Tag Archives: Tech

AASL Best Digital Tools 2021: Scratch

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.

We’ve heard great things about Scratch at CMLE! Coding is such an important skill and we love that this app is for younger students (or total newbies!).

Scratch allows learners and educators to program interactive stories, games, and animations — and share creations with others in the online community.”

Check out this review of Scratch from Common Sense Education which includes feedback from over one hundred teachers who have used the app! In this article, PC Mag says Scratch is their go-to Editor’s Choice when it comes to intro to coding programs. And if you (like me) have a slighter younger student interested in learning to code, check out Scratch JR! PBS Kids even has this app that works with Scratch JR so kids can create games and stories using favorite characters!

Grades: 1-10 (Scratch Jr. K-2)

Students chat in this 2 min video about the ways they enjoy creating with the app!

AASL Best Digital Tools 2020: Emotional ABC’s

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL)  has announced their top choices for “electronic resources that provide enhanced learning and curriculum development for school librarians and their educator collaborators.” These resources were formerly separated into the Best Apps and Best Websites for Teaching and Learning and are now combined into the Best Digital Tools for Teaching & Learning.

You can check out our archive of past recommended apps here.

The curriculum Emotional ABCs Classroom “is a teacher-led, research-based Social Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum that provides teachers (K–3) with 20 sequential Workshops, support materials, and a flexible structure for classroom instruction.” The program fulfills these foundations: Include, Collaborate, Engage, Explore.

This article from PR Newswire explains how the curriculum works and why it is important. EdSurge has this review of the program and states it is very easy for teachers to use. Common Sense Education shares pro/cons, more reviews, and teaching tools for using the Emotional ABCs program. And finally, the site itself has a free classroom teacher guide that includes workshops and additional materials.

Check out this two minute video about how the curriculum works:

Episode 603: Integrating Tech with Literacy Education

This week we look at strategies you can use to connect technology with literacy skills!

Check our show notes page, to get links to all the resources and links to the books we discussed.

Welcome to our Guest Host Jason Menth, Technology Integrationist at Talahi Community School in St Cloud, MN!

Schools are all about building good literacy skills for students, and the library is an important part of that work! Sure, there are probably a bunch of good books to read – and that’s important. And then, what else can we provide to help kids build their literacy skills?

A few tech tools can go a long way toward encouraging kids to connect with reading, to find some books they enjoy, and to improve performance in school and beyond!

Training Tips: You need a password manager!

Each week in this series we talk about another small thing you can work on to make yourself ever more skilled, and help your library to be better able to serve your community. This week’s tip can do both!

Have you heard of password managers? If you read articles or listen to podcasts about web security, you have doubtless seen reference to them – and strident urging to get one immediately.

If you have not already tried the podcast Reply All, I highly recommend it in general. Very fun, they solve tech issues in a long story form, and it’s informative. Specifically, I recommend listening to Episode #91: The Russian Passenger. You can click on that link, go to their episode site, and listen right there. (There is also a follow up: Episode #111 The Return of the Russian Passenger.)

You might also want to listen to Episode #130: the Snapchat Thief.  Or #97 What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished? And really, there are tons of others.

But the point is that a password manager is just a wonderful tool.

Possibly you are like me, and feel senility creeping up on you when YET AGAIN you are totally unable to remember a password. I have been locked out of so many website for trying to guess too many times, it’s just pathetic.

And do you use the same password everywhere?

I came up with a couple of good ones, and then proceeded to use them. Over and over again. For a few years.

Needless to say, they are both floating around the dark web after being hacked (probably multiple times) on big websites. (Hey, thanks for that, Adobe!!)

And we share passwords at work, for accounts we need to share – so I can’t just change it every week when I’ve forgotten one! (Okay, I’ve actually done this; but for a variety of reasons this is really bad practice.)

I had been hearing about password managers for a while, and it all sounded so complicated. I’m a person who can let a problem drag on until it’s REALLY a problem, if I’m not feeling motivated.

Then our website went out.

Still not sure what happened – though I believe it was user error. (*cough* me, making adjustments) But it propelled password managers right up the to-do list!

And I have to tell you: This Is GLORIOUS!!!

I now have a lovely password manager I bought that remembers ALL my passwords! It hosed up everything I had asked Firefox to remember, so it literally knows more than I do. It also tells me how many are duplicates, how many have been exposed in hacking attacks – and how many times. Yeah, that’s a little depressing.

But it’s SO EASY! When I go to a new site, I hit “Generate a new password” and it sets some random selection of numbers, letters, and symbols – as many as I want. (I think it’s defaulting to 25?) Then it sets that up on the website, and it remembers in its own files.

Done.

When I need it, the password manager just signs me into the site again – I never see it and life is good.

And I’m slowly going through the hundreds of passwords I have from life before the password manager – changing and updating every single one. (It’s really shocking how many passwords you have out there! And, how infrequently you can just delete your information from sites you used one time.)

 

There are lots of options out there. I’m using (and loving) Password Boss. Angie has a different one. And the Reply All people recommend one in their podcast. I’m guessing you can’t go far wrong with any of them.

 

Save your online life – and that of your library!! –  from being hacked. Get a password manager today!

Top Library Tech Trends

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This is  an excerpt from an ALA article

“From virtual reality to gamification to security techniques, libraries are using the latest technology to engage patrons, increase privacy, and help staffers do their jobs.

American Libraries spoke to library tech leaders—members of the Library and Information Technology Association’s popular Top Tech Trends panel from the 2017 Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits—to get the apps, devices, software, and best practices that you can adopt for your library right now and in the near future.

1. Take patrons on a virtual tour

Create a virtual tour of your library using a 360-degree camera and post it to your website or social media, says Cynthia Hart, emerging technologies librarian at Virginia Beach (Va.) Public Library (VBPL). Virtual tours can be helpful for both information and accessibility.

“One of our branches is 125,000 square feet. The A’s for adult fiction are all the way at the end of the building. Can you imagine if you were a person with disabilities or if you were an older person or had low mobility?” Hart says. “If you didn’t know that when you went into a library, wouldn’t it be helpful to have that virtual tour of the building? Then you could call and say, ‘Hey, can you pull that book from the shelf?’” Virtual visit statistics can also be used as a gate count metric. Continue reading Top Library Tech Trends