Connect Collaborate Share

Monday, March 3, 2014

Dr. Seuss Activities

What are your Dr. Seuss plans for this week?

The blog winners for the month of February are:

Grand Prize Winner of a $50.00 iTunes Educational App Card is Susette!

Winners of 5 smaller prizes are:
Janice
Margo
Jeanene P.
Karen
Linda H.

Thank you all for your comments on our blog!

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Today is Theodor Seuss Geisel's birthday!

Happy birthday to him!

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Jeanne K.'s Birthday

Today is Jeanne K.'s birthday!

Happy birthday to her!

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

World Book Online

Can you provide us with feedback about World Book Online?

As you know, we purchase the extra World Book databases each year, and we would love to hear about if/how/when you use them.

Can you let us know the following information? We are concerned that the databases are not displaying properly, and we are trying to troubleshoot the problems we are having.

1. Please go to Pioneer Library via the Quicklinks on the district page. Once in Pioneer, click on World Book Encyclopedia. Can you please let us know if it says Welcome Salt Lake District at the very top---or if it says Welcome Utah Education Network?

2. While you are in World Book, look down at the bottom of the page. You should be able to see links to the extra databases the we subscribe to. They are Early Peoples, Inventions and Discoveries, Living Green, Dramatic Learning, Advanced, Hispanica Saber, etc. Please let us know if you see those links.

3. Now leave Pioneer and go back to the district page. Go back to Quicklinks. This time, click on World Book Online. Tell us what you see. Do you see all of the extra databases?

4. Do you or your classroom teachers use any of the extra databases?

Thanks for providing us with this information!

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Be a Buddy

Jeanene sent this information about a song called Be a Buddy.

Dr. Jean has a cute song about bullies. She is really great for early grade kids.

Here is a link to the newsletter that contains the lyrics to the song.

You can also see the buddy song on YouTUBE.

UELMA and UCET Registrations

We will be awarding blog prizes at the end of February---as we do every month.

But we also have 2 bonus prizes to be awarded in February!

A couple of weeks ago, we posted something about UELMA and UCET and asked about past experiences with these conferences. We put the names of the 12 commenters from that posting into a hat and drew out 2 names.

Jill----You have won a registration to UELMA on March 13th.

Sarah----You have won a registration to UCET on April 3rd and 4th.

You will need to get permission from your administrators to attend, and your administrators will also need to pay for your subs.

We love UELMA and UCET and look forward to seeing you there!

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Mary R.'s Birthday

Today is Mary R.'s birthday!

Happy birthday to her!

Saturday, February 8, 2014

John C.'s Birthday

Today is John C.'s birthday!

Happy birthday to him!

Friday, February 7, 2014

UELMA and UCET

UELMA and UCET! How great are they!!

What has been your past experiences with these conferences?

UELMA is coming up on March 13th.

UCET is April 3rd and 4th.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Susette's Birthday

Today is Susette's birthday!

Happy birthday to her!

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Pikas

Joseph mentioned pikas in his comments about Groundhog Day. I had never heard of pikas, and so I looked them up.

Do we really think that Margo's dog is trying to catch pikas? They're just so cute! And they eat flowers!

Could pikas really live by Ensign Elementary?

David Attenborough has some good information about pikas. (Sorry the title has the word damn in it.) The video clip is 3 minutes long. Those little pikas work so hard!

Ensign's mascot is the bald eagle. Maybe they should change their mascot to be a pika!

Book Repair

Book repair! Who has time for that!! :-) In your library, what do you do with books that need to be repaired?

Do you put them in a stack in your back office---with good intentions that you will someday repair them----and then they stay there for years?

If you have an assistant, is he/she ever able to help with repairs?

Do you simply withdraw the book from circulation?

Monday, February 3, 2014

Over and Over Again

In the movie, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray lives the same day over and over again.

If you had to watch the same movie over and over again---every single day---what movie would you like it to be?

Punxsutawney Phil

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday which means that we will be having 6 more weeks of winter.

Are there groundhogs in Utah?

Would you rather have 6 more weeks of winter or an early spring?

Do you have an interesting groundhog fact that you would like to share with us?

New Blog Winners

The January blog winners are:

$50.00 iTunes Educational App Card
Tim

Winners of 5 smaller prizes:
Amy
Marilyn
Jean R.
Joseph
Mary R.

Congratulations and thank you to EVERYONE for your wonderful comments on our Connect Collaborate Share blog!

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Joseph's Birthday

Today is Joseph's birthday!

Happy birthday to him!

(Joseph sent this image in to be used for his birthday post.) :-)

Monday, January 27, 2014

Newbery and Caldecott Winners Just Announced

The 2013 Newbery and Caldecott winners were announced this morning.

Newbery Medal Winner:

Flora & Ulysses
By Kate DiCamillo

Newbery Honor Books:

Doll Bones
By Holly Black

The Year of Billy Miller
By Kevin Henkes

One Came Home
By Amy Timberlake

Paperboy
By Vince Vawter

Caldecott Medal Winner:

Locomotive
Written and Illustrated by Brian Floca

Caldecott Honor Books:

Journey
Written and Illustrated by Aaron Becker

Flora and the Flamingo
Written and Illustrated Molly Idle

Mr. Wuffles
Written and Illustrated by David Wiesner

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

There are more than 1 million apps in the App Store and more than 60 billion apps have been downloaded. What apps do you recommend? What apps have you purchased that you enjoy?

Friday, January 10, 2014

Great Blog Winners

We have new blog winners for the month of December.

Winner of a $50.00 iTunes educational app card is Jean B.!

Five smaller prizes will be arriving in district mail for:
Julie B.
Lori
Jill
Marilyn
Janice

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Possible Caldecott?

Journey, a wordless picture book by Aaron Becker, is hitting library blogs as a possible 2014 Caldecott.

Have you seen it? A lonely young girl uses a red crayon to draw herself into another world. It kind of seems like maybe she should have made the acquaintance of Harold (and his purple crayon). :-)

Are there other new picture books that you think might be contenders?

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Newbery Predictions

The Newbery award will be announced at the end of this month.

Doll Bones by Holly Black (who wrote the Spiderwick Chronicles) is one of the books that bloggers have been talking about as a possible contender. Has anyone read it yet?

Are there any titles that you've come across this year that you think might be contenders for the award?

Checking Out eBooks

We are currently exploring the possibility of checking out our Follett ebooks.

If a classroom teacher checked out The Biggest Snowball of All, he/she would be the only person who could access this title for whatever loan period we set (and we are considering 2 or 3 days). The teacher's checkout would "live in the cloud" which means that he/she could view the book from any computer with internet access. OR the teacher could download the new Follett app which is called Enlight onto his/her mobile device. At that point, the teacher could also have The Biggest Snowball of All on his/her ipad or smartphone. At the end of the loan period, the ebook simply disappears. The teacher would also have the option to return the ebook early.

How do you feel about this? For example, if a bunch of 4th grade students at Bonneville checked out the rock and mineral ebooks because they were doing a project in their classroom -- and then 4th grade students at Rose Park were doing rock and mineral and fossil research in the library, those ebooks would not be available for any librarian for research purposes.

How do you think the classroom teachers in your school would feel about this? We have a concern about some of the popular ebook titles. For example, the Martin Luther King, Jr. ebooks (we have 4 of them) are very popular in January. If we DON'T check out ebooks, those 4 ebooks could conceivably be used by dozens and dozens of teachers over the course of the month. Since most teachers probably only use these ebooks for 20 minutes or so with their students, many many teachers could use these ebooks just in one day. But if we turn on the checkout feature, then those 4 titles could be tied up, and many fewer teachers would be able to use them.

How do you think your students would respond to this? We have recently purchased a small beginning collection of novels (such as Hunger Games) that could be checked out, and we also have a few free novels that are in the public domain (such as Wuthering Heights) that could be checked out. Most of these ebooks are secondary titles. Do you think students would be interested in using the Enlight app on their personal mobile devices and checking out Hunger Games or The Book Thief or The Maze Runner or The Raven Boys or Twilight? We would probably make the loan period 2 weeks for these ebooks. If we make ebooks checkout-able, the features in Shelf where students can take notes and highlight passages and save them would be functionable. We would probably allow students to check out 2-3 ebooks at a time. Students would continue to be able to check out their normal amounts of regular hard copy books as well.

The ebooks cannot check out from the external Shelf link listed on the district page. Students and teachers would check out their ebooks from within your Destiny catalog.

We would love to get your input about checking out ebooks!

As a side note -- we haven't heard yet if UEN has decided to purchase the MyOn ebooks and make them a permanent part of Pioneer Online Library. But IF they do decide to do this, then those ebooks will also be checkout-able through UEN.