Marketing Your Digital Materials
Course
Creation Tools [5:29]
- Learn about QR code generators and how to create a library of them to access whenever
- Learn a great tip about using Screencastify to create short how-to videos for your teachers
- Learn other creation tools that you may find helpful to incorporate into your toolbag
And then Screencastify is also a tool that I use often and my district does pay for it. So I have a paid version. I don't know, I know that before the district bought it for us, I paid for an individual and it wasn't that expensive. It was very worth it to get the editor, because if I go in and I do a quick capture, like a teacher's, like um we don't know how to use this feature in the database. If I'm not able to go to their classroom right away and show them, I will create a quick screencast from wherever I am, send them the video and then they can watch it. And so I kind of just in time answer to that question. And Screencastify allows me to kind of go in and edit it, like if I mess up or if I want to add something in the middle of something or combine multiple videos that I've created, it makes it very easy to do so, and it saves right to drive. Love the tool. The free version, you get five minutes of recording time and I don't think you get the editor, but it would still do those short little how to videos that you just want to kind of give a quick overview or tour of certain aspects of the database.
And then Canva, that is such a fun, easy to use, very dynamic tool to create those infographics or those posters that you could hang up around; the either like in one of the things that I was thinking about that I want to do this fall, so when I find out what a certain grade is doing for their research for that particular quarter or unit, to create little posters that share places they can go on different databases to find information and put those like in the bathroom. Do any of you use toilet talkers for your fiction? You have a captive audience and it's like by where you're washing your hands or on the back of a stall and you could just create one of those little posters using a Canva-like tool and just you know, Did You Know? You could like pick out kind of interesting facts and I feel like that all kind of goes with the genius hour thing, too. Like we want students to just be curious and we want to have these different kind of interesting fun things, facts of whimsical topics, but then also connect to serious topics. And when we commemorate things and like the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is coming up this year, and that would be something we as librarians, we would want to help build some content around that topic to push out to librarians, or to the teachers and the students. That's one way you could get it out there, is putting it on these really kind of visually pleasing documents that you put up around the school.
And then YouTube. I know that, again, very common tool that a lot of us use probably to learn things. But one of the things I started doing during COVID is I created, just I had my own channel for school, but I created a teacher playlist, and I created a student playlist. And every time I had a question about something that I created a screencast for, I would upload it to the YouTube channel and depending on who it was appropriate for, some videos went into both teacher and student and some videos went into one or the other. And that way, if I get that question again, I literally send the link to the YouTube and I know that almost everybody will be able to access that in one way or another without any login info. Like they don't have to get into their school account. They can just watch the video. And I also share it with the world. So, you know, if you are somebody out there looking for certain things, you can go to my YouTube channel, and if, you know, we use the same sort of resource, you might not have to create it. You can just curate it. And that's where that creation versus curation kind of question comes back into play a little bit. Because we can't do everything all the time on our own. We have to find the high quality things that have been done and use those and then slowly build up our own personal libraries as well.
Our goal is to turn students into lifelong learners and the best way to do that is to be one yourself! As Melissa Thom pointed out earlier in this course, librarians need to be familiar with all the digital tools so they can pass that information on to our classroom teachers.
It's time to learn a new tool! Using pages 8-9 of the Course Packet found in the Resources above, choose a new creation tool that you can use in your library. Often there will be free versions of a program that you can try out—test the waters—before actually purchasing the tool. Looking at the responses from the Retreat attendees, choose a tool that you do not currently use and research that tool. What would you use that tool for? How does it relate to what you already have? Do any exciting possibilities jump out at you if you do acquire this curation tool?
MLA Citation
Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials: Learning a New Tool." School Library Connection, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267079?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.
Entry ID: 2267743
Additional Resources
About the Author
MLA Citation
Thom, Melissa. "Marketing Your Digital Materials. Creation Tools [5:29]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, August 2021, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267079?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/2267079?learningModuleId=2267071&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 2267079