Books: Book Trailers

Here are two book trailers I created for The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness:

Created in Picasa is this 1 minute version:

Created in Animoto is this 30 second version:

Books: The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

What if your parents decided to Escape the Realities of Earth in order to create a new life for your family?  Would it be a Haven (Heaven) of life on another planet?  Can you ever really escape the realities of Human Nature?  Can anyone ever hope to create a new and more perfect world? 

The setting: Prentiss Town in the New World.  Todd was born here, orphaned here, grew up here.  Viola just crash landed, losing both her parents.  Will they survive to create a new human future?

The Problem: Noise!  Oh yeah, what if you could hear animal’s thoughts on this new planet?  NOISE!!  What if men couldn’t hide their thoughts from each other, from women?  NOISE!!! What if the planet already had “people”?  NOISE!!!!

Read Book 1 of the Chaos Walking series to find out what happens to Todd and Viola.

The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

Books: Goliath by Scott Westerfeld

World War I history with a twist.  The third and final installment in Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series does not disappoint, including the new art work by Keith Thompson.  Goliath is non-stop action, multiple battles between the Darwinist (British Allied) and Clanker (German Allied) forces, and a love story, of course.  Wow!

Midshipman Dylan Sharp (actually a girl named Deryn) and Austrian Crown Prince Aleksander are again aboard the Darwinist Air Ship, Leviathan.  This time they travel to New York to help Nikola Tesla stop World War I with his new weapon Goliath.  The journey includes stops in Russia, Japan, California, and Mexico.

Do you call it Historical Fantasy Fiction?  Steam Punk?  I'm not sure.  I guess, like Deryn, I might exclaim "Barking Spiders!" this is great story telling with cliff-hanger chapters and characters who live on in the reader's imagination after the cover is closed.  "Barking Spiders!" indeed!

I like to call it history with a twist because real historical figures enter the narrative and interact with the main fictional characters Alek and Deryn.  In the pages of this third installment, you'll meet the likes of the aforementioned Nikola Tesla, William Randolph Hearst, and Francisco "Pancho" Villa. This is great reading for young adults and adults alike.

Below is a link to the Book Trailer the publisher (Simon and Schuster) made for the book.

Books: Matched by Ally Condie

Imagine a perfect world where nothing is left to chance and all the choosing is done for you.  This is the world Cassia Reyes inhabits--a perfect world of the future founded on the rubble of past generations.  A world where everyone lives to be 80, exactly.  A world where everyone is "matched" with their perfect mate.  A world where everyone is happy.  A world where there are 100 best loved poems--only 100.  And 100 best loved songs--again, only 100.  A world where a copy, even a mental copy, of a poem that was left out is dangerous, possibly seditious.

This is the first book in what will be the Matched Trilogy.  The next book Crossed is set to be released in November of 2011.

This is reminiscent of the The Giver and the "perfect" society that Jonas unravels as he is given his future vocation and begins to see his society with new eyes.  In Matched, Cassia's view of her Utopian society begins to unravel during an emotionally charged period between her matching ceremony and her grandfather's 80th birthday (funeral).  Her grandfather tips the scales by giving her a copy of a poem that was not selected for the 100 Best and Only Poems: Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night."  Read the poem and you will understand why it was left out.  Listen to the way Cassia describes her father's work and consider Jonas' reaction to his father's work.

I look forward to the next book in this series, wondering how the things "left-out" will be woven into the future Cassia creates.

Books: I Am an Emotional Creature

We know Eve Ensler.  We know what she is famous for; however, our students often are not familiar with her.  I Am an Emotional Creature is a vivid picture in poetic monologues of what it is like to become a woman in today's world.

To create the book, Eve interviewed girls all over the world.  She then wrote interior monologues to convey the variety of their experiences and emotions.

This would be great "next read" for a student who is reading Patricia McCormick's Sold, Laurie Halse Andersen's Speak, or any of Ellen Hopkins books.

Books: Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentine

My five-year-old twins have begun showing interest in my older daughter's collection of Junie B. Jones books.  They wanted to start with book one, but we seem to have misplaced it.  The next best place to start was, of course a book with a Valentine's Day theme.

Nora and Adele assured me that Junie B.'s behavior would get her in trouble in their kindergarten classrooms.

Junie B. is fun to read out loud.  Park has a great ear for how kids talk and a great eye for the details we sometimes miss as teachers and parents.

Junie B. kept us laughing with her search for her secret admirer.

Junie B. Jones and the Mushy Gushy Valentime shows the difficulties and joys of friendship around the sometimes awkward holiday of Valentine's Day.

Library Video--Dark Humor Helps Us Consider Library Stereotypes

The dark humor of this video helps us consider our stereotypes of librarians and makes us feel cool at the same time.

My First Screencast

Students often ask for help when they are confronted with the task of setting up a document in MLA format. Most of our computers are currently running Microsoft Office Word 2010, so I used Jing to create a narrated screencast of how to start a document in MLA format.

Cyber Safety

For the past two weeks, I have been presenting Cyber Safety lessons to the Freshmen at McLane High School. Other names for these lessons are Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying. The web includes many resources for interactive, free lessons to help students make good choices when they are on the web. I have bookmarked some of the sites on my Diigo Cybersafety Page. Here are two very compelling videos that come from the Safe Florida Cyber Safety Project. The first is Justin's Story. He shares how cyber predators began to take advantage of him when, at 13 years old, he installed a webcam on his home computer:


The second video is Alicia's Story of how she met a man online who lured her from home then abducted and enslaved her:

Dystopian Young Adult Literature--Why Is It So Popular?

With the final installments of the Hunger Games (MockingJay by Suzanne Collins) and Chaos Walking (Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness) series coming out at about the same time, I'm wondering how to guage young adult interest in issues surrounding the future of our world (their world) specifically issues around war, what war does to people, and the price of peace. Will books like these get students involved in politics or discourage them from seeing government and democracy as an anwer to the world's problems? Both series present flawed leaders and jaded heroes--heroes who are thought to be the possible next leader but have seen too much of "leadership" to want to be part of leading their world.

Scribblar--Free White Board Collaboration Tool

At the recent Central Valley Computer Using Educators Conference, math teachers demonstrated how they hold virtual office hours with a new free web tool called Scribblar, a slick and simple tool for online collaboration that even allows participants to use their microphones to ask questions and respond to others. The teacher who demonstrated said he likes it much better when he can draw with a wireless sketchpad instead of the mouse. I could also see using this as an interactive and collaborative white board in the library.

Poll Everywhere

As a Teacher Librarian and Technology Coordinator, I often have teachers ask about clickers or class responders--"Will you buy us some? How much do they cost?" That type of thing.

My response is: "You already have everything you need." With Poll Everywhere, teachers can use the students' cell phones as the clicking device for a web-based poll they can create/prepare ahead of time. Poll Everywhere even gives you an option to download the poll as a PowerPoint slide to add to a presentation. As the students send a text message to a number to vote, the poll shows real-time responses. For those students who are trying to vote more than once, they receive a message saying they've already voted.

I used this with a class of seniors in government. The minute the poll started moving in response to their votes I had the class's complete attention and a much more heated discussion about the role of government in people's lives and whether or note teachers should let students have their cell phones out.

Diigo and Social Bookmarking

For the past month or so, I have been using both Diigo and Delicious to see which Social Bookmarking site I like best. I have also been learning about Social Bookmarking at sites like Common Craft's in Plain English--Social Bookmarking Explained.

I have found Diigo to be more useful to me as a librarian for the following features:

• Groups: You can create them and join them. They are a great way to crowd-source creating lists of useful bookmarks on a specific topic. With the free educator version, you can also create private groups for your students to use as they gather research on a specific topic. Examples of groups: Diigo in Education, and Teacher-Librarians.
• Lists: This makes it really easy to share a group of bookmarks with someone else. Some groups I have created are Library 2.0, Math, and Shakespeare.
• Updates: If you are part of a group, you can subscribe to the group's daily update feed to see what other's in your field or interest area are recommending. Here is an example of a daily post from the Teacher Librarian List: 1 new Item See More »
  

  Spectrumofrights Comic1 - CC Wiki

  creativecommons,comics,copyright

  shared by Jane Lofton 18 Apr 10 07:06:05 - Comment - Like

http://booktalksandmore.pbworks.com/

• http://booktalksandmore.pbworks.com/

  How to create online book talks and lots of examples. This is a site Joy Millam created to go along with her CSLA presentation. It also includes examples of student work.

  tags: booktalksandmore, wiki, reviews, how-to

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This is my first attempt at sending a Diigo bookmark directly to my blog. You have the option of direct posting or saving as a draft. I chose draft so I could append this final edit before posting. I like that it automatically includes a link to my shared Diigo links.

Wordle or Wordsift

A Web 2.0 word cloud or text visualization tool similar to Wordle is Wordsift. What distinguishes Wordsift is its more academic purpose. It allows users to highlight words based on their association with a content area: ESL, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math. It seeks to help English Language Learners by including a Visual Thesaurus Window and a Google Images Window. Each of these windows changes when a user selects a different word from the word cloud. Wordsift also includes the option to view the parts of the original text or the whole text with the selected word highlighted. This is very helpful for seeing how a word is used throughout a text.

Anyway, I wanted to compare Wordle and Wordsift with a couple of text types. My first choice was the young adult novel The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (first 3 chapters taken from Destiny Title Peek). With this piece I found Worlde more useful in that it clearly showed the first three chapters to be about character development.

My second choice was the OpEd piece "Does Gay Sex Cause Global Warming" by Daniel Gilbert. With this piece I found both value in both Wordle and Wordsift; however the Google Image feature of Wordsift would be blocked when using it at school. Our district has found Google Image returns questionable images even when operating in Moderate Safe Mode.

Wordle--As a Tool for Previewing/Reviewing a Text

Wordle is a cool Web 2.0 application that makes a word cloud out of text. On a basic level, it is a frequency analysis where the high frequency words are presented in larger fonts. I wanted to see what a really long text would look like so I uploaded our 100+ page WASC Report. I was happy with the results as students and teachers showed up as a clear focus of our school:

Ms. Guzman's Holocaust Research

Welcome to the McLane Library. A helpful place to begin your research is at one of the many Holocaust Museums in our country:

The United State Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extesive collection of resources.

• Personal Histories--These are first person descriptions from various points of view, all describing elements of the holocaust.
• Study Topics--This student page can help you choose a topic related to the Holocaust.
• Holocaust Learning Site--Interactive exloration of the Holocaust.
• Encyclopedia of the Holocaust--This is a good place to look up terms related to the holocaust.
• Web Links--Links to Holocaust sites and information from all over the world.

The Jewish Virtual Library also maintains an extensive Holocaust site.

Environmental Science Classes

Let's find out all we can about whether or not nuclear energy should be in Fresno's future.

Welcome to the McLane High School Library

2008-2009 will be an exciting school year. We have new carpet, new books, and new computers. Ms. Montalvo and I put out new books every day, so visit often to see the new books.