Testing Video Podcast

Here's a test to see whether the video podcast Tawnya learned about in a Mac professional development can be linked to and viewed on the blog. This was made using Garageband on a Mac and then converting it to an m4a file which can be viewed using Quicktime.




So far it seems that it is visible! Which is great news! But there are several errors and the audio and video are not synchronized properly (something only I would notice on this podcast). Also the last picture does not appear at all. Imperfect, but it's a start!

Hopefully we will soon be creating video podcasts with students. The podcasts can be published here on the Blog, on the SFCS Library website itself, and burned to DVDs for students to take home.

Exciting Things Coming...

When our computer lab arrives we will be able to do SO MANY COOL THINGS! One of them is to regularly record student book reviews. Today I created a "voki," which was pretty easy, and I recorded the voice on my telephone. Check it out!



Get a Voki now!

Re-Cap of Fall 2007 and What to Expect in 2008!

Good golly, did this semester fly by! Some of the happenings in the library were:

• Volunteer Barbara Levy fell and broke her wrist en route to the library. She was incapacitated for about 6 weeks, but thankfully she is now recovered and is back in the library. Moreover, she successfully lobbied the city to fix the broken sidewalk where she fell! SFCers now have a slightly smooooother walk into school. Yay, Barbara!
• Students checked out a whopping 4,007 books this semester-- over double the amount checked out during the same time period last year! This means that Deena, Barbara, Bob, and new parent volunteer Mark Glasser have had their hands full shelving like mad. It ALSO means that SFCS students are READING more than ever before!
• For the first year ever, the library did not host a Scholastic Book Fair in December. Scholastic just has too many commercial tie-ins, toys, and poor-quality non-educational items. I know that students missed the fair, but I am hoping to have a fair with local, independent book store Cody's sometime this spring instead. That would be a fair we could all feel good about!
• The new Mac computer lab has still not arrived. The district has promised that it will be at school before winter break, but that does not seem likely. Keep checking the library in January! When you see a mob of students outside the library door, that will be a clue that the computers have arrived.
  

Fall 2007 in Full Swing

Unbelievably, the school 2007-2008 school year has been in full swing for a month! Some library news:

• All the old library computers have been sent to the recycling center (out of 20, only 2 were working).
• We are supposed to be getting a new Mac Lab of 16 library computers plus one in each classroom! The latest word is that we'll get that in November.
• The last week of September was Banned Books Week. In honor of that, all the K-5 classes were read the book And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson. Here is the Wikipedia link to the book if you'd like to learn more about it. 2-5th grade classes also discussed issues of censorship and freedom of speech.
  

Spring Book Fair Arrives

The annual spring Buy-One-Get-One-Free Scholastic book fair came and went in a frenzied flash this week. They used to be a whole week long, but in the last few years I've shortened them to just three days. The volunteers and I just couldn't take one more day, I don't think! I had LOTS of parent help this year, which made a huge difference, but even so, lunch times during the first two days were a madhouse. I wanted to get some photos of that, but I didn't have time to draw a breath, let alone snap a picture. Our school does not make any money from the spring fair, but the students get good deals on cheap books for summer reading. They love it, so I keep doing it. But the commercialism of Scholastic is really starting to get to me. Next year I am going to look into having an independent bookstore like Cody's host the fair. That way I hopefully won't have 17 boxes of junky toys hidden in my closet during the fair!

Welcome to the Blog!

Welcome to the SFCS Library blog! Since blogs are much, much easier to update than Web sites, I will be using this blog to post pictures and descriptions of the latest library events. I'll also notify you of upcoming library happenings, so check in often!