Georgia Children's Book Award Voting

My students recently voted for the Georgia Children's Book Award. To invite teachers to participate, I created a Sign Up Genius for teachers to select a voting time. Voting times were every ten minutes on one day.

When students arrived in the media center, I played a slideshow with the book covers to remind students of the books they had read and could vote on. My students enjoyed reminiscing about their favorites during the slideshow.

Then I pulled ten students at a time to vote. Ten voting booths were set up in the media center. Each booth contained a triboard with all of the book covers and a laptop. This year, I created a Microsoft Form with all of the nominees. To vote, students selected their choice from a drop down menu and then clicked submit.

As students finished voting, I gave them an "I voted!" sticker to wear.

Since voting was during Read Across America Week, I set up a Dr. Seuss themed photo booth.  Students joined their classroom teacher at the photo booth after voting. The teachers took pictures and uploaded them to Seesaw to share with parents.

This was such a fun day! I loved listening to my students talk about their favorite books and celebrate reading!

2018 Georgia Children's Book Award Winner

This year's Georgia Children's Book Award winner is It Came in the Mail, written and illustrated by Ben Clanton. This was also the winning book at my school! My students loved this hilarious story about a boy name Liam who really wants mail. So he writes a letter to his mailbox asking for something. Liam's mailbox responds by delivering lots and lots of packages. When the mail becomes unmanageable, Liam decides to share his parcels with his friends because it's as much fun to give as to receive.

Northwest Council for Computer Education Conference 2018

I just returned from the Northwest Council for Computer Education Conference in Seattle, Washington! And although my sleep schedule is still adjusting to the time change, my mind is racing with everything I learned and how I can implement these ideas with my students and teachers!

An important part of my job is to learn more about emerging technologies. I try to attend and present at as many local conferences as possible to increase my learning. This year, I set a goal for myself to attend and present at a conference outside my state, hoping to gain a different perspective. My friend Stephanie Gauthia and I were so excited that the presentation we submitted to NCCE was accepted and that the MIE Travel Program agreed to sponsor our presentation!

Stephanie and I have found success engaging our students with digital breakout games using Microsoft OneNote as the platform. We developed a presentation titled "Escape the Ordinary: Using Digital Breakout EDU to Engage Students" to demonstrate how we create our games and to show examples of the games we have used with our students. Here is a link to the presentation that we used in our session: https://sway.com/sNmOReHiBkBMAAV0?ref=Link. 

We started the session with a digital breakout that we customized for our attendees. The game focused on the commonalities between Georgia and Washington. The prize was peach flavored salt water taffy locked in a box, and the first group to solve all of the clues won the taffy! Our participants were very enthusiastic about the digital breakout and quickly realized how digital breakouts would engage their students as well.

We then explained to our attendees why OneNote makes the best platform for digital breakouts, benefits of using digital breakouts, and our planning process for developing these games. We showed our participants examples of the different digital breakouts we have created (and one made by a student!) and some helpful hints that we have learned along the way.

Stephanie and I were overwhelmed by the response to our session. We loved chatting with participants after the session about how they thought they could use the ideas we presented with their students. We hope that our attendees will share with us the digital breakouts they create, or pictures of their students using the digital breakouts that we shared with them.

I also attended several amazing sessions full of ideas that I can't wait to share with students and teachers in my district.  Here are some of my favorite sessions!

1. "Choose Your Own Adventures in Learning with Microsoft Forms and Sway" This session taught attendees how to use Forms to differentiate instruction based on students' learning preferences. I could also envision using the branching tool in Forms to have students write their own Choose Your Own Adventure stories.

2. "Connected Classroom: Foster Student Learning with Teams, OneNote, and Flipgrid" I have recently started using Flipgrid with my students, and it has been wildly popular! I loved hearing how fellow MIEE Cheryl McClure uses Flipgrid with her students.

3. "Making Office Mobile: APPreciating Microsoft Apps for Education" This session packed a lot of information into an hour! I have not used the Office apps much before, but I will after this session.

4. "Introduction to Computer Science with MakeCode for Minecraft" I thought this session would be like all of my other attempts to learn how to play Minecraft, but I was wrong! This session actually taught me how to get started with Minecraft and also how to use MakeCode to program the game. I would love to use this with my technology club students! MakeCode is definitely one of my favorite things I learned about at NCCE18. I can't wait to order some Circuit Playgrounds and have my students program them using MakeCode.

5. "Taking Your Students to a New Dimension with Paint 3D" My students already seem to know a lot about Paint 3D.  Now it's time for me to catch up to them! Sandi Adams taught this amazing session in which I learned how to create 3D models and mixed reality.

One of my favorite parts of the conference was the interactions that happened between sessions. I loved connecting with other Microsoft Innovative Educator Experts from all over the country. These interactions provided those other perspective that I was hoping to gain during the conference. I learned about how the role of the media specialist in schools outside my region. I also learned a lot about how other elementary schools are using Microsoft products. The MIEE community is strong, vibrant, and committed to helping our students and each other. I now have my own network of professionals who are encouraging me to take risks and will help me if I get stuck.

NCCE18 was truly one of the best, most useful conferences that I have ever attended. I loved Seattle, the sessions, and the people!

Books are a gift!

My students loved this fun new holiday book display! I first selected about sixty library books (thirty for second or third grade readers and thirty for fourth or fifth grade readers) that I thought would be enjoyed by a wide audience. Then I printed bar code labels (without the title or author) for each book. I also scanned the books into a resource list so that I can use the same titles next year. A volunteer and I wrapped all of the books and stuck the correct bar code label on the outside of each "present."

When students came in to check out, they were given the option of selecting a "gift" book to read over the winter break. Teachers reported that students came back to class very excited about their new books and their classmates all wanted to check one out also!

Website Evaluation Skype Game

Another media specialist in my district recently discovered the Fake News Skype Challenge lesson on the Microsoft Educator Community and suggested playing with our fifth graders. We met a few days before the lessons were scheduled to plan and decided to adapt the lesson to better meet our students' needs.

Before the lesson, I created two graphics and we asked our fifth grade teachers to upload them to Canvas, our district's learning management system. When students arrived in the media center, they quickly logged into Canvas on our laptops to access the graphics.

We started by introducing ourselves and our students. Some of our students already knew each other from sports and were excited to connect. Then we explained that we were going to play a game called "Two Truths and a Lie." Most of our students expressed that they had played this game before. We told them that unlike in the traditional game, students would be allowed to use technology to help determine which statement was the lie.

Then we discussed how difficult it is sometimes to decide if a website contains reliable information. Several students shared examples of sites they had visited previously that looked like authentic websites but turned out to have inaccurate information. We directed students to open the graphic called "Seven Tests of Reliability." We read each of the seven tests and discussed how they can be used to determine whether a website contains reliable information. We also told students that we expected them to use these seven tests during the game to determine which statement was the lie.

Then we directed students to open the other graphic. This file contained the three statements for students to evaluate. After we read through all of the statements, we asked students to vote on which one they thought was the lie by standing up after we read it again. 

Then it was research time! We directed students to www.bing.com. They used Bing to locate websites about teach topic. Students were reminded to use the Seven Tests of Reliability for each website they visited to decide whether the information was likely to be accurate or not.

After students had adequate time to research (about fifteen minutes), we asked them to vote again. We read each statement and asked students to stand when we read the statement they believed to be a lie.  

Then we revealed the lie. I thought before we played the game that the lie would be obvious to students, especially after having time to research. However, this was not true! So we spent some time at the end of each lesson discussing which websites students used to gather information and why they were or were not reliable. During this part of the lesson, students who wanted to share spoke directly to the camera so that students in the other school could hear their comments.  

We will definitely plan this lesson again next year. Our students were fully engaged in the game and loved interacting with students from another school!

Using Destiny Collections as a Collaboration Tool

Check out the post I wrote for the Follett Community blog! It's all about my current obsession with Destiny Collections and how Collections has fostered collaboration in my school.

Here is the link.
https://www.follettcommunity.com/collections-jenniferlewis

Wild West Book Fair

We recently ended our fall book fair. Scholastic's fall theme is Wild West Book Fair: Saddle Up and Read! We transformed the outside of the media center into a town from the old west. 

The inside of the media center had a covered wagon, which displayed books. Also a bandana print banner, bales of hay, boots, and a saddle!

After my volunteers and I set up the book fair, I held a teacher preview. We served chili with all the fixins and lemonade. And for dessert, cow patties (Little Debbie chocolate snacks)! Teachers browsed the new titles and created their wish lists during the preview.

Our students (and staff) enjoyed the photo booth set up in the book fair! This was especially popular during our grandparent events.

During this book fair, school was cancelled for two days due to Hurricane Irma. However, attendance at our grandparent events was still high. We also had many parents visit with their kids during our evening event. The most popular titles at this book fair were Dog Man: A Tale of Two Kitties by Dav Pilkey and Real Friends by Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham.