Category Archives: School Media Specialist

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AASL Best Digital Apps 2021: Britannica LaunchPacks: Science!

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring one of the Britannica LaunchPacks: Science! This resource covers a variety of scientific topics and includes assignments, annotation tools, videos, articles, and links all divided by grade level from K-12.

“Britannica LaunchPacks: Science leverages high-quality, diverse digital content sets to build science knowledge and understanding, enabling educators to make strong cross-curricular connections to help students engage in meaningful learning. It allows educators to build content sets (Packs) that cover each of the disciplinary core ideas outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards and provide a seamless experience for students to think critically.”

Educator John Dabell offers his review of the resource here.

Watch this three-minute video to get an idea about all the possibilities this resource has to offer:

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AASL Best Digital Tools 2021: Pixton EDU

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring the digital comic creation resource Pixton EDU! Pixton EDU “is a web-app that gives educators and students a unique way to create stories, demonstrate learning, and enhance writing assignments – in any subject – through digital comics.”

Grades: 3-12

Common Sense Education reviews Pixton EDU here. Ed Tech Impact gives more info about the app in this article which also includes reviews from teachers who have used the app in their classrooms. This article from The Learning Counsel gets into detail about the ways Pixton is useful for educators and includes user reviews as well. And this series from What Binder Education has instructions for using Pixton plus links to downloadable resources!

Watch this one minute video preview of the Pixton resource!

https://youtu.be/nu0-VkR9ra0
CMLE, Guest Blogger, School Media Specialist

Scott Eskro Extended CMLE Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from Scott Eskro, Media Specialist at Elk River High School. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program. This program was only available during the FY21 school year.

In the 2020 – 2021 school year, Elk River High School had a student population of around 1500. Like all schools, that number fluctuated in terms of students in school and students in distant learning situations.

But no matter where the students were, everyone was dealing with the stress and strain of living in a pandemic. Some believe we are on the verge of a social emotional crisis which further impacts the mental health of teens. The pandemic has exacerbated this issue and every school in the country has seen a huge impact on the mental health of their student population.

So we were looking to add contemporary fiction and memoirs that deal with the topic of mental health.

In the classrooms, English teachers have projects where students read contemporary fiction and memoirs. Students examine what the author is trying to address and/or affirm about a problem or issue in society. What issues, concerns or struggles do the characters face? How does the author address the issue and are the characters successful at tackling the issue?

We already had some books on a variety of contemporary issues. However, we were lacking books on the issue of mental illness and were hoping to add books in that area. 

Mental health is an extensive field. We were trying to improve our collection in two areas in particular.

We were looking to add books that look at the role gender plays in mental illness – examining the role that gender identity has on mental health. We were also hoping to buy memoirs and books on the topic of PTSD. Students are very interested in that topic and we have a significant portion of our student population that join the military. 

With this grant from CMLE, we were able to buy over 80 books dealing with a variety of mental health issues. Thank you CMLE for helping our students learn and tackle these issues through literature.

We will use three sets of data to examine success. First, we will look at checkout data on the books. Second, we will be giving the students a Google Form to fill out, gathering their thoughts about the book, and their understanding of the mental health issue. Third, the teacher will be examining the papers the students write.

Thank you once again, CMLE for helping us support our students and community through this grant.

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AASL Best Digital Tools 2021: Bites Media

AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:

  • Innovation/Creativity
  • Active Participation
  • Collaboration
  • User-Friendly
  • Encourages Exploration
  • Information/Reference

We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.

This week we’re exploring the resource Bites Media!
“Bites Media is a news and information platform for middle and high school students that connects current events to civic and social principles. Librarians often use the platform as a research supplement for students, as each article contains 10-12 primary sources in one place. “

Grades: Middle-High School

The founders of Bites Media believe: “news is an educational tool and it is our civic duty to be informed and engaged citizens.” Their website has evaluated this entire page of news sources based on several factors including published ethics, history of journalistic integrity, consistent commitment to the truth, and more.

This page has several strategies and stories that link to tons of examples of how to include teaching about current events into the classroom.

And Bites Media has partnered with ADL to provide this free curriculum for high school students with 80 lesson plans that . You can see the standards the curriculum fulfills and download the curriculum and support materials here!

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TA Flatland Extended Mini Grant Report

This is a guest post from TA Flatland, Media Generalist at Salk Middle School. Read more about our Extended Mini Grant Program. This program is only available during the FY21 school year.

My plan for the CMLE mini grant was to increase the number of nonfiction books that are specifically related to the History Day topics students are interested in and to increase the number of nonfiction books that address and teach current political and social issues, as we have had multiple students requesting these types of materials.

We’ve seen an increase in the number of students asking for books dealing with specific topics including LGBTQ+ issues, Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights. It also became apparent in the last three years that our current collection of history books, specifically the 1950s to the present, are severely lacking or outdated in our nonfiction collection.

When I learned about the CMLE mini grant program, I immediately put in an application in the hopes that we could improve this selection of books in our media center. I was very hopeful that the funding that we would receive from the CMLE mini grant would allow our students to find engaging materials that related to the topics that they had shown high interest in.

Once I received word that I had been approved for the mini grant I consulted with our history teachers, as well as students to determine what books would be of interest and would circulate well. We created a wishlist on Mackin and spent a lot of time creating a list of books that were not only age-appropriate, but highly engaging for our students to learn from.

Once I had the list from Mackin, I started making edits. I also showed the list to our English and Science staff as we often have cross curricular activities and assignments. Another source that we consulted was the Minnesota Historical Society to ensure that we were getting materials that were useful for our Minnesota studies class.

After consulting multiple content areas and students, we were able to find 67 books that met the criteria for this grant and would benefit our students.

The titles we were able to purchase with this grant will have long-term benefits for our school, from research for Science Fair projects to the History Day project and individual interest and learning.

Now that the materials have arrived in our Media Center we are excited to promote these materials for  students to check out and use even before the end of this school year. We are also hoping to be able to highlight and cross-promote these new books with our History Day projects and mini-History Day projects that are completed in 6th grade Minnesota Studies Class.

One of the highlights of being a magnet program is that we have the highest rate of diversity in our school district. This makes it a top priority for us to ensure that we have materials and books in our media center that show windows and mirrors to students of all cultures.

We are proud of the collection that we were able to create using this mini grant. We have already had students show their excitement after seeing these materials in our media center. They were glad to see more books that deal with social and political issues that are relevant in today’s society.