NestvogelSLIS761

 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...

 When I started teaching,  I had a chalkboard, chalk and some old textbooks.   I had no curriculum other than the textbooks.  There were no curricular standards much less any library or technology standards.  There was no technology.  We didn't have a printer in our school.  We only had a purple mimeograph machine.  Our school secretary/nurse had to take anything that needed to be printed to the district office for printing. The library had a card catalog and that's how we looked for books.  My generation has probably experienced the most changes in education than any other generation of educators.  The advent of technology in the world of education changed everything.  In my generation, we went from World Book Encyclopedias to the World Wide Web overnight.  I can remember sitting in a professional development seminar and the speaker telling us that everything we were teaching our children would be obsolete in the next fiv...