All posts by Angie

Learn VR with us in November

Library staff enjoying the Carnival lesson!

CMLE has VR kits to loan FOR FREE to our school library members!

Come to our training event in St. Cloud on Tuesday, Nov. 5th and learn how to use the ClassVR headsets available to reserve for use at your school!

And, we are so excited to announce an additional training session at the Cambridge Library meeting room from 9:30am – 3pm on Friday, Nov. 8th!

RSVP for training at the bottom of this post.

We’ll have a morning and afternoon training session with lunch in between so both sessions can eat. Please feel free to attend both sessions in order to get comfortable using the headsets and Portal.

The plan is to cover fundamentals in the morning and more advanced VR skills in the afternoon, but please feel free to drop in or leave as your schedule allows! Remember to bring your own computer (and headphones if interested).

St. Cloud training will be held at our location: 570 1st St. SE St. Cloud MN 56304. We are inside the cmERDC building and have a large classroom to use.

The first session will run 9am – noon and the second from 1pm-3pm. CMLE will provide lunch from 12-1pm. (And if you’re here in the morning and have a book you’re reading that you’d like to tell us about, we will happily record a quick Book Bites podcast episode with you!)

At this training session, you will learn how to operate the devices, find lessons that line up with your curriculum, send the VR/AR content to the devices, and use the headsets effectively in your library, media center, or classroom.

The ClassVR vendor will be holding a free Q&A webinar on Nov. 13th. We will put the link to this webinar on our page in case anyone is interested in participating.

Visit our page to find out more information about the VR kit loan program, including instructions and links to additional materials.

And if you apply ahead of time, you can definitely pick up your VR headset kit at this training event! You’ll get to keep the kit (each kit has 8 headsets) until schools close for winter break.

Apply here! to reserve VR kits for your school.

Please RSVP below if you plan to come to training. Email any questions to vr@cmle.org 🙂

RSVP St. Cloud Nov. 5th training:

RSVP Cambridge Nov. 8th training:

Join CMLE at CSB for an Author Event Oct. 24th

CMLE Member Event logo

If you’d like to meet us at this event, please RSVP below!

On Thursday, Oct. 24th Shena McAuliffe will give a public reading at Upper Gorecki at the College of St. Ben’s at 7pm. CMLE members, we can meet and attend this event together!

From the St. Ben’s website: Shena McAuliffe grew up in Wisconsin and Colorado. Her novel The Good Echo won the Big Moose Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. Her stories and essays have been published in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, True Story, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Using ClassVR in your school

So many possibilities! This information is from our VR kit application where we ask members to identify academic areas where they plan to use the VR headsets. Reserve your kit today!

If you’ve been on the fence about applying to bring one of our VR kits to your school (for FREE) maybe this information will encourage you to go for it!

Our program to bring ClassVR headsets to our school library members has been gaining steam and it’s so exciting to see all the ways our school members plan to use the devices! There are so many ways to incorporate the images, videos, and 3D models into your curriculum. Plus, when you reserve a kit, you’ll get access to an online Portal which includes worksheets and lesson plans free for you to use. Explore the available resources in this article.

You should definitely apply now (Google Form) to reserve your kits. And we’d love for you to attend our upcoming VR training program on November 5th! RSVP here. If you can’t make it to in-person training, no worries. Instructional documents can be found at the bottom of this page.

Find more information about this FREE program here, browse our FAQ, or read through our page of general ClassVR tips.

This program is funded in part with a grant from the Minnesota Department of Education using federal funding, CFDA 45.310 – Library Services and Technology Act, Grants to States Program (LS-00-19-0024-19).

Attend the MNwest Entrepreneur Summit! (featuring a CMLE member!)

This event sounds like such a great opportunity for our CMLE community! Whether you are in education, a library, or a nonprofit, definitely consider attending this event! (CMLE members, consider applying for a scholarship to help cover the cost of attendance)

Plus, you’ll get to hear from CMLE member Angie Kalthoff! “Presenter Angie Kalthoff is an experienced K-12 technology instructor, University of MN Adjunct Instructor in Curriculum and Instruction, and Tufts University ECT Program Manager.” You can listen to her fantastic episode on Season 2 of Linking Our Libraries here.

From their website:
“At the Entrepreneur Summit, education, business, and government leaders will converge, to focus on creatively fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in our MNwest region. The Summit brings together businesses and communities, colleges and high schools, that are leaning in, with students and startups, to shape and strengthen our regional entrepreneur ecosystem.”

This document has additional details about the event, including specific information for why this will be such a valuable experience for teachers!

Book Bouquet: Fictional Aunts

Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your library. As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Yay!!! Thanks!!! We really appreciate the assistance! 💕😊

This week we are sharing books that include aunts in the story.

How Tia Lola Came to (Visit) Stay by Julia Alvarez
“Moving to Vermont after his parents split, Miguel has plenty to worry about! Tía Lola, his quirky, carismática, and maybe magical aunt makes his life even more unpredictable when she arrives from the Dominican Republic to help out his Mami. Like her stories for adults, Julia Alvarez’s first middle-grade book sparkles with magic as it illuminates a child’s experiences living in two cultures.”

Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
“When the kindly old aunts decide that they need help caring for creatures who live on their hidden island, they know that adults can’t be trusted. What they need are a few special children who can keep a secret-a secret as big as a magical island. And what better way to get children who can keep really big secrets, than to kidnap them! Don’t miss this wildly inventive and funny read from master storyteller Eva Ibbotson.”

Secrets of the Lighthouse by Santa Montefiore
“Ellen Trawton is running away from it all—quite literally. She is due to get married to a man she doesn’t love, her job is dragging her down, and her interfering mother is getting on her nerves. So she escapes to the one place she know her mother won’t follow her—to her aunt’s house in rural Ireland. Once there, she uncovers a dark family secret—and a future she never knew she might have.”

Gabi, A Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero
“Gabi Hernandez chronicles her last year in high school in her diary: college applications, Cindy’s pregnancy, Sebastian’s coming out, the cute boys, her father’s meth habit, and the food she craves. And best of all, the poetry that helps forge her identity.”

The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell
“Meet the Bird family. They live in a honey-colored house in a picture-perfect Cotswolds village, with rambling, unkempt gardens stretching beyond. Pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and tow-headed twins Rory and Rhys all attend the village school and eat home-cooked meals together every night. Their father is a sweet gangly man named Colin, who still looks like a teenager with floppy hair and owlish, round-framed glasses. Their mother is a beautiful hippy named Lorelei, who exists entirely in the moment. And she makes every moment sparkle in her children’s lives. Then one Easter weekend, tragedy comes to call. The event is so devastating that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass as the children become adults, find new relationships, and develop their own separate lives. Soon it seems as though they’ve never been a family at all. But then something happens that calls them back to the house they grew up in — and to what really happened that Easter weekend so many years ago.”

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
“Flora Poste, a recently orphaned socialite, moves in with her country relatives, the gloomy Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, and becomes enmeshed in a web of violent emotions, despair, and scheming, until Flora manages to set things right.”