PASD LTR for Staff

A few years ago I read a book where the character created infographics to communicate her ideas. This got me thinking and I have tried to implement them into how I communicate important information with staff and students. Here is a great article from November 2015 regarding how effective infographics can be.  https://www.ragan.com/infographic-5-reasons-why-infographics-are-e%C2%ADffective/ I find that when I send regular emails that staff often overlook them and some times I send a lot of emails to staff. It is a goal that I am still working on. I do remember to send them out at the elementary every spring though. I have used a few different infographic websites to create. However, the one that I used this year was Canva. Things I look for when evaluating a resource like this are: Price (I prefer FREE) Ease of Use (If it takes much longer than I need to type out an email, I am not going to use it) Templates (this helps with the time issue) Ability to sign in with my G...

TBR-To Be Read. For me this list is often endless and filled with picture books, children's books, YA, adult, magazine articles, blog posts and random rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. In this post, I am going to give you an update of what I have been looking at and perusing. Some of the titles I have read, some are on my list of TBR. #1  The Donkey Egg by by Janet Stevens, Susan Stevens Crummel.  This one came in my Junior Library Guild book box recently and I judged it by it's cover. It just didn't look all that exciting to me. However, thanks to the new Facebook groups that I have joined with other's in the trenches of School Libraries, I gave this one another shot. It is a cute story of a grumpy old bear who is sold a donkey egg from a sly fox. That bear takes his new job of keeping the egg warm, cared for and loved in hopes of meeting his new baby donkey. Well, as we all know donkeys do not hatch from eggs but Bear and Hare take what looks like ...

Some of you may be saying, I don't need one of those or I already knew how to do it. But this was a big win for me today. Sometimes you need a little GIF to add some levity or in my case to quickly show an awesome tool without a cumbersome video. I did so many Google searches, but have never quite figured it out until TODAY, FRIDAY! Today I mashed a few different articles that I have been reading and finally found the method that WORKED. I am going to treat it a bit recipe of what I needed. 1 cool feature that you want to share with someone 1 WeVideo website (you can substitute many other screenshot style resources out there, this is my prefered one as I can use it on my Chromebook while being at school) 1  https://ezgif.com  website (this one has so many tools that I was able to figure out pretty easily) 2 Tbsp of candy of choice (Skittles worked well for me here) Step 1: Take a screencast of a website, don't worry if you are only want part of the screen ezgif has...

I know that many of us have used the common features of Google Search such as the calculator, timer and getting a quick definition. However, did you know some of the other features? "I'm feeling curious" will give you a fun fact like this: The words "Play Snake" will give you an updated version that you may recall from your old Nokia. "Play Solitaire" will bring up a quick game of solitaire (Easy or Hard) "Random Number Generator" will allow you to get a quick random number. Looking for a random "Spinner" will give you a spinner to generate your random number up to 20. Best part about this is if you expand the box you will see other Games and Toys or Tools that you can use. Do you already use one? Go ahead and share it in the comments.