Thing 2: Photo Fun

Photography and photo editing have always been one of my favorite hobbies. I got into it in high school when I took a photography class and used a 35mm camera and developed my own photos in the dark room. Mostly I took photos of my dog and if you look at my Instagram account, you'll see that some things never change. Since I don't have my own dark room I've moved on to the world of digital photography. When I got an iPhone the first app I downloaded was Instagram and it remains my favorite app to this day.

I'm also a SnapChat user, although I have mixed feelings about the app itself. I don't find it very user friendly and the chat feature leaves a lot to be desired. I'll stick to iMessage for texting. But it's a great way to easily send pictures of my dog to all my friends.

For this assignment I mostly focused on how to get my students more involved in photography itself rather than social media, since I work in a PK-6 building and the vast majority of my students are under the age of 10. While I'm sure a lot of my 5th and 6th graders use social media, most of my students do not.

I am fortunate enough in this building to have a digital camera in the library and have thus become the one to take pictures at various school events. I don't mind at all since photography is one of my hobbies. But after reading a few of the articles for this assignment, I've realized this would be a great opportunity to get some of my students involved. It wouldn't take long to teach a few interested students how to work the camera (most probably already know!) and how to transfer the photos onto a flash drive to give to the principal to put on the school website.

Going farther than having my students be the ones to photograph school events, I think it would also be great if they were to capture day to day happenings in the library. They could then edit the photos and either make them into digital collages or print them out and make a physical collage with poster board.

For my own exploring for this assignment, I chose to look at PhotoShop Express. In the past I've used the GIMP for photo editing. The GIMP can do a lot, but it is also very frustrating to figure out. I found PhotoShop Express incredibly easy to figure out. With it, I edited this picture, taken 3 weeks ago,  of the Christmas tree farm my family always goes to to pick out our tree every year.

Since it's the end of 2016, I also figured I would include my Instagram Best Nine for 2016. It analyzes your Instagram account and finds the nine photos with the most likes from the past year, then puts them into a collage. Link here.

Thing 1: Blogging

My name is Sarah Ryan and I am the librarian at the Montessori Academy in Rochester, NY. This blog is primarily for the Cool Tools for School professional development program, but perhaps I'll turn it into something else once the program is over.

I chose to participate in Cool Tools this year because my district is going to a 1-to-1 chromebook program and is steadily becoming more Google-centric. I am all for this switch since I already use Google for many other things, and because it allows me to use something other than Microsoft programs on school computers (I am very much a Mac person). I am already very tech and social media savvy, but figured Cool Tools might introduce me to something I haven't discovered yet.

The first assignment required me to choose a blogging platform and create my blog for this program. I've had many blogs over the years, most of which were on WordPress and tumblr. I love WordPress as a blogging platform and was planning on creating my blog there, but then realized I ought to use Blogger in order to test it out myself before blogging with my students. Since all my students already have Google accounts, Blogger will (hopefully) be an easy transition for them (and will be one less password they have to memorize).

In this lesson I learned about the benefits of blogging with students. My upper elementary students are already very eager to have discussions via Google Classroom with each other, so I predict they would be just as excited to blog. It would be a great way to get them into writing book reviews and recommending books to their classmates. I also really liked the idea of starting first with "paper blogs" in order to get them used to writing posts and commenting on their classmates' posts.