Computer Applications in the School Library Media Center

WeVideo is a great tool for creating videos. WeVideo offers you an educator classification, with a free day 30 day trial. During the free trial, WeVideo does place a watermark stamp on all created videos, which is a little frustrating, however it does create the video for you. Upgrading to a paid account removes the water mark and gives you additional tools to use in creating your videos. For a personal account, WeVideo charges $4.99 monthly or you can purchase an unlimited membership for $7.99. The unlimited offeres a higher video definition, advanced marketing tools, and an unlimited number of videos published per month. The personal account allows you to publish 30 videos per month, but allows you access to the same number of songs, images, and special features that the unlimited subscription offers. Educators can purchase up to 30 users for $199 a year. The aspect of WeVideo that first drew me to it was the fact that it can be added as an app to google chrome. You are a...

Storybird is a great program for helping students feel creative. While I love to have students use their own imagination and practice their own drawing skills, this is a great way for students to learn to connect visual elements to written content. Part of me, the low-tech part, worries that this may discourage students from doing their own artwork, since their efforts may look somewhat amateurish or less polished than the professional illustrations. However, this might also encourage some artistically inclined individuals to explore graphic design or digital art. When I first went to Storybird.com, it asked me how I would be using storybird. I clicked on Teacher/Educator and was walked through the steps of creating an account, including a username, password, and avatar picture. On the home page, you have the opportunity to add students, create a storybird book, check our student's progress, and invite students parents to view their published work.  I really like tha...

At our most recent Opals User Group meeting, a colleague mentioned Canva as a great tool for use in the school library. I had never heard of it, so I dug around a bit to see what it was all about. Basically it is a graphic design program. It provides templates, pictures, fonts, colors, and sizes and you decide how you want to put it together. I can see so much potential for this in the library. From making flyers, bookmarks, and notices to creating shelf markers for various sections of non-fiction, I think this would be a great tool. To be honest, I had a little difficulty finding out about using Canva as a teacher. From what I understand, students can log in under their google usernames and passwords and just start doing there thing. I am used to see an overview option for teachers, so teachers can supervise what students are doing on the program, but I can't seem to find one for Canva. Maybe it isn't necessary, but it feels a little odd at first to not have that option...

Padlet is a great collaborative tool somewhat similar to pinterest. While it is not typically something you would save a lot of chocolate cake variations to, it is similar in the idea of a bulletin board. Each member of the group is able to pin something to the wall and comment on it.  In one of our classes last spring, the teacher had us use a padlet for introductions. We each pinned something that represented us to the board. It was fun to see what everyone else was posting.  As you can see in the example below, that the background and text is customizable and people can pin pictures and words together.  (Since I am not able to access my class from this spring for some reason, I pulled a picture from a google image.) I can see using padlet in a cooperative class project. Maybe sharing a favorite quote from the book they were assigned, questions they have after reading assigned chapters, one insight they had into the character, the species they will ...