In June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.
The app Map of Life allows users to discover, identify, and record biodiversity from all over the world. Students are able to contribute to the map by recording sightings. The app features many different categories of species, including trees, mammals, birds, fish, and more. Users can learn about characteristics and habitats, with the goal to help worldwide conservation efforts. This app would be a good addition to a science field trip, in order to record and identify plants and animals.
Cost: Free Level: Middle and High School Platforms: iOS and Android
Read about this teacher’s experience using the app in her classroom, then watch this short video from the Florida Museum of Natural History that describes how to use and learn from the app:
You might blink a couple of times if a patron asked you this question! But we want you to be about to confidently say “Yes! Have you found our library’s cache??”
Geocaching is a popular activity for people of all ages, all tech abilities, and located literally anywhere you could go. It is done at bus stops, at highway rest areas, in parks, at historic sites and in junkyards, downtown and in the middle of the woods, with friends or alone. An astronaut cached on the International Space Station!
But what is it?
“Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices. Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location.” It sounds easy. Sometimes it is. And sometimes all you get is the fun of hunting for things. And that is the real attraction of caching: the chance to look around for things – either right in your own neighborhood or as you travel to new places! Finding things that others have hidden for you lets you participate in a special community, one in which Muggles have no idea what is happening right under their noses. You discover new places, find new people, and have fun – a great combination. Think Pokemon Go, but more real-world. Fewer monsters, less fighting – more focus on finding things.
Libraries are natural spots for caching, and work well with people who may want to go out to cache to explore the community. Caching involves identifying a specific piece of information (the cache), then hunting it down. Sound familiar? It’s pretty similar to the work we do in hunting down information online or finding books for people! Library people are natural cachers; we know how to be tenacious and to keep hunting for that one thing we need out of a whole environment of other things. And providing caches in our library is a great way to encourage people to visit us!
And many libraries are already getting in on this action. Does your library have a cache? Would you like to?? Read through the instructions here, scrolling down to read Hiding Geocaches.
You can also participate by sharing Travel Bugs! “A Travel Bug is a Trackable that moves from place to place, picking up stories along the way. Here you can add your own story, or live vicariously through each Bug’s adventures.” What kinds of adventures could your travel bug have?? SO many!!
CMLE is setting up some library Travel Bugs. You can follow the adventures of our Travel bugs, and get updates as they move around to exciting new locations; and we will update you as they make their way around to different libraries. Set up a cache in your library, so our Travel Bugs can come visit you! Click on these links to see the Travel Bug individual pages – complete with photos of CMLE Office Bear Clarence holding each.
The Geocaching Vlogger is out having fun near Seattle at a geocaching event, and finds a library geocache
And the Geocaching Vlogger spends time looking for another library cache, which is requiring use of the library resources! (All our patrons should be this excited about coming to the library!!)
Look through these resources for some information about library caching:
The Other Wikipedia: A Geocache in The Library “In 2013, staff created a geocache to be hidden within the Beatley Central Library. Starting at the Information Desk, a series of clues guides players through various collections until they reach the actual geocache. Staff creatively employed the Dewey Decimal System to navigate geocachers from one clue to the next.”
Libraries “Cache” in on Geocaching Treasure Hunts “As physical collections shrink in response to the digital revolution, most libraries are looking for ways to keep the turnstile spinning. In central New York near Syracuse, Liverpool Public Library (LPL) found one answer this past spring in the call of the wild, namely, the growing geocaching craze.”
Hide and seek in the library: Geocaching as an educational and outreach tool A slideshow from Andrew Spencer at the Macquarie University Library
NLD ideas: Let a library geocache help in the hunt for new visitors “It’s a perpetual problem when promoting libraries: how to avoid preaching to the converted and inspire people who’d never normally come through the doors to make their first visit. Libraries as far apart as Cornwall and Norfolk, Glamorgan and Ayrshire have all found an innovative answer – set a library geocache.”
Does your library have a geocache? Tell us all about it! We would love to feature you and your library in an upcoming story!
Can you believe October is almost over? This fall has been just beautiful, and hopefully you haven’t been too busy at your library to be able to get outside and enjoy it, at least a little! And we all know what the end of October means – Halloween!
We like to celebrate at CMLE, so we are having an open house Halloween celebration on Monday, Oct. 31st! Our office is decorated, we have treats, almonds, and other goodies, and we’d love for you to stop by and say hello!
Our location is 570 1st St. SE in St. Cloud, MN. Costumes are welcome, and we hope to see you then! Email us with any questions!
Working your way through the hiring process is tough on everyone. By the time you to the interviewing stage, employers have looked at dozens (or hundreds) of applications. Job hunters have applied to dozens (or hundreds) of different jobs. Everyone is tired and wants the whole thing to be over.
But this is it! This is the biggie, the final step, the weeding down to the final good candidates. After this, the hiring process will (hopefully!) be done -and everyone involved lives happily ever after!
Well, ideally anyway.
In reality, this is where it can be too easy for either party to make a bad misstep that throws a wrench into the process and prevents the best person from getting the job. It is surprisingly easy to screw this up.
I have spent time on both sides of the interviewing table. It’s hard for both, everyone is nervous, everyone wants to make a good impression. Employers who do not understand they are being interviewed just as much as the candidate are missing a prime opportunity to impress someone who could be a valuable member of the team for the next several years. Candidates who miss the boat on making that same good impression are left to continually wonder why they are not getting offers. Continue reading Interviewing: Let's Ask Questions! (Hiring Series #5)→
Angie and I are on a mission to visit all our CMLE member libraries – and we are making some great progress! This week we were invited to visit the library at the St. Cloud Hospital, by librarian Susan Schleper. We are sharing all these library visits with you, our members (and others!), to help everyone see the diversity of service we are providing across the CMLE system. And we want you to know what is going on in different libraries, so you feel invited to contact each other to talk about partnerships or sharing ideas for great service! Many of you are solo librarians, or working with others who are not doing the same kinds of things you do – but someone else in the system probably does it or wants to learn more about it. So: read, be awed by all we do here in the CMLE area, and reach out to each other! (And us! At Headquarters we like to partner too!!)
A nice place to sit, some popular fiction on the shelves – a great place to visit if you are in the hospital!
Most visitors to the hospital library are probably not as enthusiastic as we were to be there – but look at this location! If you are in the hospital as a patient or visitor – drop by to look at their materials. It can be very helpful to have a spot to just take a break; and the library can be that space. (I managed to keep my hands off their copy of the Hunger Games. But it was a close thing! Visiting libraries and NOT reading their books is really hard for a book-loving librarian!)
In June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.
