Summer Fun

Here are a few projects that I am working on this summer...

participating in The Red Clay Writing Project in order to work on my professional writing and to learn more about language and literacy so that I may improve my collaboration and inquiry projects with my school community; students, teachers, and families. My goal is to continue my broadcasting digital literacy project to include the knowledge I have gained this summer about writing and to include more digital writing and participatory learning.

hosting the CMS Summer Reading Responses on the CMS Media Center Blog

working on my Applied Project for my Ed.S. in the SLM program at UGA. My applied project is looking at the roles of the media specialist and creating a balanced program through program development using the Georgia Exemplary Library Media Rubric.

opening the CMS Media Center this summer for students and families on Thursday afternoons!

I plan to share more about all of this soon.

If you have experiences with opening school libraries for the summer, Red Clay, or program development you want to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Today is also Poem in Your Pocket Day!

All students and faculty are encouraged to carry a poem in their pocket today to share with others. Students and faculty "caught" sharing their poem today will have their name entered into a drawing for a Jittery Joe's gift card! Which poem will you have in your pocket? See Mrs. Hinger in her pocket apron or the pocket sign outside the media center for a poem if you do not already have one. Thanks to all of our teachers that have helped promote this over the past few weeks!

Georgia Exceptional Library Media Program Open House Today

Today is our Georgia Exceptional Open House from 9-11 a.m. Come on out and see all the exciting things going on in the CMS Media Program! You can see our newly redesigned media center. Thanks to the efforts of several teachers, students and parents the CMS Media Center has been updated and transformed. We will have Jittery Joe's Coffee (thanks to the donation from the Googe's) and brunch type snacks as many of our students will present about our ongoing collaborative information literacy projects. I'll post highlights from these projects soon!

Elizabethan Faire--collaboration, info literacy, students to UGA library

--Elizabethan Faire 2011--



The CMS Media Center is hosting the Elizabethan Faire this week. We will be open for visitors Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Ms. McNeeley's 8th grade students have research topics relating to the Elizabethan Era during their study of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

During this collaborative project, the students learned about research and information literacy skills and created multi-genre research papers, three dimensional displays and presentations using both print and electronic resources. Students did their research in the CMS Media Center, online using Galileo and at the UGA Library on two Saturday research days. Please come in and see our AMAZING students present all they have learned on this exciting and interesting time in history.

Broadcast Update! Copyright Visitor, Fun with Music, and More!

Our Broadcast Extended Learning Time class meets each morning and is made up of 14 students from 7th and 8th grade. We take applications and 7 new students are selected each quarter to allow more students the opportunity to be a part of this class. This class is co-taught by me, our media specialist, and another CMS teacher Kasi Carvell.
Our class addresses many of the AASL 21st Century, TMLS, Social Studies, and English Language Arts standards. One standard we have focused heavily on this quarter is avoiding plaigarism and using digital content in a responsible manner. So, we had a guest visitor after our discussion on using music and photographs responsibly making sure to follow fair use guidelines taking advantage of items in the public domain and Creative Commons.

Bertis Downs manager and attorney for REM and professor of Copyright Law at UGA visited our class last week and disussed his take on copyright and music as well as the importance of following copyright law. He also brought copies of Bound by Law a graphic novel published by Duke Law School on the topic of using items from the public domain for each student.




He shared with us REM's Headquarters website where he has a link to their Remix Project. This is super cool! Read this article from USA Today on the Pop Candy Blog to find out more. Check it out and share it with your students!

After spending time with Mr. Downs our production crew memebers are now working on projects using CCMixter.org to find music in the public domain to incorporate in their comercials and other productions.

We've been funded! DonorsChoose.org ROCKS for book clubs!

Back in December when Borders partnered with the Waiting for Superman documentary several of our families shopped at Borders and recieved $15 gift cards for CMS to apply to a project on the Donors Choose website. So, I quickly went on their website and created a project to support our ongoing book clubs. I have collaborated with several teachers in various subject areas during and after school on book clubs this year. Our media budget has dedicated funds to purchasing student selected books, so using Donors Choose was a great way to expand this program. Right now we have book clubs going on in advisement groups, English classes, Exteneded Learning Time classes, and during afterschool.

After only a few weeks we were funded for $423 worth of book club sets including the Lightning Theif Series, Warrior Cat Series and the newest book by Mike Lupica.

Check out the kids with the new books!

A few posts in a row: Jan and Feb 2011 in a hurry!

It has been a whirlwind start to 2011! We started the new year with 3 days of school and then a week off for some serious snow for Georgia.

I have several different projects going on in the media center right now, so I am going to post on each of them!