Friday, January 15, 2021

Book Share/Talk HyperDoc

 Literacy Studies students recently completed their work in a HyperDoc taken from cubeforteachers.com.

This book share/talk document encourages students to think beyond plot and summary and instead consider their own thinking as they read and connect their reading to broader topics. (You can grab the template HERE.) Students also create a hyperlink for the image associated with their book of choice. While they used the Unsplash add-on to insert copyright-free images in a recent Slides project, students this time used Pixabay Free Images add-on in the HyperDoc.

To encourage collaboration in the HyperDoc, all grade-level students on a given class day shared their work in a single document. Before we even began inserting book cover and Pixabay images, classes engaged in discussions about good digital citizenship when multiple users share a document. We even had the chance to see how seemingly innocent clicking around in a Google Doc can have an impact; once, all of the directions were inadvertently deleted, and in another class, a student accidentally deleted an entire column in the table. :) Everything a teachable moment and retrievable and fixable! :)

Students' work occurred over 3 days' time: one day to introduce the HyperDoc, install the Pixabay add-on, and begin filling in individual rows of boxes; one day to complete your individual row, including inserting the hyperlink and commenting on others' work; and, a final day to wrap-up anything not yet completed.



The students' choices of websites to hyperlink to their images was pleasantly surprising! While some chose to include links to official authors' websites and book trailers, other students searched for topics and themes related to their books. On students' final work day, many took advantage of the time to scroll the document and browse the related content. Below are screenshots taken from some of the HyperDocs:

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Top 20 in 2020

Here in the first week of January 2021, it seemed like a good idea to look back on the most checked-out titles from 2020. The titles represent some of our most popular authors in the library, as well as many current and former state award nominees. You can see the full set of 20 books when you click on the link below:

CLICK HERE to access the presentation

Many popular authors--Alan Gratz and April Henry anyone?--and several Iowa state award nominees are on this year's list, alongside some older favorites like Big Nate and Mike Lupica. You might also have noticed that graphic novels made the list; they continue to be a popular choice for many readers! See any here that you've read yourself? Or maybe you want to try? You're welcome to stop by and check out a title or two--happy reading!