Our 5th Graders Made Photos Talk With Blabberize While Learning With Mo, The Developer, On Skype!

Last week, our 5th graders had the opportunity to Skype with our friend Mo. He developed Blabberize.  Blabberize is a site and app that allows you to take any picture, put a mouth on that picture, and make it speak with your voice.

We plan to use Blabberize to give book talks, share historical events, celebrate art work and projects, and so much more. 

They had such a blast learning about Blabberize with Mo on Skype. 

He explained to the kids how you can take any image and Blabberize it by...

...clicking on the MAKE button underneath the Blabberize. It is circled in hot pink in the image above.

This is where you can also BROWSE and look at MY STUFF.

Mo took a famous painting and...

...showed them how to add a mouth and making the it talk. 

After Mo made this one for us, he also explained how Blabberize could be used in projects by

turning it into a video or embedding it in a blog or webpage to be shared with classmates and others.

They couldn't wait to make their own. 

They got right to work. 

Some of them worked with a partner or two and lots of them...

...worked by themselves to create....

....something awesome. 

We loved watching them find or take a photo to Blabberize.  

We kept Mo on Skype so he could answer questions and...

...get a good laugh from what our kids were creating too. 

At the end of our time together, Mo showed them the new..

...Blabberize iOS App. 

The site states, 

You can place your talking picture in video with you using the self facing camera. Or take your talking picture into the wild with Augmented Reality using the front facing camera.

He showed us how to Blabberize a banana with the new app.  We can't wait to use this one on our iPads and create with it too. 

You will find the information on the Blabberize iOS app and other resources here to help you create amazing videos with Blabberize too!  

Thank you Mo for Skyping with your students and sharing the awesome app you created.  We are excited to use Blabberize throughout the year. 

Join Us For The Next Future Ready Librarian Webinar, Exploring Equitable Digital Access!

On November 27, 2018, we will be hosting a new Future Ready Librarian webinar, Exploring Equitable Digital Access.  

For this webinar, my friends and colleagues Lynn Bryan, Ashley Cooksey, and Kristin Mattson will joining me as we talk about how we explore and support equitable digital access in our schools and districts in Alabama, Colorado, Illinois and Iowa. 

You can register for this free webinar here on the Alliance for Excellent Education site.  If you cannot attend at the scheduled time, don't worry as it will be recorded and shared afterwards too.

Thank you to our friends at Future Ready School and Follett for making this webinar possible and for supporting Future Ready Librarians everyday. 

World Read Aloud Day 2019....Our Collaborative Google Doc To Make Connections & Plans!

One of my favorite events every year is LitWorld's World Read Aloud Day!  This year we are celebrating on February 1. 2019.  We plan to celebrate throughout that entire week….January 28-February 1, 2019.

Over the last 9 years, I have read, celebrated, learned, connected and created with others around the world in honor of World Read Aloud Day, literacy and reading aloud. 

The best part of World Read Aloud Day for me are the connections that libraries and school communities make with other children, teachers, librarians, authors, illustrators and friends globally. 

We have Skyped with our friends in Iowa, Georgia, Chicago, Florida, Philadelphia, New York, Texas, Connecticut, Australia, China, Oman and others around the world.Whether it is listening to them read, reading a book together, or singing along to the words, the celebration of reading aloud is what we lift up on this day.

At Van Meter School, we have connected with several of our favorite authors over the years, including Robert Forbes, Seymour Simon, Tom Angelberger, Cece Bell, Erica Perl, Donna Gephart, Laurel Synder, Jesse Klausmeier, and many others. I can't wait to start planning and collaborating on who we will have Skype into visit and read aloud with our students and community this year.

As you and your school community plan World Read Aloud Day, Andy Plemmons, Matthew Winner and myself have created a Google Document for all of us to start making plans with others around the world.  

If you are interested in connecting with others on this day, please add your name, contact info, occupation, school, location, schedule, and ideas to the information below.  To support our connections, let’s group our schedules by time zones. If your timezone is not represented, please add it as a heading and we will update the table of contents.  Look for others to connect with and sign up on their schedules too. Be sure to use your name and contact information when you sign up on others’ schedules.

The World Read Aloud Day 2018 Google Doc can be found here.

And you can register for the official World Read Aloud Day here on the LitWorld site. 

They will be posting the 2019 WRAD resources soon....I can't wait. 

Also, we have created a place to share ideas, inspiration and what has worked over the last several years.  One way to bring these ideas and inspiration to everyone, we started a Padlet.  Check out the Padlet here.

Please us know if you have any questions on how WRAD Google Document works. We are happy to help.

Have fun and get connected for World Read Aloud Day this year.  And remember to use #WorldReadAloudDay when sharing on social media.