Sunday, April 13, 2014

DigLit Sunday: Book Shelfies


This is my first post as part of Margaret Simon's weekly link up celebrating Digital Learning in the classroom: DigLit Sunday. Head on over to Reclections on the Teche to explore other link ups. 

While perusing Twitter one day, I came across Jonathan Werner's link to a recent blog post. I'm not sure who coined the term "Shelfie", but I loved it! I had recently introduced Explain Everything to my students as a productivity app, and had been wanting to find a way to introduce ThingLink to them. Jonathan had merged these two apps to create an interactive book recommendation. I couldn't wait to introduce the idea to my students.


 Once I showed my students a few examples, they began to create their own. I did not require them to include anything, but gave them the some ideas of things they could include in their Shelfie:

1. A powerful line from the text
2. A personal response to the text
3. A quick summary of the book
4. A book trailer
5. Link to the author's website or blog
6. Link to a blog post about book
7. Images of other books by the same author

The rest was up to the kids. They did great! Not only did they learn more about a book they loved, but they immediately began to share what they were finding with each other. Once they finished, we used a QR code to link their Thinglink and put the printed image of the Shelfie out in the hall. I couldn't be happier with the product. Franki Sibberson (A Year of Reading) had then given me the idea to keep the Shelfies up in the classroom for next years class to get book ideas.

Here are the steps we did to create our Shelfies:

1. Take a picture of you and your book with the iPad.
2. Drop the picture into Explain Everything.
3. Edit by adding text and other pictures in Explain Everything.
4. Save the picture from Explain Everything to iPad camera roll.

*Note: My classroom has 2 iPads with cameras. Because of this, we used WebDAV to export the image to their school cloud. From here, students could use either the ThingLink app or the website.

5. Import image to ThingLink.
6. Add interactive buttons.
7. Share the image by using the link, or embedding the code.

These are just a few of the Shelfies we created.








10 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing! I am definitely going to use these ideas, as we just got a cart of iPads we can book. My third graders will LOVE this!

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  2. These are soooo cool! I can see why the kids got into them so much. What a great visual for other students to become inspired to read.

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  3. This is awesome! We don't have iPads; we have Chromebooks. I wonder if I could find a way to do something similar on them.

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  4. These are so cool! Thanks for sharing. I'll have to play with this over Spring Break.

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  5. These are wonderful to see. I have several classrooms who are doing more with books, trying to share more. This might be just the thing to spark some interest too. Thanks for the explanations too!

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  6. Oh my gosh! I love this. I'm going to explore more with this app. I see it as a great way to end the year where kids can recommend their favorite books.

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  7. I absolutely love this post. I can't wait to explore making shelfies with my students. Thanks for connecting with DigiLit Sunday.

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  8. Holly- we were able to do a lot of it on the laptops. I'm not sure if Chromebooks have a camera, but if they did I'm sure you could find a website to use! Good luck!

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  9. Thank you soo much for your kind comments! I truly appreciate!

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  10. Oh, the fun!!! I can't wait ti play with this! Thanks for sharing!!!

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