Category: Technology

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Using READsquared At Your Library

Wednesday, March 3 @ 11:30

READsquared is offering a statewide spring training to showcase the new 2021 CSLP theme, how to do a theme update/import programs, and allow for open Q & A.

You have been invited to a join.me meeting

Join the meeting: join.me/READsquaredTraining 

Wednesday, March 3, 2021 11:30 AM
Eastern Time (US & Canada)
In my time zone?To dial in by phone:United States – Los Angeles, CA
+1.213.226.1066More phone numbersConference ID:
518-509-521 #Need to share screen?  Download the app

Do not reply to this email. Your reply will not be seen by humans.

Tuesday, March 9 @ 2 PM

Register to be emailed a meeting link. https://forms.gle/uK5UhUc45eKRwYFq7
Tuesday, March 9 @ 2 PM
Join a discussion with other NH Librarians on how they use READsquared at their libraries, with patrons and volunteers.

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Free Unique & Fun Tools – Infopeople Webinar

Review of webinar from the Youth Services Team at the Idaho Commission for Libraries in the February 2021 issue of their newsletter the Scoop:

To whet your whistle for this webinar, here are few examples that were featured…
Music –
• Radio Garden – get a taste of international culture without leaving your house. Spin a virtual globe
and listen to radio stations from around the world!
• Conserve the Sounds – an online museum for endangered and vanishing sounds. (i.e. a payphone
or a coffee grinder). Hear sounds that are about to disappear from everyday life.
Games –
• Rebuses – over 1,000 rebus puzzles to solve, varying levels and shareable
• Hex Invaders – a play on Space Invaders, but all about hexadecimals
Art –
• Use Cubes – allows you to build 3D pixel art – looks a little like Minecraft
• How Long to Read – a practical site that tells you how long it will take the average reader to read a
specific book – it can also give you your own reading speed on a sample of the book

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Navigating Youth Media

As the forward in this report states, “Young people are navigating their developing
identities in the midst of tremendous social and technological change. They are increasingly relying on digital media to connect, learn, and play.” This initiative is seeking to identify current media habits, gaps and ways media can better benefit youth.

This report is the first publication of an initiative called By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. Media production by youth, with youth, and for youth describes approaches to engaging public media’s “missing audience” of tweens and teens
who fall between content offerings for young children and adults. This literature review is a precursor to the full report, which will represent the ideas of a diverse group of youth ages 10-17 being interviewed at the time of this publication.

Navigating-Youth-MediaDownload

Blog post: Let’s Talk About Public Media and the Next Generation

More about By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audience

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Media Literacy in Early Childhood Report

Now that living in a virtual world seems to be a part of this so called new normal–media literacy is even more important to even our youngest.

Executive Summary

The TEC (Technology in Early Childhood) Center at Erikson Institute in partnership with the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), and the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) was awarded a grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) in 2018 to host two national forum meetings to discuss media literacy in early childhood with experts and practitioners with the objective of developing materials to support the understanding and teaching of media literacy in early childhood.

This report recognizes and builds upon the extensive media literacy educational materials, books, research, and policies that have been developed to date. The framework builds upon many existing media literacy-focused frameworks including Teaching Tolerance’s Digital Literacy Framework (2017) and Project Look Sharp’s Process of Media Literacy (2018). The child development and children’s media use findings bring together decades of research from various fields in order to understand media literacy in early childhood. The cultural considerations, activities, and tips highlight existing educational materials and concerns raised by practitioners who serve children in a variety of settings. The barriers and solutions to sustaining this work shed light on the challenges practitioners and caregivers face daily. The intention of this Media Literacy in Early Childhood Report is to utilize media literacy, child development, and early education knowledge to develop educational materials and advocate for support for media literacy education in early childhood.

This report provides:

1. an updated definition of media literacy in early childhood;

2. an explanation of developmentally appropriate media literacy education for children under age 8;

3. background on the developmental abilities and expectations of young children with regards to media use and media literacy; and

4. guidelines to support media literacy in early childhood.

TEC-MediaLiteracy-ReportDownload
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December Programming & STEM

From Becky Tapley, STEM Math Education Specialist (pronouns: she/her/hers) at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance:

As we step into the month of December tomorrow, I wanted to send some resources your way to help you reflect on the activities you may engage your youth with this season. 

The first article has excellent thoughts about ways to build awareness, representation, and sensitivity into your December planning: 

https://www.helpteaching.com/blog/4-ways-to-make-your-classroom-holiday-inclusive.html

Some highlights are these 4 tips:

-Don’t Assume, Stereotype, or Tokenize
-Build Diversity into Your Lesson Plans
-Think Outside the Usual Holiday Cliches
-Consider Forms of Inclusion Outside of Religion and Culture

One topic that is brought up in that article is to include some STEM projects. “Holiday STEM projects offer more great ideas since they often focus on things like winter weather that can be examined outside of a cultural or religious context.”

Check out Howtosmile.org and search for topics your youth are interested in.

One example: How Animals Stay Warm: https://www.howtosmile.org/resource/smile-000-000-002-092

From snowflakes, to penguins, to winter data collection: http://mathwire.com/seasonal/winter05.html

Winter Math and Science Snow connections: https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-posts/lindsey-petlak/winter-math-and-science-can-be-snow-much-fun/

I hope these give you some ideas on how to make your December activities and celebrations inclusive and engaging!

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FREE Digital classes for seniors–presented by seniors

PSS is pleased to announce its partnership with GetSetup, a nationwide peer-to peer, online learning platform providing digital classes on a wide range of topics – for seniors, presented by seniors.

PSS’s goal is to dramatically increase the digital capacity of older adults, by improving their skills with their core devices and apps, so we’re focusing on tech-skills classes first, with others to come.

All classes are FREE when you access: https://www.getsetup.io/partner/pss We encourage new users to take their New Member Orientation class (found on our landing page) to help you navigate the web site, select and participate in a class and get Customer Support. We look forward to assisting you in growing your digital skills!

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Virtual Field Trips

I need a vacation. I need to go SOMEWHERE. Yes–most of us are at this point. Classroom teachers are not the only ones using virtual field trips as fun teaching aids.

Melanee Stinnett-Voss a member of Bitmoji Craze for Educators recently shared her virtual field trips in Bitmoji style HERE.

During a recent workshop for educators to improve their virtual program offerings, we went on a field trip to Mount Vernon. Our instructor first gave us a brief overview of how to move around the virtual museum. We were instructed to take a piece of paper and divide it up in four parts and label them Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. See a like document HERE

We were then given time to explore the museum on our own, noting where we found examples of science, technology, engineering and math on our sheet. After the free time, we were brought back as a group and then split up into a team or small group to talk about what we learned and found most interesting. We entered our top finds on a group Google Jamboard. Then we grouped back together for a short recap.

Museums

Tour collections and learn about the history of art and artifacts with these online museum experiences.

  • American Museum of Natural History: Brian Selznick, author of Wonderstruck, leads a virtual tour of the museum, meeting field experts along the way.
  • British Museum: This cool, interactive site lets kids browse the museum collection by time period, not by room, so kids can focus in on the era they’re most interested in.
  • Colonial Williamsburg: Eight different webcams let viewers peek in on what’s happening at places like Merchants’ Square or Raleigh Tavern.
  • Historic Hudson Valley: This site offers many history-themed online experiences for kids, from “Traders and Raiders,” which looks at the history of pirates in the greater New York Area, to “People Not Property,” which teaches kids about slavery. There are also lots of ideas for at-home historical activities, like cooking with cornmeal or “tinsmithing” at home with aluminum foil.
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art: The #MetKids site is geared for little ones, and lets them explore a cute, illustrated map to find treasures in the museum’s collection.
  • Musée du Louvre: The world-famous museum offers virtual tours by subject, from the body in art to Egyptian antiquities.
  • Museum of Science: The #MOSatHome page offers virtual looks at the Boston museum’s exhibits and hosts daily livestreams and webinars.
  • National Baseball Hall of Fame: Browse through the collection of photographs, memorabilia and more to learn more about America’s national pastime. The museum also offers virtual programming on its YouTube page.
  • National Constitution Center: Explore exhibitions about constitutional conflicts through the years, including “Hamilton: The Constitutional Clashes That Shaped a Nation.” For a fee groups can also participate in live, virtual guided tours for up to 300 people.
  • National Gallery of Art: The National Gallery has 50 video tours specifically geared towards kids, focusing on a work and the people, places, and scenes surrounding its creation.
  • National Museum of Computing: Located in Bletchley Park in the U.K., home of the famous WWII codebreakers like Alan Turing, this museum offers a virtual tour that takes visitors through the history of computers.
  • Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History: You can bookmark this one to visit over and over, since it offers virtual version of every exhibition in the museum.
  • The Vatican Museum: You can get 360 looks at nine rooms in the Vatican — including the magnificent Sistine Chapel.

Farms

See how food grows, is harvested, and gets to your table with these farm tours.

  • American Egg Board: The Egg Board has virtual tours of different egg farms, and many of them let you choose different videos for kindergarten/elementary and middle school students.
  • Bonnie Plants: Home Depot takes kids on a multi-part virtual field trip to this grower, hoping to inspire kids to get into gardening themselves.
  • Bright Farms: A farm grower in Irvington, NY shows kids how food goes from the field (in this case, an indoor grower) to the grocery store. There’s even a quiz at the end!
  • Farm Food 360: Kids can see 11 different sorts of farm and food plants, including dairy cow farms, egg processing facilities and an apple orchard.

Landmarks

You might not be able to go on your sightseeing vacation at the moment, but these virtual landmark tours are the next best thing.

Zoos and Aquariums

These zoos and aquariums have live cams where kid can check in with the animals.

Even More Fun

From a candy factory to the surface of Mars, these tours take kids to places that aren’t available to them even in normal times.

  • Boston Children’s Museum: “Walk” through all three floors of the Boston Children’s Museum on this virtual tour. Direct your kids to fun exhibits like Explore-a-Saurus and the Japanese House.
  • Discovery Education: The site hosts virtual field trips for kids, from engineering plants that make the cars of the future to a lab that researches nuclear energy.
  • Great Lakes : This virtual field trip from Great Lakes Now has three components: coastal wetlands, algae, and lake sturgeon. Each video is a quick five minutes.
  • Johnson Space Center: Boeing leads the tour through the Houston, Texas facility, covering the history — and future — of aerospace innovation.
  • M&Ms Factory Tour: The Food Network hosts a virtual tour of the M&Ms factory and shows how the delicious candy gets made.
  • Nature Lab: The Nature Conservancy offers 11 virtual field trips that allow students to do everything from exploring a coastal rainforest while in a canoe to unlocking the secrets of coral reefs in the Dominican Republic. Each video is about 45 minutes long.
  • Outer Space Tours: Kids can see the real surface of Mars, courtesy of the Curiosity rover. NASA also does virtual tours of the Moon, along with the International Space Station.
  • Recycling Simplified: Take kids on a tour of a modern-day recycling center or landfill, and teach them about environmental sustainability.
  • Slime in Space: Nickelodeon teamed up with two astronauts on the International Space Station to demonstrate how slime reacts to microgravity and had kids reproduce those same demonstrations back here on Earth. It makes for an amazing 15-minute virtual field trip. Pre and Post activities available.
  • Sơn Đoòng: National Geographic offers a 360-degree tour of the world’s largest ave, situated in Quảng Bình Province, Vietnam. You can even hear the water as it runs over the rocks.
  • Stellarium Web: kids can explore over 60,000 stars, locate planets, and watch sunrises and solar eclipses. If you enter your location, you can see all the constellations that are visible in the night sky in your corner of the world.

Tour suggestions from Good Housekeeping, Weareteachers.com,

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U.S. Department of Education Releases Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide

WASHINGTON – On October 23, 2020, the U.S. Department of Education released a new Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide, a resource to help parents and guardians understand how digital tools can provide tailored learning opportunities, engage students with course materials, encourage creative expression, and enrich the educational experience.                          

“As technology continues to iterate and benefit every part of our lives, all students need more opportunities to leverage the potential of technology in education,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. “We hope families can use the information we release today as many of them are relying on technology more so than ever before and are navigating learning from home.”

Digital learning can help families and educators meet the specific needs of individual students, understand a child’s progress, and connect families and students with resources in their school community and beyond. As an increasing number of school systems implement digital learning both inside and outside of the traditional classroom, this guide demystifies digital learning for parents and empowers them to be effective advocates for high-quality digital learning.

The Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide includes guidance and best practices for caregivers around topics including:

  1. How to leverage flexibilities and innovations technology and digital tools provide, such as accessibility options, to meet the unique needs of every learner — including students with disabilities and English language learners.
  2. Simple steps parents can take to keep their children safe online and foster safe online behavior, such as accessing security features on a child’s device, keeping track of log-in information, and keeping children safe while videoconferencing. The guide also discusses the importance of digital citizenship and offers parents resources to help their child navigate online bullying or encounters with troubling content.
  3. How a competency-based learning approach, which measures a student’s knowledge of a subject rather than time spent on the subject, can harness technology for the benefit of students. Digital resources like online assessments, periodic check-ins, and more can update parents on their child’s learning progress, and they can provide instructional flexibility in the event of a school disruption.
  4. Easy-to-understand primers on major federal laws governing student privacy and safety, such as FERPA, IDEA, and COPPA.

The Parent and Family Digital Learning Guide was informed by the feedback and contributions of digital learning experts representing researchers, parents, educators, and school leaders, as well as Digital Promise and Learning Heroes. This publication is the first in a series that will ultimately provide digital learning knowledge and resources to educators and school leaders in addition to parents and students.

The guide can be viewed here.