My Life In the Library

Everyone likes to learn in their own way and has their own learning style. As educators, we have known this for years and often do inventories with our students to see what learning style they are so we can best teach them. Are they a visual learner? Audio? Kinesthetic? Podcasts have exploded in popularity, along with audiobooks, as a way for audio learners to listen to get information. In an interview with School Library Journal, librarian Marcie Atkins explains that, "it gives students an opportunity to learn information in other ways besides just reading." In today's blog we will explore three different sites for podcasts: Soundcloud, Podomatic, and Podbean. Soundcloud: Soundcloud was very easy to use. To sign up, you can either put in your email address, use Facebook, or my favorite Google. I like the ease of signing up for websites with Google and then I never have to worry about remembering passwords on my home computer. After sign up, creating my first podcast w...

Another quick and easy way to grab your students' attention in the library or classroom is with a cartoon or comic! While cartoons and comics have always been popular, they have started to become more accepted as literature by librarians everywhere with the rise of graphic novels. Students enjoy reading cartoons and comics and with the three sites featured below, they can easily make one as well. This is a great outlet for student self expression and a way for teachers to assess learning in a way that students will enjoy! Toon Doo Toon Doo is the first comic creating website I tried. It is easy to create an account, simply needing a username, password, and email address. Creating my first comic was very simple. I was able to choose the layout I wanted and from there I could choose all the additional features. I was able to search for backgrounds and props for my comic. I will say that the results were limited and I found that I struggled at times finding exactly what I was look...