Powerpoint is second nature to my students, as they probably started using it in second grade! They recently graduated to Prezi, but its overuse, and rollercoaster transitions, is making my teachers sick! They are asking for the next best thing.

There are so many resourceful ways to do multimedia presentations now, folks need to pay attention. In my research and trials, there are many tools that educators should explore.

9Slides.com is a great resource initially designed for the business market, but it can work remarkably well for the education field. Available for handheld devices and online, this tool allows you to upload video on one side of the screen and PowerPoint, PDF’s or even SlideShare on the other side. At a recent in-service I taught, one elementary teacher thought it would be the perfect match for her beginning-of-the-year student writing samples. Students already read their work aloud but now it can be displayed while they narrate. What a great artifact to show parents at back-to-school night! I can see teary-eyed parents basking in pride as their child performs their personal narrative.

Thinglink.com has just published an application and upgrade that strengthens its utility. Thinglink has been a nice tool that adds text and hyperlinks on to images, à la Jennifer LeGarde in her April Librarian Month page. But now you can also place video pop-ups on the image, and a new app has been released for handheld devices. This is going to be a great tool for my library orientation. I’ll take a picture of my library and insert tags and videos explaining the resources available, such as the location of fiction, the short story collection, the computer lab, etc., along with the rules of engagement. Thinglink also tracks the number of user “hovers” and clicks so you can measure how effective it is.

Perhaps the coolest tool of the season is Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker.  You can download videos and edit and manipulate them using this online application to layer text pop-ups, Google maps, Wikipedia pages and other very interactive additions. Users may find it a more complex, but the end product is really worth it.

Teachers and students need to take advantage of new multimedia tools that make it easy to create presentations that are both strong and show the depth of our students’ learning. Summer is the perfect time to get acquainted with a few of these resources and enhance our teacher toolboxes.

Phil Goerner is teacher librarian at Silver Creek High School, Longmont, CO.

See also The Best Powerpoint Alternatives for Creating Great Presentations.

Photo: Thinkstockphoto

Many teacher librarians find ways to provide leadership through their teaching, programs, and facilities. As the recent Pennsylvania study confirmed, effective school library programs positively impact student learning. While library leadership is essential, it may not be enough. We must think bigger. As information professionals, we have the expertise, connections, and skills to extend our leadership beyond libraries and make ourselves invaluable to principals, district administrators, and other decision makers. We can help plan, articulate, and implement major programs that will define schools in the future. In this new column, which will appear six times a year, I’ll identify pivot points—opportunities for librarians to leverage our profession’s strengths to lead, teach, and offer support.

The Pivot: BYOD

Until recently, most schools didn’t allow students to use their own technology devices in the classroom. Despite students’ use of mobile devices elsewhere, many districts impose strict policies that force children to power down as they enter the classroom. Enter BYOD. Bring Your Own Device programs offer students and teachers access to the Internet and the permission to use those devices in the classroom. Some districts see BYOD as a strategy to fill technology gaps, while others see it as a way to better prepare students for college, careers, and life. Unlike 1:1 programs, BYOD classrooms include anything from smartphones to laptops. BYOD is about flexibility with students working and learning in a variety of ways—not unlike a high-functioning library.

The Points

Digital citizenship. Personal devices require personal responsibility in the form of digital citizenship. With the flip of a switch, schools can shift from aging computer labs and a “no cell phone” policy to students and teachers using almost any device at school. While teachers retain the ability to define when those devices can be used, the need for students to understand appropriate uses of technology is suddenly everyone’s business. Many teacher librarians have long promoted digital literacy, responsibility, and citizenship, often to the bemusement of other teachers. As personal devices come to school, teacher librarians can parlay this experience into an opportunity to collaborate with teachers, helping to solve a new challenge that all educators must confront. Whether integrated into library instruction or articulated with classroom content, expertise in digital citizenship becomes a vital asset in Bring Your Own Device schools.

Leadership. Teacher librarians can inform and guide decision making whether a district is considering BYOD or is well on its way to implementing a BYOD program. As digital citizenship connects teacher librarians with teachers, it offers a similar opportunity to connect with IT, curriculum, and other departments. BYOD requires districts to shift thinking about teaching and operations. Teacher librarians can locate and curate best practices, ideas, and resources for the benefit of both district leadership and teachers. When administrators seek out other districts to inform decision making, teacher librarians can tap into librarian networks to connect with kindred districts. Teacher librarians can also help review or develop digital citizenship materials, curriculums, or communications connected to the implementation.

Test beds. Finally, school libraries can serve as test beds to explore the use of personal devices in schools, offering administrators, teachers, and the public a safe way to examine a BYOD program. By providing proof of concept, a successful BYOD pilot in a school library might lead to a broader implementation. Overnight, your library can become the focus of the school and district, representing forward thinking and innovation.

Great school libraries have always been about providing access to both technology and resources to create a learning commons. BYOD extends this ethos to the entire school. As others follow our lead, teacher librarians can play a valuable role, supporting educators for whom this brave new world represents change and uncertainty. We know change and uncertainty. And we know digital citizenship, digital literacy, and educational technology. BYOD offers teacher librarians a choice: Do we step in to lead, teach, and support learning? Or do we leave our patrons to their own devices?

Mark Ray (Mark.Ray@vansd.org) is the manager of instructional technology and library services at the Vancouver (WA) Public Schools.

Diagram created in GoClass

Regardless of what curriculum areas we teach, observing and assessing our students is something that we all do every day. Thanks to mobile devices like iPads and Android tablets, recording our informal observations and formal assessments has never been easier. Here are some of the best mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites available.

Infuse Learning is a free service that allows you to create and deliver assessments on your laptop, iPad, or Android device and push individual questions, prompts, and even complete quizzes out to students’ devices in private virtual classrooms. Your questions and prompts can take on a variety of formats including multiple choice, true/false, and short answer style; it even allows students to respond by creating drawings or diagrams on their own devices. This would be especially useful, for example, in a biology class, where you could ask students to create cell diagrams on their devices and submit them to you electronically. Infuse Learning is the most universally accessible app on this list because it offers both audio support and multiple language options—the service will read your questions and prompts aloud to students, or translate them into students’ native languages.

GoClass is a free iPad application for creating short lessons and delivering them to your students. Your lessons can include annotated images, freehand sketches, text, and video. GoClass also gives teachers various tools for creating class rosters that they can use to keep track of which students are using which lessons and when. Teachers also have the option to ask questions and poll their kids, then project those student responses to the class without showing students’ names. The image (above), from GoClass, illustrates how a teacher might use the app in the classroom.

Google Documents is a great means to creating assessment forms that display properly both in Safari on iPads and on Android device browsers. I often use Google Forms to create a simple pre-learning skills assessment or prior knowledge survey for my students, using the scale option built into the interface. For example, when I facilitate Google Apps trainings, I ask participants to rank their current skills on a scale of one to five. In professional development settings, I make form responses anonymous. When I use Google Forms in classrooms with students, I require that they enter their names. Then I can mill about the classroom with my iPad, view responses as they come in, and have discussions with students on an individual basis. For directions on creating and distributing a form using Google Documents, check out my professional guide, Google Docs and Google Drive for Teachers.

For totally informal and unplanned recording of observations about my students, Evernote is my go-to app. I have Evernote installed on every device that I use on a regular basis (MacBook, iPad, Nexus 7, Windows 7 on my desktop PC) to jot down just about everything, from interesting sites that I find while browsing the Web to reminders to myself to pick up eggs at the market. The speech-to-text option in Evernote makes it exceedingly handy because you can dictate notes rather than type them; if you speak clearly, the transcription is quite good. Evernote also allows you to tag your notes—which makes it easy to search through everything in your Evernote account—and sort your notes into different notebooks. I create a notebook for each class that I teach so that I can quickly access all of my relevant notes and resources out of the thousands of notes currently in my account.

Finally, if you’re looking for a tool to record your observations of student behaviors while also creating an engaging student experience, give ClassDojo a try. ClassDojo will work on any modern Web browser on your laptop, iPad, or Android device. ClassDojo allows you to record your observations and easily share them with students and their parents.

There isn’t one single system of observation and assessment that works for every teacher, but the tools outlined above have been a hit wherever I have shown them. What’s your favorite mobile system for recording observations and assessments of your students?

By Joyce Kasman Valenza

Shift happens. It disrupts. Next year, it’s critical for our profession to see opportunities where others might see obstacles. We can scout. We can innovate. We can harness disruption and lead. Or, we can opt out and let others do it instead.

This year’s shifts situate librarians for creative leadership opportunities, to make sense of the resources and tools that bombard our schools, and our public library partners, like that proverbial fire hose. Who better to curate and flip—and to ensure that learners have the tools they need 24/7? Who better to point teachers and learners to new platforms for growth and difference making? Who better to recognize the growing number of informal opportunities for learning as well as assessments that realistically recognize performance and skill acquisition? Who better to show learners that their work can have meaning and that, whatever their age, they can begin to shape their worlds?

It’s exciting. Let’s examine some of the stickier trends and trends-to-be and see where our opportunities are.

1. OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES/USER-GENERATED CONTENT. High-quality, open educational resources (OER) are proliferating and many are worthy of K–12 discovery. Bloggers, tweeters, and citizen journalists offer new real-time primary source perspectives. Major universities continue to change the nature of knowledge distribution and redefine opportunities for lifelong learning with their sharing. Social scholarship flourishes. I know, I’ve gotten excited about this before, but it’s simply richer now—ignoring this trend by not considering this content as part of your collection would be a tragic waste.

Opportunity: Pick a platform and curate OER resources important to your community—perhaps for instance, Common Core resources and strategies, perhaps pointing to the amazing new wealth of primary sources, or free documentary films.

2. CURATION FOR DISCOVERABILITY. Our collections have too many entry points. Without serious curation efforts, those OER resources and the valuable, more traditional content we pay for will go undiscovered and unused. Our catalogs may no longer be adequate containers for the dynamic Web content, tools, instruction, ebooks, and media we need to share across vendors. Librarians need to step up and fuse together interfaces that make best stuff discoverable when and where learners and teachers need it.

Opportunity: It’s not just about curating adult-created content. Kids create work worthy of celebrating and archiving. How about leading a school- or community-wide electronic portfolio movement? (See Helen Barrett’s work at electronicportfolios.org.)

3. CREATIVE COMMONS. Students need to be aware of the Creative Commons (CC) movement, not merely as media consumers but as content creators. Kids can control how they’d like the text, art, music, and films that they produce to be reused or remixed. It’s up to us to ensure that our artists, filmmakers, and musicians consider applying CC licenses to their own works. This year, Creative Commons released a Choose a License wizard, clarifying that opportunity. All this glorious content inspires a variety of other trends.

4. MOOCS ARE BUSTING OUT. This may have been the year of the MOOC (massive open online course). The dramatic proof was a fall 2011 artificial intelligence course, which drew 160,000 students—followed by the launch of higher-ed courses on the Coursera platform, MIT’s MITx and Harvard’s edX. I participated in Google’s international Power Searching MOOC last summer. Many predict the MOOC movement will trickle down to K–12 schools. There’s no stopping older students from joining in.

Opportunity: Search for MOOC s and point teachers and learners to strong opportunities for informal learning.

And, it seems, where there’s a MOOC, there’s often a badge.

5. DIGITAL LEARNING BADGES. Perhaps in response to measures of achievement that don’t really measure, well, real achievement, digital badges recognize skills and accomplishments that get developed online. Badges nod to those other-talented students who don’t get recognized for their touchdowns or AP scores. Badges follow learners when they leave the K–12 system, and come encoded with metadata to explain their value. Learners/users can then collect and share badges, potentially marketing themselves for future career and learning opportunities.

Opportunity: Scout for badge opportunities that match and recognize your students’ independent learning passions.

6. FLIPPING. Flipping the classroom changes the place in which content is delivered. If a teacher assigns instruction—in the form of video, simulations, slidecasts, readings, and podcasts—as homework, then class time can become interactive. Flipping frees the class for face-to-face critical thinking, exploration, inquiry, discussion, collaboration, and problem solving. Flipping is a sweet spot for the talents of librarians, who can lead the professional development involved in curating high-quality resources and creating digital instruction. We need to flip our libraries too, and mobilize them for the many users who access their information largely on phones and tablets.

Opportunity: Support a favorite teacher by helping her flip the lecture she least enjoys teaching!

7. PORTABILITY. My dream is that every kid in America will have a library in his or her pocket or tucked in a sleeve. If your school is working toward BYOD (bring your own devices) or a one-to-one program, this has got to be on your radar—no excuses. We should be involved in selecting apps for learners, and we should be driving the reinterpretation of the library for the phone or tablet. It’s time for all of us not only to have virtual libraries, but to have mobile sites or apps.

Opportunity: Let your students help build your app or mobile site. Even younger students can help determine what resources they most need to have in their pockets 24/7.

8. COLLABORATION AND CONNECTION. Kids are comfortable in the cloud. Whether it’s working on a story, script, survey, or presentation, students and their teachers collaborate automatically. Google Apps illustrates how ridiculous it is that other tools require individual logins, won’t accept group participation, and won’t move with users across devices. Professionally, TL Cafe thrives, and this year the #tlchat hashtag went live.

Opportunity: Be the go-to resource for linking classrooms with other classrooms, authors, and experts. Lead in setting up learning events via Twitter, Skype, Google+ Hangouts, or Elluminate.

9. MAKERSPACES/LEARNING COMMONS.Inspired by the Digital Youth Project and Henry Jenkins’s work on participatory culture, many of us are recreating our physical spaces. This, of course, dovetails with our rethinking of the space required by print and the place creation plays as the end result of research or play. It seems to me a perfect storm. Libraries are evolving as makerspaces (aka hackerspaces or fablabs)—flexible, collaborative spaces that foster playful design and creation.

Opportunity: Dedicate an area of your existing space as a makerspace. Ask students to help you run making workshops for the faculty during lunches.

10. KID POWER. We witnessed the power and agency of children who used social media to have their say and command the world’s attention. Nine-year-old Caine, for example, built a cardboard arcade that inspired boys and girls around the world. Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl from Swat Valley, leveraged the media to advance education for girls. After Taliban gunmen shot and wounded Malala in October, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared November 10 as Malala Day, a global symbol of every girl’s right to an education.

With the support of mentors from the First Light organization, British school girls raised awareness of the underground practice of genital mutilation (FGM) in the U.K. with their compelling documentary, Silent Scream.

Opportunity: Share this story (and the ones above) of kids making a difference with your own kids. Use them as an inspiration for creating meaningful future projects.

11. BIG DATA. Possibly best known as the intelligence behind recommendation engines or the Human Genome project, Big Data was abuzz in 2012. Politicians exploited it. Examples include the Google Crisis Map; the One Million Tweet Map, which analyzes who’s tweeting what and where; and GapMinder (www.gapminder.org), which demonstrates global trends through data and promotes using statistics to develop a fact-based world view. Big data fosters problem solving in the form of computational thinking, a literacy that we librarians seldom explore.

Opportunity: Encourage your students and teachers to be data scientists. Examine large datasets and tell stories about them using infographics.

Along the way you’ll discover why it’s practically useless to use email when communicating with teens,  and—great news!—“two thirds of online teens age 17 (67%) say they decided not to post something online because they thought it may reflect badly on them in the future.” Perhaps we’re finally getting through to them about being good digital citizens…