Wednesday, November 20, 2024

You've Been Virtually Book'd For Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024....A Special Program and List I Use Within Our Destiny Discover & Library Each Month!

We are getting ready to celebrate Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024. We will be collaborating on coding projects, bringing exciting activities to our students, and sharing lots of books and eBooks with coding topics and stories. 

In fact, one of the best parts of special days like this is sharing these books with all of our students and teachers within the library, classrooms and even at home. There are so many special ones that will inspire our kids, while bringing them ideas and fun. 

I brought together a list of 14 coding books that we have in our library collection. I also created a choice board with these books and linked them to our Destiny Discover so our students can find and read these special books from our library. 

Let me show you how I set up this choice board for my school community. 

First, I created the choice board in a Google Slide.  I added the covers of the 14 books I included in the list.

Second, I went to our Destiny Discover and grabbed the links to each book. 

This is easy to do.  You just search for the book, click on the three little dots in the entry
and the drop down menu shown in the image above will appear. 
Click on Share and the link to the book will pop up. That is the url to share in the choice boards. 

I love how I can also download the QR Code.  Isn't that cool? 
Take the copied link and add it to the book cover.  

When every book cover is linked, you are ready to share the choice board. 
Go to File and down to Publish to the web.  
This will give you a link to share with the students and teachers.  
When they click on that published link, the You've Been Virtually Book'd For Hour of Code Week, December 9-15, 2024 choice board will pop up. They can then click on each book cover to find them in our Destiny where they can read more about the book, find them in our library and even put them on reserve. 

I am excited about this list of 14 special new books I put together in Titlewave.  In this choice board, you can click on any book cover to view in Titlewave and find the full book list there too. 

If you want to make a copy to add your own Destiny Discover links from your library, click here

Our students and teachers will love these coding books that are part of our You've Been Virtually Book'd program.  And I love how we can keep this program going all year long!  It brings so much to our readers each and every month.


The NEW December PebbleGo & PebbleGo Monthly Holiday Calendar Is Here! Turn It Into An Interactive Research Choice Board For Your Students & Teachers!

 

The NEW December 2024 PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Monthly Holiday Calendar that our friends at Capstone create for us each month is here! 

In this post, I share more about the PebbleGo Monthly Calendars. 
I love making paper copies of these to share with our teachers and kids. 
They hang them up in their classrooms and hang them in our library too. I also share them online through social media and as an image in Google Classroom or Seesaw. 
The teachers even use the PebbleGo Calendars for mini research opportunities throughout each week. The students use PebbleGo Create to share what they learn throughout the month with the calendars. 
Last year, when I was sharing the calendars with teachers and students, I thought....Hey, this would be really fun in a choice board! 
So, I opened up a Google Slide, uploaded the PebbleGo December 2024 Holidays Calendar, and added a little chalk board with text over the top.  
Then I went through the calendar and found every special day in PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next.  
For example, Christmas is on December 25, so they have the Christmas PebbleGo article featured. I went to PebbleGo and found the article about Christmas in PebbleGo.
 I grabbed the link, as shown in the image above. 

I took that link and added a linked text box around each special date. 

Now, when the kids click on a holiday, it will take them directly to that PebbleGo article.  

If you want to use the template to create your own, you will find the Google Slide here to make a copy and add links to the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next articles. 

And to make it a choice board, just Publish to the web, as shown in this image above. 
You will share that Published Link with your students.  

I love sharing these interactive PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Holiday Calendars with our students and teachers. They love learning all about these special days that are highlighted each month too.

I am excited to have the December 2024 PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next ready to go for the month. I hope you will find ways to use it with your students and teachers this month, and all throughout the school year too. 

Monday, November 18, 2024

Join Us This Thursday For Our NEW Demco Webinar, 5 Ways To Make Nonfiction a STAR in Your School! You Can Register Here, Friends.

                

We are excited to invite you to our upcoming Demco webinar this week on November 21, 2024 at 4:00pm CST.

This one is the third in our special series and is called 5 Ways To Make Nonfiction a STAR in Your School

As shared on the Demco site,

Join us to find out how to make nonfiction books a standout attraction in your learning spaces. Teachers, librarians, and educational professionals will walk away with impactful strategies that will help transform how students engage with nonfiction.

In this webinar, participants will discover:

  1. 5 ways to make nonfiction a STAR in your library and classroom  
  2. How to bring these ideas to your broader school community 
  3. Shannon’s NEW nonfiction book selections

All webinars are archived and available for viewing within a week of the original presentation date. 

You can register today for our webinar, friends. We hope to see you there.