Our Friendiversary Celebration....Two Libraries One Voice

John Schu and I had a wonderful time celebrating Friendiversary for the first time together this year.


Friendiversary is an annual celebration of friendship and reading from First Book and Mo Willems. 


From BookMark, The First Book Blog, 


"First Book is celebrating Friendiversary this week by providing 7,000 new Elephant & Piggie books to second-graders at Title I schools in Louisiana and Massachusetts. The Elephant & Piggie series is written and illustrated by our friend Mo Willems, whose support makes it possible for First Book able to provide these books. Every book includes a special Friendiversary note from Mo, and his publisher, Disney Publishing Worldwide, is also providing activity kits, stickers and posters free of charge to each classroom."


And we will celebrate friendship and reading all year long.  


This is cross posted from John and I's blog Two Libraries One Voice.  

Something Exciting Has Come To Van Meter..... Mackin VIA and eBooks!

The students and teachers are so excited for something NEW we have at Van Meter!  

It is an online eBook management system called Mackin VIA. And inside of Mackin VIA are over 160 eBooks which will always be available, 24/7, with no waiting.  These electronic resources were purchased by Heartland AEA as part of an incredible initiative to bring eBooks into our schools and into the lives of of students, teachers and community.  

Heartland AEA has provided us with access to Scholastic's BookFlix and TrueFlix, which is mainly for our elementary students.  By adding these eBooks, we are also giving our secondary rich digital content as well.  All of our students in kindergarten through 12th grade will benefit from the addition of VIA into our environment here at Van Meter. 

 Last week at Van Meter, we introduced VIA and the eBooks.

We brought the 7th and 8th graders into the secondary library with their laptops.  We visited all of the 6th graders during science class.  In the afternoon, we went downstairs and worked with the 5th graders. In between, the American History and Environmental Science classes learned about VIA too.

After being told about the eBook initiative....

the students logged into Mackin VIA with the username and password given to us by Heartland.  This is the same username and password used for the other AEA resources. 

This logged them into the Mackin VIA for Van Meter.  On the front page, the eBooks are organized into "Categories" by subjects like Art and Music, Graphic Novels, and Sports and Recreation.  

By clicking on the different "Categories", you can go into different sets of eBooks.

These are the eBooks found under the "Art and Music" category.

You can also type in the subject, keyword or title into the "Search" box on the front page of VIA, directly above the links to view "Groups" and "Categories".

Within VIA, "Groups" can also be set up for the specific classes, teachers, topics, reading groups, events.....anything that you would like to organize a set of eBooks for.  I set up several for our secondary and elementary teachers already.  

Hailey Beneke and I created a "Group" for her Environmental Science class.  She had fun picking out the books that were going to go into the Group.  There are so many great books available in our VIA.  Hailey especially loved how the students can read the same eBook at the same time, anytime of the day. 

And the students also had fun checking out the eBooks that the teachers put into the Groups.  

One book that all of the kids loved was Small But Deadly Pufferfish. We all learned so much about these interesting, cute little creatures.  

And they absolutely loved the Inside the NFL database from ABDO Publishing. This will continue to be a BIG hit with our elementary and secondary students.  

Another awesome thing we can do within VIA is create "Backpacks". All of our students at Van Meter have their very own Backpack. They sign into it with an unique username and password just for them.  

My daughter, Brianna, signed into her VIA Backpack one night and loaded a few ebooks into it.  It was so easy for her to do and she had fun looking at all of the different titles.

She now has four eBooks from within VIA that are specifically in her Backpack.  She can read them anytime and can take them out of her Backpack as well.

Now that we have VIA and the start of a wonderful collection of eBooks, I have found several places for all of us to connect with them.  I want our students, teachers and school community to be able to get to VIA from any of our online spaces.

On the Van Meter Library VOICE site .

On the Van Meter Elementary Library and Tech VOICE site.

From the homepage of Destiny, inside and outside of school.

From the Van Meter Library VOICE blog and other ones that I have.  

And on the Van Meter School website, we put the VIA widget right on the front page.  

I created posters to put up in the library, classrooms and around school.  They include the website and a QR code which takes the user right to VIA.  

I also created small cards that we handed out to all of the students last week during the VIA rollout.  I saw a lot of them tape them right to their laptops.  

They can use their phones, iTouches or iPads to scan the QR code and browse the eBook collection on their own devices at home, school....anywhere they want.  

After Christian learned about VIA during Spanish 4, I found him scanning the QR code to read eBooks from his phone.  They thought that was pretty awesome.  

On the Heartland AEA website, there are tons of resources that you can use for the new eBook initiative. 

The AEA has created these shelf signs or bookmarks with a QR code as well.  These can also be found online. 

Here is a question that came up often last week.....

"What about reading the eBooks on other devices, not just our MacBooks?"

My son Hagan tested out VIA over the weekend on all kinds of devices.

He used it on our Nook Color and iPad.

He also read an eBook called The Unexplained, Alien Abductions on his iTouch.  

Hagan enjoyed reading the eBooks on all of the devices, including the desktop.  To him it was more about the content of the eBook, not the device that he was reading on.  He is just very excited about being able to read all kinds of new eBooks anywhere he wants.

Especially reading about his Packers on the Inside the NFL database. 

We are very fortunate to have our AEA's support these types of learning initiatives and resources.  Without them, a collection of eBooks such as this would be impossible for us to fund and support. 

I also purchased a few eBooks and the football datbase last week from Mackin.  It is so easy to add to the collection.  All of our eBooks, even the datebase, are already in our VIA.  

The next step....adding the MARC record of these eBooks to Destiny.  More to come on that.  :) 

For additional information on using VIA,  you can refer to the Mackin VIA Student Guide and Mackin VIA Teacher Guide at www.mackin.com/via.

You can also find Mackin online at mackin.com, email at via@mackin.com or call 1-800-245-9540.

I look forward to seeing and hearing how the integration of these new resources will make an impact within our school, the curriculum and the lives of our students.

This is just the start of something that will truly make a difference.

"The Flip"....StudyBlue Online Flashcards

The line at the end of this video, “The Flip”, really made me think.  I wrote it down in my planner and circled it as I watched this video for the first time.  

Between the front and back of the card is you.....Learning.  

Isn’t that so simple and true?  Think about it.  You have your flashcards and you are all ready to study.  You look at the front, flip it over and look at the back.  But as you are flipping it, you pause and take in all of the knowledge and ideas that you have about that specific topic.  Then you turn it into the answer that you are looking for on the back of the card.

Have you ever thought about “the flip” like that before?

When I was in high school and college, I created flashcards for just about everything I learned about and studied.  I created them when I was learning about the different parts of our government; for the geometry test that I took over three times; and for my college geology class when I cut out photographs I took in Colorado the summer before to show the various geologic landforms I was learning about.

On the front of the card, I wrote a term, a thought, a place, a math problem.  I even drew a picture sometimes.

And on the back of the card, I wrote the definition, the answer, the solution to the problem, the destination of where my thoughts took me.

I spent hours creating these cards.  Sometimes I couldn’t put everything I needed to on them.  I was often the only one to use them.  And I always had to create my own.

With StudyBlue, we now have the capability to create beautiful, digital flashcards that can contain more than just these elements.  They can now contain embedded images and audio.  They can be shared online with others.  We can keep them organized in our own online Backpack and can search for flashcards that others have already created about the topics we are studying.  Quizzes can be easily created with one click and progress is monitored and praised.

Studyblue is more than just a tool which simplifies an age old way of studying with flashcards.

StudyBlue makes us better. It gives us a platform that brings together the things we need to be successful in our learning.  It is mobile so it can be with us when we need it....on the go, at school, at home....wherever that place might be.

And it gives us a place to enjoy learning.  To make it fun.  To make it something we can share.  To be proud of what we are achieving.

I know that if I would have had StudyBlue as a student, I would have had “more” in between the front and the back of the card.  I would have been better prepared and informed.  I would have taken my learning to a different level.  I would have been able to share and gain knowledge from others.

Our students today are lucky.  They have what is important between the front and back of the card.
It is them.....

learning more than we ever have before.

~This is also posted on the StudyBlue Blog

Get Connected On World Read Aloud Day With #WRADCONNECT

On March 7, 2012 we will be celebrating World Read Aloud Day with the world.  

The theme this year says it all....

Change the World, Story by Story

This amazing day is sponsored by LitWorlds, whose mission is, "to use the power of story to cultivate literacy skills in the world's most vulnerable children through Education, Advocacy and Innovation."

Through social media such as Skype, Twitter, and Facebook we will come together to celebrate the power of words and stories on our lives.  

This year we thought it would be fun to mix it up a little and get our secondary students involved.  I contacted my friends Michelle Luhtala, library department chair at New Canaan High School Library in Connecticut, Joyce Valenza, teacher librarian at Springfield Township School in Pennsylvania and Rocco Staino, contributing editor for School Library Journal and chair of the Empire State Center for the Book. We gathered students who were interested in being part of our WRAD group. 

The WRAD Connect group at Van Meter....Lizzy, Quinn, Collin, Paxton and Sebastian.  Meg and Alisa are also members of our group.

At the Springfield Township, a lot of the same members of #SWVBC came together for WRAD too.  

It's a personality-rich group! ;-)

In New Canaan, from left to right, our group includes Michael, Charlie, Molly, Alex, and Isabelle -  Franci and David are missing from the picture, but we'll catch them soon.

And then we put our student groups together in Skype.  It was so great hearing the ideas and plans they immediately started developing for World Read Aloud Day....

and so much FUN too. 

We decided that a cool name was needed for this group right away.  They decided on #WRADCONNECT.  Two of Michelle's students, Michael and Molly created a WRAD Connect Facebook Community Page and 

WRAD Connect Group on Facebook. 

They will use the hashtag, #WRADCONNECT when they tweet to connect with other schools taking part in WRAD.

We have created the "Change the World, Story by Story" wiki.  This is the place where we will stay organized since we are at different schools and need to depend on this tool and others.  We will post different resources and artifacts as well on the wiki. 

We started collecting video clips for the project - recordings of people responding to the prompt, "Tell us about a story that changed your world." The following video is a compilation of four Van Meter students' responses.

The Story that Changed My World from michelle luhtala on Vimeo.

We invite everyone to contribute to the clip collection. Videos can be uploaded to the Facebook page, to Flickr, via email, or anywhere else! Short and unrehearsed is preferable - people of all ages, clips in all languages are welcome! We created a form for contributors to fill out, so that we have an "inventory" of WRAD contributions, regardless of where they are published. Here is the form. 

Our students will collaborate to co-present WRAD activity on March 7. They are contacting authors and other students to interview between 11AM and 2PM. They will also feature selected video submissions. The entire program will be broadcast live. We'll post a link as soon as we have one. 

Michael is developing a schedule of WRAD activity

As we look ahead to the year and all of the events in front of us, World Read Aloud Day is definitely one that will bring excitement, fun, and new friendships to our students and school communities.  

And we hope that you will tune in on March 7th to WRAD CONNECT and celebrate will us.