One of the reasons I have survived and even thrived as a Media Specialist is because of my high school Media Specialist, Wanda Erickson. On top of working at the Upsala School, Wanda is also a librarian at the local branch of the Great River Regional Library. Wanda has helped me to not only support my students at the school, but also to form connections with the public library. Recently I asked her about the library's summer reading program for kids. She passed along some information and also hooked me up with the local Library Services Coordinator, Sarah Seeley. Sarah and I talked and together created a short advertisement to share with the students about the summer reading program. Below is our video advertisement.
This year, the Great River Regional Library's Summer Reading Theme is Read for the Win. Students can swing by their local branch of the Great River Regional Library to pick up a library card and some books and sign up for the program. Students will receive a reading record on which they keep track of their summer reading. Each reading record has 5 clocks on it. Students will mark off one clock for each hour they read, are read to, or listen to an audiobook. When students have marked off 5 hours, they can return their records to the library to be entered into a drawing for some sweet prizes! While they are there, they can also pick up some more books to read. The program runs June 13-August 13. You can visit http://www.griver.org/kids/summer-reading-program for more information.
Also, this summer at the library, there will be lots of fun events for the kids to join in. Come during lunchtime on Fridays for crafts, reading, and social time. There are other craft opportunities as well, including creating a robot from recycled materials and creating balloon animals! There is even a Library Olympics in July! Check out all the events at the Great River Regional Library here: http://www.griver.org/events
There's always something fun happening at your local public library!
In October, I began my first attempts at putting together a student new broadcast. The students and I learned lots of things in the first few months as I wrote about in a previous post. We learned how to use the iPad to record, how to utilize Google Docs for script writing, and how to use iMovie for editing among other things. We are still working on fixing some of the problems we noticed way back then, but we have also made other improvements along the way.
One of the problems that we noticed initially is the sound quality while recording with the iPad. This is still an issue that we are battling. We have tried a few different microphones and have not had a lot of success. There is one microphone we borrowed to try out that seemed to work well, so we are in the process of ordering that microphone. In the meantime, it has meant telling the students to speak up and adjusting sound in iMovie.
iMovie: When you click on volume on the bottom, you can raise up the sound levels.
Writing the script has been somewhat of a challenge for the students. Some kids are just better writers than others. This has meant that I set the students up to type and allow them to try their best, but then I end up looking it over to make sure everything is correct. When the students have done a good job, there's not much I need to redo, but sometimes the kids do very little and I end up rewriting the whole script. It's ok though because it is all about the experience.
We have made a few improvements over the months since I last wrote about the student news. Our first improvement was to get rid of the printed scripts as seen in this episode:
We replaced the printed scripts with a teleprompter. Our teleprompter consists of a LCD projector on a cart connected to my laptop which has the script set up in cueprompter.com. The script is projected onto a portable screen.
This improvement has meant that there is no more shuffling of papers while a student is speaking and the students are now looking up rather than down at their papers. The end result looked like this:
This was a great improvement, but after attending the TIES conference in Minneapolis this year, I just had to have a green screen. Luckily our previous Media Specialist, the great and powerful Tom Gilgenbach, gifted us the app Do Ink Green Screen. Our custodians were kind enough to paint one of the walls in our studio (back storage room) green over winter break. This has been such fun! We still record using the iPad, then we import the video into the Do Ink app to add backgrounds, save the video to the camera roll, and finish editing in the iMovie app.
Do Ink Green Screen App: Super easy to use! Even my 4th graders can do it!
The green screen can end up looking really cool, like in this video:
But we have run into the issue of students wearing green shirts, like in this video (oops!):
Looking forward, there are still a number of ways we would like to improve the student news. Ordering the microphone to improve sound quality will be a great help. We are hoping to paint the two walls on the sides of the news desk to improve the adding of backgrounds. Each week we announce winners for good behavior and we announce birthdays daily. We will try to start adding photos of the students as their names are announced.
Looking to next year, I am considering different ways we could have students involved. Currently, all the students have an assigned date to type the script and to be an anchor. Some students dislike typing and others do not like being an anchor. I have had students help with recording and editing in minimal amounts. Next year, I am thinking that I may have students broken up into groups based on which role they would like. Perhaps some students will be our reporters and gather information for our script writers to write into the script. The script writers would perfect their writing skills in scripts that the anchors would read. While the anchors read there would be a director/ producer directing them when to speak, slow down, and speed up as they record on the iPad. After the recording is done, the editors would then put in the green screen background and edit the video in the iMovie app. This would mean that all of our 5th grade students would be involved in some way in the announcements, but in the way that they would most enjoy. This is still a thought I will be pondering for a while.
This December the technology teacher and I ran the Hour of Code program for all our students grades K-5. Rather than just doing coding for one week like most schools we allowed our students to explore computer coding for a whole month. So what is coding anyway? Well, according to Code.org, its a superpower! Coding is basically giving a computer a set of commands that the computer understands and uses to perform tasks. These tasks could be moving an item across the screen, making an item appear, creating a drawing, or many other things. In my opinion, this video pretty well captures what coding is and why it is important.
Some students quickly got bored with coding. These students were very happy when they returned from Winter Break to learn that we were moving on to other lessons. There were a number of students, however, that were very bummed out that we would no longer be coding. While we were doing the Hour of Code throughout December, I got feedback from the parents of these kiddos that their children were enamored with learning these new coding skills. As I watched the students working together to get through the puzzles on Code.org, I saw students that regularly struggled to just sit still in class becoming successful collaborators on a project. I saw students that struggled to find any success in school build a glow of confidence in their new-found talents. For this reason, I decided that coding needed to be continued in some way with these children.
One of the things that I most enjoy as a Media Specialist is being able to provide children a place in the school where they can be successful even when they feel left behind in other subjects. This was the main reason I decided to start a before school coding club. The students who enjoyed coding and found that they were successful at something in school are now able to continue building skills and confidence that could lead to rewarding careers in the future. I am very excited to announce that we will be starting two coding clubs in February! Our 2nd-3rd Grade Coding Club will start on February 3rd and our 4th and 5th Grade Coding Club will begin on February 10th! We hope to see you there!
