Tag Archives: Tool

Booklist Webinars About Makerspaces & Weeding

Image retrieved from the Booklist site
Image retrieved from the Booklist site

On October 8th at 1 pm, Booklist is offering a free webinar called, Creating A Makerspace Culture.  During this webinar you will have the opportunity to hear from other libraries about how they were able to cultivate successful makerspace environments. Click here for additional information and the registration link.

Tip: If you are unfamiliar with the concept behind “makerspaces”, click here to learn more.

Second Webinar:

Retrieved from Booklist site.
Image retrieved from Booklist site.

CMLE intended on posting a link to another free webinar titled, What Not to Weed presented on Thursday, October 3rd. However, this webinar has reached its maximum capacity for participants. That being said, if you would still like to view the session, Booklist is offering a free, archived video on October 16th. If you would like a link to the video sent to your email, click here to sign-up.

Library of Congress Is Now Online and Free!

LibraryofCongress Logo
Image retrieved from the Library of Congress website. All rights reserved.

Historically, the publications from the Library of Congress were made available, for purchase, through CDS. However, as of  July 1st, this information can now obtainable at no cost. Click here to learn more about how to access this FREE resource .

Tip: You can download a PDF of the titles available by visiting the Library’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate website at www.loc.gov/aba/.

Recommended EdTech Tool: Ngram Viewer

Image retrieved from Google some rights reserved
Image retrieved from Google Images       some rights reserved

A CMLE member librarian, representing our special library types, suggested an educational technology tool called Ngram Viewer, a subsidiary of Google Research.  It illustrates (often in table or graph format) how a word or phase has been used over time including its root, compositions, use in parts of speech and so on.

In May, David Brooks, a political and cultural commentator, wrote an article in the New York Times Opinion Section on how this tool can be used to identify social and cultural paradigm shifts. Click here to read the full article, What Our Words Tell Us.

My Report on the EduTech Smackdown Open Mic Night with Joyce Valenza

In one of last week’s blog posts we highlighted EduTech’s Smackdown Open Mic Night with Dr. Joyce Valenza, which took place Monday (December 3rd) at 7:00 PM. Though there were maybe other places I would’ve rather been at 7:00 PM on a Monday :), I have to say I turned out to be very glad to have attended this online (Blackboard Collaborate) event. It was a great OpenMic_SimonScott_TLCafe12experience all around! The “open mic” approach was really quite fun, quick, and refreshing. Attendees that wanted to share a resource with the virtual audience had been asked in advance to create a slide and embed it in the larger slideshow so that they’d have a “spot” in the line-up of presenters. As the night progressed, one-by-one each slide appeared on the screen and the mic was turned over to the presenter.

The host of the evening was Dr. Joyce Valenza, along with a few other (big name) moderators. Throughout the hour-long open mic webinar scads of helpful tools, apps, and other resources were shared. I literally have four notebook pages full of tools/resources with helpful ideas and suggestions for how to effectively utilize them. I anticipate that I may be sharing some of these resources/tools/apps in upcoming blog posts, but know that they ranged from holocaust survivor story websites, to apps like Reflection, to storytelling sites/apps, to poster making resources. Really, the whole gamut was covered here! It was an energizing experience, and I definitely plan to attend similar events in the future.

Lucky for you if you missed it… There is an archived version of the webinar now available! If you participated as well, we definitely want to hear from you! Please share (in the comments area) the ideas and resources you found the most useful!

EduTech Smackdown Open Mic Night

On December 3rd at 7:00 PM Dr. Joyce Valenza will be hosting TL Virtual Cafe’s EdTech Smackdown Open Mic Night. The event is free and open to all.

Valenza will be sharing her trend list and some of her favorite tech discoveries. The event will be moderated by Gwyneth A. Jones, aka The Daring Librarian and Tiffany Whitehead, aka The Mighty Little Librarian.

Moderators encourage moving beyond listening to sharing during this Open Mic Night! If you’re interested in sharing your own exciting discoveries of the year, please grab a slide/slides and add to the crowd-sourced presentation/book in advance. Share your best recommendations for tips, resources, etc. and help build the interactive resource book.

Those interested in attending the event on December 3rd at 7:00 PM can use this Participant Link.