From National Geographic comes the GeoBee Challenge App! Available for iPhone®, iPod touch®, iPad®, Android™, and NOOK Color™ this app allows students to try their hand at answering geography questions from around the globe! Complete with beautiful maps, students will have a multiple choice round, a map challenge round, and a bonus round! Some of the very same questions that are asked during the National Geographic Bee contest are on this app! This app generally costs around $1.99. Find it at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geobee/apps/ or in your app store!
Category Archives: School Media Specialist
Interest in Pinterest?
At least week’s MLA Conference, I had the privilege of presenting with Minnesota School of Business Librarian, Krista Jacobson, on using Pinterest to market your library. This seems to be a topic of interest to a fair number of people as the session was pretty well attended! If you’re interested in using Pinterest to market your library, you may consider viewing our conference handout materials at http://mnlibraryassociation.org/uploads/conf12/handouts/B8.pdf. Here, you’ll get a nice sampling of the topics we covered. We hope to also present on this topic at the LibTech Conference in March, so if Pinterest catches your fancy, be sure to checkout the LibTech Conference program to see if our presentation made the cut! Oh, and between you and me, I’d love to just talk about Pinterest with you too! — Kate Bessey
Taking Information Literacy on the Road
Bridging Information Literacy (IL) Across Libraries has become our CMLE tag line for work we have been doing with high school media specialists and college librarians. CMLE is in a unique position to convene important conversations across library types, and IL is the first bridging topic we have chosen. The group first met in April to get acquainted and get their draft assignments. By using a wiki and email, both groups finished draft documents by the end of May. Then, a face-t0-face meeting in July really bonded this group in ways the wiki may not have been able to do. Initially, we were uncertain how much the groups had in common. As we talked in July however, the group acknowledged the many commonalities, and that they want to do more around this subject. They did not want to end their work!
We wanted others to hear of our “bridging experiment” and laid plans for sharing what we had learned through MLA and MEMO Conference presentations. We believe it is useful to share the process we used, some outcomes, and some exciting plans for the future. We concluded that it is not helpful to “preach to the choir” about IL….our colleagues already get it! Somehow, the group felt it was worth a try to reach students. To that end, we recently developed a survey for college students asking them to offer advice to younger students. Specifically, we asked “Based on your experience, if you could tell a high school student three things to help them prepare for college-level research, what would it be?” We are hopeful that younger students will heed the advice of their older peers and engage more deeply in IL . We hope to produce a short video of college students sharing their message, with quiet supported by a librarian message, and share it broadly through You Tube.
CMLE will continue this IL work, and hope to grow the circle of involvement and engagement. In the meantime, we are on the road sharing the message, and have opened the group wiki up so others can see the draft documents. We hope to share a polished executive summary within the next couple of months. Visit the wiki to get the draft version of the following:
- Media/information literacy power standards (according to three high school media specialists)
- Typical student profiles and research frameworks for high school freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior
- Suggested skill sets for incoming college freshmen
- The MLA conference handout which shares key points of the work of this group, and steps going forward.
Tip: Check out the New Insights documentation on the site, which captures shifts in thinking and understanding of IL and the work of other librarians.
Would you be interested in participating in an event where we convene a larger group of high school media specialists, college librarians, and public librarians around the topic of information literacy? Let us know in the comments….or send email to papost@stcloudstate.edu
Five Tech Skills Every Student Should Possess
Recently, eSchool News asked its readers for their thoughts on the top five technology skills that all students should learn. A big part of what came through loud and clear is the ability to easily adapt to change. Tip: the comments at the end of the article are probably as interesting as the article itself. The full text of the article is available at http://tinyurl.com/ckb63x5
What do you think the top five technology skills are for students?
MEMO Conference Mad Dash
The to-do lists are shrinking as the mound of miscellaneous boxed items grow as we put the finished touches on our work with this years MEMO Conference. Our presentations, the Hospitality and Local Arrangments Committee work, details around the Conference Connections Cafe, and our work with the Friday night Conference Cantina have kept us busy. Julie Notsch, Cathedral High School has been working with us on this committee work. Cantina Night will offer some time for light hearted fun and a focus on the individual. Begin by creating your own margarita and taco dinner by building it just the way you like it. Team trivia and drawings for fabulous prizes will top off the evening.
We are hopeful that the turnout is good, and people are able to push work into the background, to fully enjoy the conference experience. It is fun to see people get their “batteries charged” and feel excited about their work with an infusion of new ideas!
When the conference is close to home, it is tempting to bolt for home when the breakout sessions end, but the true magic and networking happen in the hallways or in the evenings. So resist the call of your jammies, and stick around. Kate and I hope to see you all there!