A Match Made in Heaven: Technology and Friends

We are teacher librarians who found each other through social media. After celebrating our love of all things library, we were finally able to meet face-to-face at a conference, where we took over a corner and created Midwest Teacher Librarian Chat (#mwlibchat) on Twitter. Our goal is to share, promote, and support teacher librarians everyday with great ideas, strategies, and inspiration. In addition, we both believe that today’s school library is like no other in history, hence our phrase, “This ain’t your grandma’s library.” We work together to promote and share ideas and strategies to encourage librarians to be #FutureReady.

A Match Made in Heaven: Technology and Thought

Conducting research with younger students can often lead to projects that simply regurgitate information and facts. As librarians and literacy leaders, we believe that students should use technology as a means to share their learning. This can be challenging, but also engaging and powerful. We strive to provide opportunities for our students to share their learning in unique and creative ways.

Rigor and Technology

Technology should not drive learning but instead provide a means to enhance learning experiences and increase rigor. The use of technology resources that allow for multiple avenues of learning is ideal given time and budget. Students can be creative in terms of design and visual appeal while at the same time use deep research skills, evaluation, and synthesis of information to create new knowledge.

In addition, the ability to present and expand on visually-represented material provides students a great opportunity to develop communication skills. These skills are applicable across the curriculum and provide some great opportunities to collaborate. Taking learning to higher levels of understanding through leveled questioning and exploring increases the rigor of learning experiences and ultimately leads to higher achievement.

Raising Creators, Not Consumers

When working with students, we believe strongly in helping them to become not only critical consumers of information, but also to create new products to share their learning. One current favorite tool Lynn uses for sharing her 2^nd-5^th grade students’ learning is ChatterPix Kids.

ChatterPix Kids by Duck, Duck, Moose, Inc. is a free app compatible with iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. This app allows creators to take a picture of an object, add a “mouth,” and create a thirty second recording to make their picture “talk” or “chatter.” Creators can also add text, photo filters, and “stickers” to enhance their digital creations.

Lesson Example

Although our students have used ChatterPix Kids to create projects such as book promotions and to share their learning in various subjects, one of our favorites has been the biography ChatterPix projects created by third graders at Titan Hill Elementary School.

After researching and reading about a famous person, third graders were asked to create a summary of the person’s life highlighting what they believed to be their person’s most significant activities and contributions. Students were asked to create and practice a “script” prior to the day of recording to ensure they were not only fluent, but that they also shared only the most significant ideas about their person and met the thirty-second recording criteria.

On the day of the recordings, students either took a picture of the cover of one of the books they’d read about their person, or used a copyright-free image source, such as Creative Commons Images, to find a picture of their person. Students then created the “mouth” recorded their audio, and added text with their name and the name of their famous person to the ChatterPix recordings. Students saved their projects to the iPad camera roll, which was then uploaded to a shared folder. Finished recordings were shared with the class and with parents.

Students were highly engaged in the research and creative process because they were given an opportunity to share their expertise with an authentic audience in a creative way. The creation of the ChatterPix biographies not only allowed students to share their learning, but the activity also reinforced the nonfiction summary writing and fluency practice they’d been conducting in class. Discussions of ethical use of information and images were easily embedded and reinforced throughout the project.

Creation and Presentation

Another favorite digital tool of ours is the Buncee creation and presentation tool. Buncee is essentially an amped slideshow resource with images, animations, text, and audio capability. The Buncee resource is Web and app accessible with a free and paid version available. The education version, eduBuncee, is featured here. 

Buncee allows students and teachers to create multiple slides with backgrounds, stickers, animations (falling snow, sparkling stars), uploaded images, and Web images that link back to the original source. In addition, users can add text, embed links to outside websites, and “clip and stitch” slides from one Buncee project to another. These features make Buncee a great resource for presenting information as well as project-based learning.

We have used Buncee with students in grades two through eight. Younger students used it during summer school to share their idea of the perfect summer day. Older students used Buncee as a platform for sharing books and research topics.

We have also used Buncee to share staff information and links with teachers at the beginning of the school year by creating a hub they can refer back to later.

Lesson Example

We’ve used eduBuncee with students in grade six at Johnson Crossing Academic Center as a means to present booktrailers and as a research presentation tool. As school librarians, we often have limited time to convey a number of skills in a lesson. Buncee allows us to guide students through the research process, evaluate websites for projects, and use citation skills for images students find on the Internet. One of our collaborative projects at Fremont Middle School paired a novel read in an eighth grade class with students’ thoughts on social issues and themes found in the novel. Students brainstormed a list of social themes and symbolism from the novel to begin their project. They chose images from within Buncee and from the Internet to represent their thoughts on individual topics. The project included an explanation of images and how they related to the components found in the novel. Students’ final task was to present to the class and elaborate on their projects and meaning. Thinking was required everywhere.

Standards

Buncee is a resource which allows teachers to address several standards including ALA Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, Common Core, and Nebraska ELA (Nebraska is not a Common Core state) standards including inquiry, drawing conclusions and creating new knowledge, ethical use of information, collaboration, and expression of a love of reading. In addition, revised Nebraska ELA standards include technology, inquiry, and digital citizenship.

This is one of the reasons we were excited to share Chatterpix and Buncee with teachers and students. Throughout the last year, users have been able to gradually expand the scope of content units to include the components of design, research, ethical use, and presentations in a project-based learning opportunity. As school librarians, one of our favorite projects is to explore a book beyond the summary of the plot and characters to develop a deep understanding of social and emotional concepts found in the novel. Using visual design, writing, research, and outside links, students are able to fit the content to what speaks to them, thus creating a deep and engaging learning experience. During the coming school year, with an expanded subscription base, we hope to create collaboration between content areas on middle school teams using Buncee as the final project platform.

We both believe that great digital resources provide not only an engaging experience for students but promote deep content exploration, ethical use of information, and creation of knowledge. That’s the environment in which we want to operate.