Blogging student book reviews, new books, new

On my library website I've had a mechanism for students to submit book reviews. They complete an online form (Formmail.com). The info gets sent to me in an email and I then post that to the website. It's somewhat laborious to update the website with new reviews but I've been able to keep up with the volume, posting them within a day of submittal. Posting to a blog is so much easier I decided to convert it for book reviews plus my info new books, etc. It'll be my introduction of blogging to my school. A couple of the teachers have taken a tech class where they learned about it. Until we figure out as a staff how we teach students commenting I currently have it off.

Here's the blog:
http://mcareads.blogspot.com/

Video booktalk of a book

I created a video booktalk using imovie, copyright free photos and voice over narration. The toughest part was figuring out how to sink up the narration with the photos. The movie is hosted at TeacherTube.

The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs
by Betty Birney

Week 9, Thing #23

Thanks so much for providing the tutorial. I learned so much and enjoyed it immensely. Below are my reflections.

My favorite discoveries:
1. Ways to promote books and have an interactive conversation about books through my library website with audio and video podcasts, blogging, LibraryThing.
2. Tools (Wikis, Zoho) to use to collaborate with staff in producing pathfinders and bibliographies that tie library and classroom resources to curricular topics.
3. Ways to efficiently and effectively access, file and organize information on the Internet in order to stay up-to-date with my professional development with news readers and Del.icio.us.

How has this assisted with my learning:
Hugely... introduced me to Library 2.0 and now I'm tapped into the conversation on the blogosphere to continue learning. I'm not always able to get to the conferences so this online tutorial was ideal.

Unexpected outcomes:
That I got so into the tutorial. Enjoyed it immensely, learned a lot.

If we offered another would you participate?
Yes!

Describe learning experience in one sentence:
It blew my mind.

Week 8, Thing #18

There was a very interesting article by Chris Harris on his SLJ blog about using Zoho Notebook to create pathfinders and as a book review platform as it allows you to embed video, audio (and directly record there too!), RSS reader, etc. This might be a quick and easy way to create audio podcasts of the Calif. Young Reader Medal nominated books and post to my library website.

Week 8, Thing #19

LibraryThing is great. I especially liked its recent integration into public library catalogs, like Danbury. Seeing the additional info they provide within a record, like similar books, tags and patron reviews, is fantastic. We're definitely seeing the next wave of OPACs.

It's interesting how public and some school libraries are using LibraryThing for reader's advisory (I'm doing this now) and to promote new books. This can be done quite easily. You just export ISBNs of books you've added within a date range (which can easily be done with our circ system Alexandria), upload to LibraryThing, and tag them new books. I tried this with a file of about 40 and it was quite quick for them to process; depends how many others are in the queue ahead of you. See the widget on my blog. One concern I have is the social networking aspect, the book sharing conversation between students and adult LibraryThing users. That's the challenge with Web 2.0, teaching students how to use the Internet safely and appropriately.

Week 9, Thing #20

I experimented today with making a simple movie booktalk of Avi's The Book Without Words using iMovie, a photo of the book cover and voice over narration. Took some time as I've never used iMovie but the results are intriguing.

Week 9, Thing #20

I searched YouTube for library promotion videos and came across this gem which is the director's thank you to her elementary school library. It brought a tear to my eye and reminds me of why I love this job.



With further searching I uncovered others created by school and public libraries for an "I love my library" contest sponsored by Thomson Gale with the winning entry shown at last month's ALA conference. See Gale's website for entries submitted by school libraries.

Great example of video booktalking posted by BookWink.com can be found on TeacherTube, an instructional video sharing site. Looking at the instructional videos made me think about creating videos on how to search the catalog, intro to the library, etc.