NestvogelSLIS761

 At the beginning of the Pandemic, I was teaching second grade as I had for many years.  I was confident in my content knowledge and I was confident in my presentation skills.  My children made huge gains year after year and they had fun doing it!  I was named "Teacher of the Year" by my peers just the year before!  I was a great teacher!  And then Covid hit and everything changed overnight.  Teachers had one week to prepare for months and months of virtual learning.  I was no spring chicken and certainly not a digital native, but what choice did I have?  I had no idea what I was doing, but I dove right in!  The biggest gift that I was given in this week before virtual learning was the gift of Chromebooks to my children!   The support manual for Google defines Chromebooks as, "  a new type of computer designed to help you get things done faster and easier. They run  Chrome OS , an operating system that has cloud stora...

 Hi All! As I walked into school Friday morning through the seemingly never-ending car line, I heard shouts of, "Happy Birthday, Library Lady!".  It's wonderful to feel loved by all the littles in our school!  Today is my 60th birthday and we are celebrating in Nashville!  We've never been here before and it is fun! On Collette Cassinelli's blog,  EdTech Vision , I found a wonderful tool that I have never seen before but should have.   It is called BookCreator and it is a real gem!       It can be used in all subject areas to make multimedia digital books.  It is easy enough to use with Kindergartners but engaging enough to be used with 12th graders and up!  The students can combine text with audio, visual, photos, and drawings.  When complete, you can download it as an ebook or print it as a PDF file.   You can try it out for free and create 40 books, but there is a cost to using it as a classroom teacher for $1...

  I can't remember how many countless times I have thought about or said out loud how happy I am that I didn't grow up in a digital world or, for the most part, that my children did not either.  It seemed so much easier and more gentle.  When I was a little girl there were three channels on the TV and they came on at 6:00 am with the National Anthem and ended at 12:00 am with the National Anthem.  The news on all three channels was basically the same information regardless of what channel you were watching and we trusted that that news was correct and backed by credible sources.  Now we have to worry about "fake news" and the credibility of sources in everything we see, read or listen to.  I've had my heart drop several times after seeing something pop up on my phone or IPad about some famous person dying only to learn it wasn't the truth.  Those "news" items were easily found to be untrue, but many things are not.  I find myself going to fact-che...