The Daring Librarian

The Task: "You've moved to the upscale neighborhood of Mt. Olympus, rubbing elbows with the big shots, the wealthy, the divine - yes the Greek Gods. To fit in you better know who your neighbors are! This playlist will help you find out all about their habits, attitudes, and yes...their powers!" During testing season we have a challenge to support student research with limited access to our computer labs and mobile labs. So, teaming with my 7th grade English teachers, we've re-worked our usual Greek Mythology research unit & adding a Reality TV hook for engagement. (Confession: 2 of my 3 seventh grade English teachers & I are also all huge Bravo fans & and our shared guilty pleasure is the Real Housewives franchise) Since we didn't want to do "Real Housewives of Mt. Olympus" for fear that our guy students would be turned off by that, we thought Big Rich would do the trick! PS. This lesson also would work for our good friends in the S...

Only 3 weeks until the ISTE11 conference kickoff with Mario Armstrong! OhEmGee, I am SO excited! Besides being super busy with with ISTE Board service, meetings, poster sessions, Blogger cafe hanging, and playgrounds - I'll be presenting twice on two exciting (but very different!) panels! !! Game Show Learning! Learning Tools Family Feud: Crowdsourced Edition with Geek Tribe pals my dear mentor the amazing Joyce Valenza, super cool & smart Shannon M. Miller, slick Chad Lehman, hilarious & high-energy Nick "The Nerdy Teacher" Provenzano, and the wonderously sweet & funny Matthew Winner! With our special game show host the AWEsome Steve Dembo! Survey Says! This is gonna be GROOVY! We're gonna re-visit the favourite 70's Game Show with a Twist! We've crowdsourced the survey with over 100 of our PLN answering questions using a Google Form and will be going head-to-head boys against the girls to see if we can guess what the top learning tools wi...

A few weeks ago I blogged about t he AMAZING Fakebook Powerpoint Nicholas Provanzano created in PPT & shared on Slideshare. I even purchased the Discovery Teacher set of Farcebook blank posters & fictional characters examples that I mentioned in the blog - SWEET! We laminated the blank posters so that kids could write on them with dry-erase markers or yes, overhead pens [gasp!]... There are times in our school (like right now) where getting into the iMacLab or using the MacBook mobile labs is difficult due to standardized & computerized testing. These high engagement low tech alternatives are GREAT! But I wanted MORE! So, I re-imagined and re-worked the framework, changed the name to Fakebook, changed some of the text & wording. Created in ComicLife in I exported the image as a .jpeg and inserted into a MS Word doc. You'll need LEGAL SIZE paper to print it but I think it looks real cool! I showed it around to my super cool teachers & they liked it! In a few ...