February 15, 2019

Many of you have been wondering when registration would open for our Kathleen Odean Best New YA Books for 2018 (Grades 6-12) workshop. I’m pleased to announce it is now on MLP. The workshop will take place on April 23rd at OCM Main Campus. You will, as always, get her list in book form.

Strengthening students' connectedness to their own learning is a goal we all share. Check out this Edutopia article to discover 7 Ways to Spark Engagement.

Did you see the Ted Ed featured lesson, Why Does February Only Have 28 Days? Your students will love the video!

Now that the SLS Merger between OCM and CiTi has been approved, we have have some work to do! I’m going to be reaching out to both regions to put together a work group to start putting together our new plan of service. If you are interested in participating, please let me know!

We have been working with several districts' library departments this year, and one of the things that we are doing is creating our “Collective Why?” Some may refer to this as a vision statement, but getting to our "why" and being able to articulate it is the beginning of the the process of meeting the needs of all students. I was interested in this Padlet put out by Shannon McClintock Miller and thought you might be interested in the mission and vision statements created by school librarians across the nation.

You may also want to check out this article: Six Ways that School Libraries Have Changed (and One that Will Always Be the Same). Can you guess what that ‘one’ thing is?

Happy February! Thank you for all you do to inspire students every single day. Below, you will find additional resources and opportunities to maximize your Discovery Education resources to support your conversations around digital citizenship and more.

LEARN about the Discovery Education tools and resources to support all facets of digital citizenship as you support students in being safe and responsible members of the digital community.

• Explore this Hot Topic further and share these resources with colleagues.
• Don’t miss a special opportunity to extend your learning with Hall Davidson during our upcoming webinar on Digital Citizenship on February 28 at 7:00 pm.

SHARE the excitement of the game with your students. Discovery Education has partnered with the National Football League®, National Basketball Association®, and Major League Baseball® to offer sports-themed curricular resources that leverage students' love of the game to make relevant and lasting connections between learning and their everyday lives.

• Discovery Education and Major League Baseball are teaming up to energize classrooms with a new series of interactive science and STEM challenges.
• Learn engaging ways to be active and have fun with NFL PLAY 60, the American Heart Association, and special guests.
• Join Discovery Education and the NBA on February 14 for a virtual field trip to the All-Star Game. This exciting 30-minute program will give students a glimpse behind the scenes and help them learn how NBA staff use STEM skills to bring the game to life! Register today.

CONNECT with fellow educators in your school and beyond regularly as a way to grow as a leader and a learner. Did you know that we are looking for educators who are passionate about using digital media to maximize student engagement and achievement? We love to celebrate educators who share resources and collaborate with others. If this is you, consider becoming a DEN STAR today!

Did you know that you can check usage statistics for Overdrive and Sora? Use the following to log in:

To view your Sora Statistics, you simple choose “Sora Activity” from the Insights tab at the top left hand corner. You will see many graphs showing things like total time read, average time per session, and average time per book. When you first load the page, it will show you information for all of OCM BOCES, but you can search for your school at the top and change the period to narrow it down. For example, Bolivar Road is doing amazing things with Sora! Since November 2018, they have read 583 books! You can then click for more information, bringing up a list of items read.

It’s an awesome way to see how well your school is doing on Sora, or on Overdrive!

In collaboration with Pamela Puri of Tech4Kidz, we are planning two Integrating Coding into the Classroom workshops. The goal of these workshops is to strengthen educators' coding skills so that they will use coding with their students throughout the school year. The first workshop will be held on March 7th, and will focus on beginner level coding skills using MIT’s Scratch language. On August 20th, we will have the second part of the workshop, which will cover more complex coding skills. You can sign up for either one of the workshops depending on your familiarity with coding, or sign up for both! Sign up using MLP by clicking on the following links: Part 1 and Part 2.

In addition, I will be working with Pamela Puri to organize a Syracuse Scratch Educator Meetup. At a ScratchEd Meetup, you will find a gathering of Scratch Educators who want to learn with and from each other, sharing their ideas and strategies for supporting computational creativity in all its forms. If you are interested please fill out this very short survey to help us decide the dates of the first two ScratchEd Meetups.

Searching in the OCMCAT (Union Catalog)

I am using an example of a listserv request this week. The request was for Naruto Volume 61. Remember the phrase “less is more”? This holds true when searching the union. By using the search criteria of Naruto 61, this reduced the results to only one page of 4 records, compared to 315 results just using the title or author.
Click this link for final search results

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