you can share and view what friends are enjoying about your book list.

Another website that you might find useful is LibraryThing.com. This site gives some of the same features plus a few more. You are able to view your book list in list format or by cover. Can change the size of your covers and create groups, a perfect feature for a secondary teacher. However, in list format you are also able to view many other details about each book, such as ratings and comments/reviews from other users.

The last website that I will discuss is BiblioNasium.com. This website is the perfect site for elementary level teacher/librarian. With features such as, creating a profile for student use, run reports, print reports and parent letters, and gives resources that can assists teachers. Allows you to make and share with your students which books are your favorites, a recommended reading, or a required reading for them. Awesome website with an appealing eye to any young learner of the elementary level.

All pictures were altered and edited using Evernote. A wonderful application that allows you to edit photos the way you want them. Love it and highly recommend it.

Podcast

After some careful research, I have come to the conclusion that I now love Podcasting! I never realized how helpful this type of educational tool could be, and allows for some much needed time management. Which, if you are a teacher you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, I explored through some websites that could be used to help or fully create your podcasts, and here is my opinion on these amazing websites.

Now, I really loved these websites, and I know that I will be using these sites for a variety of projects that I plan to implement into my campus, my lessons, and of course, share with my fellow educators.

I'd like to start with SoundCloud, great website that allows you to create any type of audio file, and saves to the site so that you may access it from anywhere and share to all. AudioBoom, is another helpful site to teachers everywhere, here you are allowed to create files of video and audio combined, however it does not allow to add background music. Which is not a huge disappointment, but would make some video making a little more professional sounding. PodOmatic, is basically the same thing as the others that I have just mentioned, except, that you can listen to your creation with friends or classrooms at the same time. I personally like iMovie, yes I'm a Mac user, and I will admit it, took me a while to learn how to navigate on this computer, however I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Remember, that's my opinion, and no offense to PC users. So using iMovie I was able to create this short video by using this tool. I have decided to share this video with you. So here goes and I hope you enjoy it!

Video & QR Codes in the Library

Students in this day and age have become visual learners. In that I mean everything is on a video, and there's nothing wrong with that. I love using video to assist in my lessons, and my students love it. YouTube can be a very important resource in that area. There are tons of great videos that are posted that can be advantageous to a teacher/librarian. With that being said, here are some links of helpful videos that I think could help you in lessons and some that I kids would just love.

This first video comes from "Calypso Gilstrap" on YouTube, that was made to help students familiarize themselves with their school library. I plan to do this same video for my library some day!

This video here comes from the same channel on what is available for student use and how to use these resources as a student. I think students will love this!

This Channel is "The Unquiet Librarian" and this person tends to post lots of helpful videos for their students. This video is a perfect example of the type of help you could find in this channel.

These videos from this particular channel are geared towards high school students, however I think students always enjoy seeing their classmates on video discussing something that might come in handy one day.

This video might just be my favorite. This comes from the "pikesvillelibrary" channel, which was made to show students the available resources and activities that are offered from their library. Love the upbeat feel to this video.

Coming from the same channel, students will love seeing special events held in the library showcased on YouTube.

I really enjoyed this video that was made to promote and encourage more reading of books from the library. This video was found on "bbmsmedia" channel, and I adored the fact that the videos posted were student created. Which allows for other students to relate and really connect to the videos.

This video is provided from the same channel source and is a cute and creative way to get students to understand the consequences of overdue books.  Absolutely love!