680. Artifacts

One theme for this class has been taking on modeling behavior when it comes to engaging technology as tech leaders.  The librarians in my district are tech-savvy and we usually bring and model new tech tools to other departments.  However, I feel we haven't done a great job of showing our tech leadership when it comes to our own department.  So for this class, I decided to take on a more active role with two of our tech tools: 
 

Social Media presence:

Our Twitter handle, DGSLibrary, was used mostly to communicate schedule changes when we had in-person students. Occasionally we would highlight a class or project but we weren't very active in sharing our story. I have started a weekly campaign to promote books in our library, books I'm reading, books I'm listening to, or the books in the Lincoln Awards list. The list has 20 books and each Wednesday I'll be tweeting a short book talk video about one of them. Last week's tweet was about A Heart in a Body in the World by Deb Caletti. 

DGS Library Website (Libguides) presence:

Remote learning has meant that our students and staff rely more on our website for information.  We started using Libguides last year to mostly link to Google Docs with instructions. This year we are converting lots of our instruction to videos for both students and teachers. For a Social Studies class, American Government, I created a page to include all the information that in the past we would have just linked to students from their Google Classroom with videos, interactive games, and a section in Spanish to help our EL students. Check it out at Media Bias. 

681. Managing Ed Tech Services Intro

Hello! Welcome to my blog for all library, teaching, and technology-related things.

My name is Inma Galan, I am a high school teacher-librarian at Downers Grove South High School in Downers Grove. This is my 5th year with the district. Prior to working at the high school,  I worked at a public library facilitating storytime programs for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. My day to day job allows me to work with a variety of classes from doing book talks to teaching citation tools.  We are a 1:1 school and now with remote teaching obviously rely on technology daily but even before we had a chance to utilize technology daily.  I want to learn more about leveraging and managing technology as we continue to change and evolve. I like to learn more about creating opportunities for all our students to engage with technology in more creative ways. 

I am a mom to two boys (17 & 13) and a dog, plus two cats that came along with my fiance. I am currently training to run my first marathon in 3 weeks!  I love to travel and hope to have a chance to go back home (Spain) next summer. 

680-Navigating Social Media

 

We use Twitter and Instagram in our library as a way to communicate and share information with students and staff. I don’t think many families follow us or that we particularly do a good job of reaching out to families.  One of the main reasons we started to use Twitter and Instagram was to share schedules with students, now with remote learning, we are mostly sharing new tools, tutorials, and book talks. In an always-connected world, I think it is important that we share with and reach out to our students, staff, and families. 

We have a pretty standard policy when it comes to inappropriate technology use, the first time students log into the district Chromebooks they have to agree to follow the policies. Honestly, I think most of them click on the "agree" without reading the statement. When we work with freshmen students we always remind them of the policy and the fact that there is not an expectation of privacy on district-owned devices and networks.  Additionally, when we work with classes we remind them of copyright laws and how they apply to in-school projects versus projects they will work for the outside world to consume (creating a blog or web posting versus a Google Slide in-class presentation). 

I think school leaders need to have more conversations with students, what is their perception of cyberbullying, how do they experience it, how do they think it can be solved or prevented.  I think we do a good job of trying to talk to students but at times our messages seem so prescriptive that they can’t relate to the message.  

680. Introduction

 Welcome to my blog for all library, teaching, and technology-related things.

My name is Inma Galan, I am a high school teacher-librarian at Downers Grove South High School in Downers Grove. This is my 5th year with the district. Prior to working at the high school, I worked at a public library facilitating storytime programs for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. This is my 6th class on the Instructional Technology Endorsement program. I have completed my ESL/Bilingual endorsements at St. Francis and really enjoyed the experience. 

Normally, I would be working with a variety of classes with daily changes from doing book talks to teaching citation tools. However, under the current circumstances we, the librarian's team, are doing the best we can to support teachers and students. We are a 1:1 school and were used to using technology daily. Now we are taking it up to the next level. 

I am a mom to two boys (17 & 13) and a crazy dog.  I love to travel and immerse myself in new cultures.  I am originally from Spain. This past summer we had planned to travel to Spain & Portugal, we're still hoping we'll get to do that next summer. In the meantime, I have been running and reading a lot. 

EEND 675 Foundations Artifacts

The tools that I would like to highlight and that are part of the extensions we use in my district are ExplainEverything and Pear Deck.  They both can be used to engage students both in the classroom and when using remote learning.  There are free options available however subscription-based options provide extra support and resources. 

Explain Everything is an interactive whiteboard platform that allows teachers and students to collaborate, share, and learn. Teachers record and share lessons using options like images and videos. Students record and share videos as evidence of their learning. Here are instructions on how to set up a project using Explain Everything. Here is a sample of a completed project. 

Pear Deck transforms Google Slides into interactive slides by allowing you to include different types of questions for students to answer on their own or during class. The teacher mode allows you to see who is participating and display responses anonymously.

Here is an example of a Slides on finding News Sources that used Pear Deck to assess students' understanding of the concepts.

EEND 678 Effective Technology Integration. Artifacts

The topics we have covered over the last 8 weeks focused on leveraging technology effectively. This looks different for all of us given our roles, students, resources, and districts. My role as a teacher-librarian is to provide instruction, support students' literacy and reading for pleasure, and create collaboration opportunities with teachers.  Technology allows me to achieve these goals. The tools/artifacts I decided to share support students' literacy both in the classroom and for their own reading pleasure. 

Sora is the student reading app from Overdrive Education. It provides students with access to ebooks and audiobooks that can be downloaded to their devices (Chromebooks) and or phones.  Schools can set the number of ebooks students can check out and the length of the checkout. District libraries can share books between schools and/or help students borrow from public libraries. Teachers can assign books to be read and check on reading statistics. Students can highlight and take notes that can be downloaded as a PDF or to Google Drive. Here is a presentation on how to access our Sora App. 

Newsela is an instructional content platform that publishes daily online articles on a range of topics and reading levels and integrated assessments. Newsela helps students develop critical nonfiction literacy skills. Teachers can engage each learner with up to date content, view metrics on student usage and performance, differentiate with 5 reading levels, including articles in Spanish are available as well for ELL, and search by standards.  

EEND 713- Reflection

My two takeaways from this class are Authenticity and  Flexibility. For engagement to happen in an e-learning environment students must feel their assignments are authentic, relevant to their learning, providing them choice and ownership. Alongside authenticity, there needs to be flexibility for students and teachers to adapt to change, to modify plans, to change technology, to abandon and pick up new projects.