January 19 – February 12 Highlights

We had just 19 days of school from January 19 to February 12, and several of those days included semester finals and semester textbook checkouts and returns. Even so, the library was packed with activity! Here are some of the highlights.

Research

Some of the class research visits included Stacy Cabrera’s 11th Grade English students working on group research projects completing a collaborative dossier based on author genre/theme/style groupings and Laura Clarke’s 10th Grade English students exploring a research topic that will lend background to their study of the Romantic period in literature. The classes had short lessons in research and took advantage of our subscription databases, including our two new video databases from InfoBase and Alexander Street, as well as evaluating open web sources for quality.

3D Design

Mr. Braskin and Mr. Brenan’s Computer Science students finished their 3D chess piece projects and created some very original and attractive pieces while learning about 3D design using Tinkercad and becoming astute with measurements and understanding what types of designs are feasible to print on our printers. Here’s a link to the assignment. Here are just a few examples of their work:

3D chess pieces

3D chess pieces

Kate Martin and Amber Dixon’s Art 2 students also visited the library for three days and worked on 3D design projects. I introduced them to how 3D printers and Tinkercad work, and then they had the choice of creating a 3D design starting with a sharpie drawing, using these directions (bit.ly/2Dto3Dprint), or creating designs from scratch in Tinkercad. We will be printing out their designs next week, so stand by for some photos.

Marisa Reichardt Author Visit

The library was honored to host debut author Marisa Reichardt on February 10. She spoke to groups of students during both AM and PM office hours and to Shannon Vaughan’s Creative Writing class about her new novel, Underwater and how she became a writer. Here are a couple of photos of her with students.

Marisa Reichardt and Students

Marisa Reichardt and StudentsThe library has copies of Underwater for students to borrow, and copies can also be purchased from {pages}, our local independent bookstore, either at the store or online at bit.ly/orderunderwater.

CSLA Conference

Doorways to Diversity

Jane Lofton presenting how to Become an Images Ninja with Google and Other Killer Web-Based Images Tools

I was in San Diego for California School Library Association’s annual conference on the theme of “Doorways to Diversity” February 3 – 7. I served as Social Media/Website chair for the conference, and I presented a workshop session on “Become an Images Ninja with Google and Other Killer Web-Based Apps” and a concurrent session on “Make Twitter Your Number #1 Tool for Building Your Personal Learning Network.” I also coordinated CSLA’s third annual “Unconference,” at which participants chose their own topics to discuss and shared great ideas with each other.

Here are my Images Ninja session slides:

 

I also recorded the session using Google Hangouts on Air:

 

Here are my Twitter session slides:

And, my Twitter session recording:

I also encouraged other presenters at the conference to take advantage of Google Hangouts on Air to easily record their sessions. Here’s a link to my personal blog with information about how to do that. The information applies equally well to recording class lessons to make them “re-windable.”

I came away from the conference with many wonderful new ideas of ways to build diversity into our library program and collection and how I can better serve both our students and faculty. I’ll be sharing more about the conference soon.