School Librarianship

New Tech Tool: Book Creator Kaitlyn Casper LIS 568 Week 6: 6/30-7/6     This week, I decided to try out Book Creator while working on my website assignment. I chose to use Book Creator as a medium for making a choose-your-own adventure book for my website. I had never heard of or used Book Creator before, so I was looking forward to trying it out! Initial Impressions     When I first visited the site, it was pretty easy to sign up and make an account. I immediately liked the simplicity of the user interface, since it was fairly straightforward and didn't have too much to look at. It was also easy to start my first book because it opened one for me. This book was a tutorial on how to use Book Creator, so it was very helpful! There were not too many buttons, so it wasn't overwhelming and it seemed easy to use. Book Creating     As I started creating my book, I got the hang of Book Creator pretty fast. It was easy to add text and pictures and edit them. I real...

 New Tech Tool: Powtoon Kaitlyn Casper LIS 568 Week 5: 6/23 - 6/29          This week, I decided to explore Powtoon since we are required to use it for creating our Digital Citizenship website! I had not heard of Powtoon before using it for this assignment, but I found the concept super interesting! When I saw that someone had reviewed it and called it "the Canva of video making," I knew I was probably going to like it. First Impressions     When I first signed up for Powtoon, I will admit that I was slightly intimidated by the business of the homepage. However, I found it really helpful that they offered some free templates for me to use to make my first video. I decided to use a template and started clicking around to explore the different features and mechanics. It took a little bit of exploring to get the hang of it, but once I did, it was fairly easy to use. I really like the flexibility of Powtoon, as it lets you customize text, use "props,"...

New Tech Tool: SpacesEDU Kaitlyn Casper LIS 568 - Week 4: 6/16-6/22     For this week's tech tool, I decided to try out SpacesEDU. I learned about SpacesEDU through commonsense.com, where they list a variety of tech tools that school librarians can use. SpacesEDU sounded interesting to me because it was described as a platform where students can do work and message each other. A messaging platform would be an interesting feature to have in a school library, provided that it is monitored and only used for academic chatting purposes. I was interested to see what SpacesEDU would be like! Initial Exploration     I initially signed up and made an educator account so I could see what SpacesEDU is like from the educator's perspective. It required me to choose a school to make an account, which is usually where I stop registering, since I don't work at a school and I wouldn't want to sign up under one that I don't work at. However, SpacesEDU let me make my own school, so I ...

New Tech Tool: Kahoot! Kaitlyn Casper LIS 568 - Week 3: 6/9-6/15 This week, I decided to check out Kahoot! Kahoot! is something that I have heard of before, but I do not have a lot of experience with it. Thinking back, I believe I participated in a Kahoot! game only once, and I've never organized one myself. I know that lots of people my age have more experience with Kahoot! and love using it for both educational and recreational purposes. I have also heard some school librarians say that they've used it with their students, and it made for very interactive, energetic, and fun lessons! First Impressions My first impression of the Kahoot! website was that it is slightly overwhelming to view--there are so many different colors, text, and images to navigate. I decided to start by exploring the top tabs since it says "work" and "school." Upon exploring this area, I found that Kahoot! offers priced plans to use their technology. I ended up doing a quick Google se...

New Tech Tool: BookFlix Kaitlyn Casper LIS 568 Week 2: 6/2 - 6/8 Initial Impression This week, the online tool I tried was BookFlix! I had heard about this tool from a school librarian that I work with and I thought it sounded super fun. Upon visiting the website, it was cool to learn that it's free to use! It didn't require any payment, nor does it show ads. It also seemed really kid- and user-friendly right away, with large buttons, colorful pictures, and simple text. Exploring BookFlix I started clicking around and checking out different categories, like animals and nature, ABCs and 123s, and the featured pair, which was about fish. It was really cool to see that BookFlix shows a fiction story alongside a similarly-themed nonfiction book. At first, I thought that it would just let me see the pages of each book, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that BookFlix actually shows a movie-like video of the fiction book! It also had the option to show read-along words or to just ...