Fall storytimes kick off in about a month which means it's time to get my head back in the game after summer reading. I always start planning at the beginning, with storytime basics. Books, songs, puppets, flannel boards, etc.It's important to me to try to keep the essence and foundation of story time the same as it's always been. I like the idea that a child can move to a new area and visit the local library, and easily recognize and acclimate to a story time. The same goes for adults and grandparents as caregivers. It's reassuring bringing a grandchild to storytime, (generations between them), and know what to expect. The vision of "storytime" hasn't changed much over the last 60 years. Last spring I had been infusing more and more iPad technology into my storytimes with tremendous success. As I began my planning this season I am really excited about the apps that I've decided to bring into it as well. New technology has opened the door to some great things. One of my newest favorites is the Sock Puppets app. Yes it has a charge, but when you think about the cost vs. the application for this in storytime it is PRICELESS. I can not WAIT to use this to introduce weekly themes, etc.. I never imagined I could use an app for puppets! What amazing thinking "inside" the box. I'll let you know how it works..
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It all started with an app. Installing just one little app. Two hours later, there's no app and the iPad is hanging out of its kiosk shell. Why oh WHY is technology so incredibly frustrating?!?! In light of my recent talk on the glory of iPads in our tech-savvy-modern libraries, I am knocked right back down to size with today's recent escapade. You see, my department head/colleague found a bilingual app. We talked about it. We read up on it. It sounded great, had great reviews so we moved to download it to our children's public iPads..... But before we could download it we had to disable restrictions. Then we couldn't disable our restrictions until we connected to our secure WiFi.... Which we couldn't do until we closed out all our running apps... ....and opened our homepage for the WiFi terms and agreement page... Finally, 20+ minutes later we watched as the app slowly.... ever so slowly... downloaded. When it finally completed, we knew we would have to backtrack that whole process to enable restrictions once again, but first we decided to try the new app... Hello? Testing... 1,2 3. HELLO? Do you hear that? Right oh. Neither did we.As luck would have it the app had no sound. This is certainly not a good attribute for a language learning application. I closed the app and tried again. No luck. We opened another app. THAT app had no sound. Hmmmm... We deleted the app. We rebooted the ipad. All apps had sound once again. We re-downloaded that app. No sound on the app or the others again. So here we sit on a gray and rainy afternoon, struggling to get our bilingual app-less iPad to make a sound. For the price of only $2.99 you too can enjoy the hours of technology-maddening meltdowns and have nothing to show for it but a huge headache. Till next time my friends... . I often get asked by colleagues how I came up with a programming idea or how I found an app or a new book. I always emphasize the importance of following blogs online and sharing information either social networks or blogs. That is often followed by the person saying they feel overwhelmed searching for blogs and they "just don't have time or know where to start". Big. Sigh. I completely get that. Except I don't search out blogs so much. I have THEM come to ME using the app Feedly, an RSS reader. If you don't know what an RSS reader is, it's simply an Inbox-like tool for blogs and online resources that you want to keep track of. Back in library school I had an awesome professor who made us sign up for Google Reader (now defunct) and subscribe to library related blogs and feeds. Six years later, and I'm still using that RSS reader on a regular basis. All the blogs that I love are there in one place... I pick and choose them myself. A simply click and everytime something new posts to one of these blogs or sites, I get it on Feedly. Feedly allows you to organize your feeds into folders as well (a librarians dream), such as Programming, Technology, Books and Authors, News, and so on. Feedly is an app on my mobile device as well which allows me to post to social media or email an article of interest. It's a professional tool that keeps me in the loop and keeps ideas flowing. Give it a try! Start small...pick just 5 feeds to follow until you get a handle on it. Here's a quick look at what my feedly looks like.
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