Jourdan Keith and a New Events Calendar
Jourdan Keith came to the middle school in my area today. She was very engaging and a wonderful storyteller. She got the students to participate in her event very nicely. A couple of them even got up and read what they wrote for everyone to hear, which is more self projection than I have seen for a long time from a middle school student.
She started off with a story, asking the kids a lot of questions and allowing them to answer. By the end, when she asked for ideas of animals that they thought were weird, kids were holding up their hands up to answer several times. She told another story, this one a "how and why," and tied it into poetry--using haiku as an introduction or an ending for a story. She had the students use any of the animal suggestions and write a how and why story, then asked for volunteers to read to the class. Two children got up and read their ideas out loud. Everyone was polite and listened and they clapped after they were done. It was very supportive and creative.
After the poetry event, I went to my TSL meeting at GLK. I missed the first half, and the whole next hour was a sort of break. When everyone came back to order, we heard from the IT department about our new calendar. It is going to be very exciting. The old calendar, which is still up, is clunky and abreviated, not very interesting and not user friendly. The new calendar will be much more user friendly, providing the option of rss feeds and email notification for both individual events and event groupings (by age group, branch, etc). It will be much prettier and cleaner, with pictures representing the events and color coding for event types. The calendar will also allow a uniformity throughout the website, so that when an event goes on the calendar, the same description will be used on the branch page and anywhere else the event is featured. When the description is updated all of the others will be as well (can we say xml?). Yay to a new calendar day! (coming soon to a library webpage near you...)
She started off with a story, asking the kids a lot of questions and allowing them to answer. By the end, when she asked for ideas of animals that they thought were weird, kids were holding up their hands up to answer several times. She told another story, this one a "how and why," and tied it into poetry--using haiku as an introduction or an ending for a story. She had the students use any of the animal suggestions and write a how and why story, then asked for volunteers to read to the class. Two children got up and read their ideas out loud. Everyone was polite and listened and they clapped after they were done. It was very supportive and creative.
After the poetry event, I went to my TSL meeting at GLK. I missed the first half, and the whole next hour was a sort of break. When everyone came back to order, we heard from the IT department about our new calendar. It is going to be very exciting. The old calendar, which is still up, is clunky and abreviated, not very interesting and not user friendly. The new calendar will be much more user friendly, providing the option of rss feeds and email notification for both individual events and event groupings (by age group, branch, etc). It will be much prettier and cleaner, with pictures representing the events and color coding for event types. The calendar will also allow a uniformity throughout the website, so that when an event goes on the calendar, the same description will be used on the branch page and anywhere else the event is featured. When the description is updated all of the others will be as well (can we say xml?). Yay to a new calendar day! (coming soon to a library webpage near you...)
Labels: Events, IT, poetry, poets, technology
posted by srcsmgrl at
5:10 PM
2 Comments:
If the new calendar is based on some pre-existing shrinkwrap or open-source package, I would loveloveLOVE to know which one.
By
El JoPe Magnifico, at 12:14 AM
I know that there is a "vendor" but I don't know who it was put out by. I will be let you know if I find out.
By
srcsmgrl, at 10:40 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home