All posts by Angie

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Procreate

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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.

The app Procreate is a powerful tool for the iPad that allows users to make really impressive digital artwork.

Procreate is an intuitive drawing, painting, and illustration application specifically designed for the iPad. It has hundreds of brushes, layering capabilities, multi-touch gestures, Apple Pencil support, and a time-lapse video export feature. Procreate, especially in combination with a stylus, allows you to create digital artwork that looks like it was created on paper or a canvas. This art can then be exported in multiple file types, including PSD (Adobe Photoshop) retaining all layer functionality. 

Visit the Procreate website for extras like FAQs and a downloadable Artist’s Handbook.

Platform: iOS
Cost: $9.99
Grades: High School – Adult

Common Sense Education has this review of the app and it includes feedback from teachers as well as suggestions for incorporating the app into simple classroom projects. Procreate is included in this article from Digital Debris of the top 3 apps for sketch notes and is described by the author as “the most powerful creative app I have ever used on a mobile device.” And the site Educator’s Technology gives some quick examples of the capabilities of Procreate in this article.

Check out this video to see what you can make with Procreate!

Communication, Programs

Join CMLE for dinner at Old Chicago!

Let’s get together! (See photo above as evidence of past enjoyment at CMLE dinner events!)

Join CMLE and other library people at 5:30 pm on Monday, Feb 11th at Old Chicago in St. Cloud. We’ll have dinner and chat about all things libraries. What does that mean? Maybe you just pulled off an exciting program or had a big problem you were able to solve. Maybe you’re looking ahead to a project you’re putting together for the spring. Or maybe you just want to hear about what it’s like working in a library setting that is different from yours!

We’ll do all those things! It’s always fun and useful to chat with others in the library community, to share tips or ideas or to commiserate about problems.

So we hope you can join us! Please RSVP below, we really hope you can make it!

 

poster, Programs, School Media Specialist

High School Reading Challenge

New year, new reading challenge!

CMLE has set up a High School Reading Challenge for you to share with your high school students! On Goodreads, we have set up a challenge to read ten books (one for each month of the school year, and a bonus book). You can share this with your high school students, encouraging people to read for the fun of it or have a contest in your library to encourage the idea of competition. Feel free to give away little prizes for people who finish all ten, or giveaways for people who finish each of the ten categories!

You can use our flyer What are You reading__ CMLE High School reading challenge, or design one of your own to promote it.

Reading!

Books!

Having library fun!!

These are all good things!!!

One of your basic tasks is to promote reading, and the fun (or value) of reading books you enjoy. This is a chance for people to try out some books they will have fun reading, or books that they can try reading for their classes, or that will be useful to something they want to learn or to try.

Let’s go read!!!

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Science Journal

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.

The app Science Journal is an easy-to-use app that helps students with their science experiments!

Turn your phone into a light, sound, and motion sensor. Measure these experimental variables with greater accuracy and create detailed data displays. Use photos and text to record observations within the app. Teachers can connect external sensors and search Science Journal’s website for possible experiments.

Platform: iOS, Android
Grades: 5th +
Cost: FREE

Science Buddies has this detailed article that shows all the different sensors available on the app and includes several informative videos. Check out this page of lesson plans for STEM classroom activities that incorporate the app. And check out this review of the app from School Library Journal!

Watch this video to see Science Journal in action:

Books

We Heart MN: Minnesota Bees

In this series, we’ll pick some of our favorite things about Minnesota and share some related book suggestions. (We’re open to your suggestions! Comment below or email us and tell us some of your favorite MN things!)

Favorite topic this week? Minnesota bees! Minnesota has nearly 400 species of native bees. Learn more from the Minnesota DNR’s website.

If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems from the University of Minnesota Press
“An anthology of 2,500 years of poetry, from Sappho to Sherman Alexie, humming with bees, at a moment when the beloved honey makers and pollinators are in danger of disappearing.

Virgil wrote of bees, as did Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, and Whitman, among many others. Amid the crisis befalling bees—hives collapsing, wild species disappearing—the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent.”

The Winter Bees by Jill Kalz
“Behind each door of each small place in this collection of ten short stories, people mind their duties to keep a small town humming. The Winter Bees: Fiction introduces seemingly mundane lives lived in a rural Minnesota town and reveals journeys of personal discovery, meaning, love, and hope.”

 

A Photographic Guide to Some Common Wasps and Bees of Minnesota by Scott King
“A photographic guide to some common wasps and bees of Minnesota. Includes color photos and descriptions for over 125 species of wasps and bees observed in Minnesota. An excellent introductory reference to this interesting order of insects.”

Winter Bees and Other Poems of the Cold by Joyce Sidman
“In this outstanding picture book collection of poems by Newbery Honor-winning poet, Joyce Sidman (Song of the Water Boatman,Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night), discover how animals stay alive in the wintertime and learn about their secret lives happening under the snow. Paired with stunning linoleum print illustrations by Rick Allen, that celebrate nature’s beauty and power.”