All posts by Angie

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Signed Stories

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app provides great videos with sign language performers telling stories and songs along with pictures!

Featuring noted sign language performers, Signed Stories brings a great array of quality picture books to life through animations, words and signing. Readers can choose between American or British Sign Language. Available books cover a wide range of stories, from classic fairy tales and folktales to nursery rhymes and songs. The app includes a vocabulary builder and fun learning games.

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: Elementary – Middle School
Cost: (Free app, books for purchase) 

Learn how the Oregon School for the Deaf incorporates Signed Stories into their literary activities. Scholastic mentions the app in their article “6 Fabulous Apps for Special Needs.” And check out this review of the app from OMazing Kids.

Watch the app in action here:

CMLE

A fun CMLE event! Thanks for coming!

 

We had such fun at Old Chicago on Monday! It was fantastic to see so many members take the time to join us for dinner! We had people from local school, academic, and public libraries come together and we definitely had fun sharing book recommendations, learning about programs, and chatting about dogs 🙂

If you couldn’t make it, no problem! We will have another dinner event again but in the meantime watch our website for an announcement of our next CMLE Tea Party with Library Advocacy Event! This will happen in May at the Mad Hatter Tea House in Anoka! (If you need convincing to take a trip to Anoka, check out the pics from our last event there. Yum!)

Thank you again to all that attended dinner, we always are so happy to connect with our fantastic members in person!

Books, Resources

Books and Resources for Black History Month

February is Black History Month! We want to make sure our member libraries have all sorts of book recommendations and resources to celebrate this month and to encourage learning about Black history all year long.

Let’s start with some recommended reading lists: 

Next, explore these resources you can use in your school library or classroom: 

Finally, last year at CMLE we hosted an African American Read-In event where we were able to explore an awesome variety of African American literature. Read about our event or learn more about African American Read-Ins.

If you’d like to get some more book recommendations, listen to our Reading With Libraries podcast episode about the genre of African American literature:

Advocacy

MN Library Legislative Week is coming! So many ways to participate!

Have you always wanted to participate in MN Library Legislative Day (or week) and just not known where to start?

Don’t worry, we can help! (And way to go for wanting to advocate for Minnesota libraries!!)

This year, Library Legislative Week is  February 25-March 1, 2019 and MN Library Legislative Day is February 26th

MLA and ITEM have this excellent site with TONS of Minnesota Library Advocacy info, including the 2019 Platform, advocacy videos, and even a Tool Kit for Legislative Day!

If reading all this information is a little overwhelming, we get it. Watch our website and social media for the release of a special Minnesota Library Advocacy Podcast Episode where we break down the four “asks” that we’re focusing on for this session.

If you can’t make it to St. Paul on the 26th but still want to participate in Legislative Day, come to our location in St. Cloud instead! We’re at 570 1st St. SE, right next to East Side Target.

We’ll have flashy new advocacy postcards, contact information for legislators, and sample text for you to use when contacting officials.

We’ll be available in our office from 9am – 6pm that day and hope you can stop in! We want to help make it easy for you to participate in MN Library Legislative Day and speak up for your library!

We need to be telling people (especially people who are in charge of making decisions about funding libraries) just how vital library services are to schools, universities, and entire communities!

If you’re planning on stopping in, let us know (not required) and we’ll be sure to have extra snacks on hand 🙂

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Seeing AI

In June, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their Best Apps for Teaching and Learning 2018. The apps encourage qualities such as creativity and collaboration and encourage discovery and curiosity.

This app can be helpful in so many ways, especially for people experiencing difficulties with vision! It can read you a document or a book, distinguish money, recognize people’s faces, and more.

“The AI in Seeing AI stands for artificial intelligence. This Microsoft app is translating a visual world into words for people with visual difficulties. Documents, products, scenes, people, colors, money, and handwriting are some of the settings offered in this app. Scenes and people are described along with information like relative location and distance. Microsoft has put accessibility in a pocket-sized format in this powerful tool for iPhones.”

Platform: iOS
Grades: All
Cost: FREE

Seeing AI is included in this article of ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into the classroom. This post from NVIDIA gets into the way the app was developed and shares some real-world situations in which the app is helpful. Finally, this article from Perkins School for the Blind breaks down each category of the app and includes a video along with a description.

Watch this video and see how the app works!