While reading through the latest issue of School Library Journal, I came across an article highlighting a great resource out there for brining books and technology together. It is a blog created by Natalis Malesa, a school library assistant and MLIS student. Her blog is titled Stories from the Cloud (www.storiesfromthecloud.blogpost.com), and is meant to show educators how technology tools can be used to further connect kids with books and complement what they are reading. She states that she wanted to show how “visual storytelling can be used to complement books. They don’t have to be to be two separate things, the computers and the book. They can work together.”
The blog is setup so that it first showcases a book title, giving a summary or preview of the book, and will then show how it has integrated a specific technology tool with the book, providing a specific example of how the tool was used with the title. For instance, the lastest blog entry, from March 3rd, shows how Malesa used the tool Slide (www.slide.com) to retell the book Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. In the blog post she gives basic instructions for using Slide, and then provides the example she created. Following this she provides a review of the book title, and allows readers to comment on the post.
Many of the tools she features in her blog posts are ones we have discussed previously in class, such as Timetoast, Wordle, Voice Thread, and Google Maps, and here we get to see examples of exactly how they can be used with books and incorporated into the classroom or library programs. Looking over this blog really helped to synthesis many of the themes and topics we have discussed is class for me, and provided concrete examples of how to bring media/technology and books/reading together. I will definitely be following this blog for ideas from now on!
Barack, Lauren. "Tech Knowledge: Stories from the Cloud." School Library Journal
(Mar. 2011): 14. Print.
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