Category Archives: School Media Specialist

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Chatterpix Kids

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their picks for Best Apps for Teaching & Learning 2019. “Apps recognized foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration and are user friendly to encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. “

“Give your photos a voice with ChatterPix! Chatterpix can make anything talk — pets, friends, doodles, and more! Simply take any photo, draw a line to make a mouth, and record your voice. Use ChatterPix whenever you’re doing a video project with students on the “no photo” list. They can take a picture of whatever they want, record their voice and still participate.”

Platform: iOS & Android  
Grades: All
Cost: FREE

Journey with Technology has this article about several different ways to use ChatterPix Kids in the classroom. This page from Common Sense Education has tons of lesson plans that incorporate the app. The Digital Teacher has a detailed description and more ways to use the app in the classroom in this article.

Watch this EdTech tutorial to find out how to use the app (approx 3 min video)

If you are interested in the best apps for your library, media center, or classroom, you can read our 2019 series here or find all past apps discussed in our archives.

Guest Blogger, School Media Specialist

CMLE Mini Grant: Spanish Books for Collection

This is a guest post from Ellie Michaelis, Library Media Specialist at Pinewood Elementary in Monticello. Find more mini grant reports here.

Through the aid of the CMLE minigrant, our school library was able to purchase 19 Spanish language books for our Spanish speaking students. 

This amount nearly doubled the size of the collection – we have increased our selection of books from 25 to 44. Though still small, we were able to purchase books that were of high interest to our students (such as Diario de Greg and Sonrie!)

Over the past years, our Spanish collection was neglected, because there was almost no demand for these books.  Recently, we have had an influx of new-to-country students who absolutely love the library.

They quickly devoured the small selection of books we had available and were asking for more, something we were glad to provide!  Our students provided input on the titles purchased with suggestions including Scooby Doo and “more big books”!

We also took input from the teachers, who suggested popular class read-alouds (Charlie y la fábrica de chocolate) and book study genres (biographies and fairy tales).

When our students heard that we had received the books, they were ecstatic and couldn’t wait for them to hit the shelves.  The joy of putting the right book in a child’s hand never gets old!

School Media Specialist

CMLE Mini Grant: Branches Series Books

This is a guest post from Doug Asquith, Media and Digital Learning Specialist at Dassel Elementary Media Center. Need a Mini Grant to purchase materials or try an interesting new program at your library? Apply today! 

I am honestly humbled and excited by this CMLE mini-grant getting accepted.  We at the Dassel Elementary Media Center have other Branches stories on our shelves, but this grant will allow us to expand and round out our collection to even genres and student interests at Dassel Elementary. 

These books fill a need for high-interest low-level books in our Media Center. Seeing students take the leap from leveled readers and picture books to books that look like, to quote a first-grader, “big kid books” brings a level of excitement to their faces as they begin to dive into the wonderful worlds created by these books. 

If the students enjoy what they have read, it is now easier to recommend students to either the next book in the series or other books in the same genre as the book they read.

Also because of the Branches mark teachers, particularly our SPED department, feel better about recommending these books to their students as the teacher has a better idea of the general reading level just by glancing at the cover of the book. 

The next step for us at Dassel Elementary is to keep an eye out as more books are released in each series. Again, thank you CMLE for this mini-grant and helping Dassel Elementary grow readers with Branches.

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Sora

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their picks for Best Apps for Teaching & Learning 2019. “Apps recognized foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration and are user friendly to encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. “

Like last week’s featured app, Sora is an app that will definitely be great to use in your school library or media center!

“Sora is the school library companion to Overdrive and Libby. With Sora students and teachers are able to access audio and e-books through a digital platform customized for school library users. Sora is able to be connected to a school library collection, and given the school district permissions, the local public library collection. Educators are able to assign texts to students to read and students are able to self-select. Badges can be awarded to readers for various achievements.”

Platform: iOS & Android 
Grades: All
Cost: FREE

This link is for a PDF document from a Sora Training Specialist that will go over a variety of ways to use Sora in your classroom. This article from Publisher’s Weekly explains the history of the app and how it hopes to continue working with schools and teachers in the future. And this article from Granite Media has step-by-step instructions for getting started with Sora.

Watch this 1 min video to see how Sora works:

School Media Specialist, Tech

AASL Recommended Apps: Wakelet

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their picks for Best Apps for Teaching & Learning 2019. “Apps recognized foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration and are user friendly to encourage a community of learners to explore and discover. “

We love to learn about all the exciting apps that AASL recommends, but we especially love it when we find an app that will be particularly useful to school libraries!!

Wakelet “is a one-stop shop for curating resources for your school library.  As an app on your mobile device, you can send links directly into a Wakelet collection for personal or public use.  You can create a collection of resources together with teaching teams for students to use for reference on projects. Collections can be made up of websites, links, notes, tweets, pictures from your device and more.”

Platform: iOS & Android
Cost: FREE
Grades: All

This article from Primary Tech explains how Wakelet lets you create collections of content from around the Web. It has several links to examples of Digital Citizenship topics. The site Ditch That Textbook has this post with several suggestions and videos for ways that students and teachers can use the app. Check out this review of the app from Common Sense Communication. Finally, this article from the UMass.edu blog shares resources, learning activities, and videos for ways to incorporate the app in your classroom.

Watch this 2 min video to see how Wakelet works:

If you are interested in the best apps for your library, media center, or classroom, you can read our 2019 series here or find all past apps discussed in our archives.