WHODUNNIT: Running a Library Mystery

One of my favorite activities during Literacy Week was the library mystery, which I mostly aimed at the middle school students.  I wanted a quick, daily activity that I could start during our break, but then the students could continue working on during the day.  Each day's activity would lead students to a set of clues, and each day the clues would point more directly to the guilty party.

THE SET UP
Having spent the previous week making announcements to build suspense and interest in the library mystery, on the first day, about 12 students showed up during break, eager to begin.

As I chatted with the students, my aide came running up and, very dramatically,  declared an important book had disappeared. Much "oh no" and "what shall we do" ensued, during which I enlisted the twelve students as my detectives to help solve the mystery.  I gave them this handout and explained the game:

1) Each day at break they would come to collect a new puzzle to solve.
2) Solving the puzzle, would give them a clue.
3) Solving that clue would lead them to the new set of mystery clues for that day.  By analyzing the clues each day, they would be able to deduce the culprit.

THE PUZZLES:

The first puzzle (a dystopian crossword) I came up with myself.  It took so long, I admit I gave up and just looked around online to find other puzzles I could use.  All the puzzles were based around books, of course.  Originally, I wanted to do a different genre for each day, but I waited far too long in setting those up, so most of them ended up being based around dystopian and fantasy novels.  Next year.....

Shade in the boxes of letters to spell out, when rearranged,  the name of an author (alduous huxley for me).  Their first set of mystery clues were hidden in Brave New World. I also attached a hint to suggest in which of his books they should look (1) The title comes from a famous line in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

For the next  puzzle I found a Harry Potter anagram site and put together this handout. Again, the letters with an * spelled out (in order this time) the title of another fantasy novel.

For the third puzzle, I just found a Lightning Thief crossword Puzzle and highlighted letters to spell out the name of another book.

THE CLUES:
I'm not the most logical, analytically minded person in the world;  I created the chart  below to help me devise the clues.  I did check the with "suspects" before-hand to ensure they didn't mind being accused of book theft!   You can just substitute your own teachers for the set of clues here, or create your own.

Basically, when writing the clues, I tried to:

1) Create clues that developed a (very basic!) plot and established either means or motive (sometimes both)
2) Throw in several red-herrings.
3) Add enough additional clues to negate the misleading clues, in order to narrow it down to one person.

Here are the clues.  I divided them into three sets, one for each day of the mystery, with the clues growing more and more obvious.  On day two,  I had the suspect write an actual note (for clue 11) to include in the book (thereby adding another clue, if the students' knew her handwriting).  The two books in the final clue for day three are directly related to information most people know about the suspect (who is our Secondary Head): i.e. she speaks German, and disciplines students.

Do the clues completely eliminate all suspects?  Not really.  But most of the students guessed correctly.  The teachers also had fun being cryptic as students ran up to them asking questions to try and clarify the clues.

Now that I have the hang of it,  next year I'll try to make the clues more logical, so that they really can deduce the criminal from the evidence.  BTW, here's the chart I used to help figure out the clues.

Google Body: As Cool As It Gets

I'm spending today (and the week) playing catch up.  I've really let my PLN slip this year,  and I think it shows in my librarianship, though the bosses seem pretty happy!

Anyway, while playing around online, I ran across Google Body, which Google released in December.  You will need Firefox 4 or Google Chrome 10 for it to work.

Basically,  it's Google Earth for the body.  It loads with a  1) 3D rotating computer-generated body (you can choose male or female), with layers for 2) muscles, 3) skeleton, 4) organs, vascular system and nerves/brain .  Tools allow the user to 5) zoom in on specific elements, 6) add pins and highlight (I highlighted the stomach here), hide/unhide body parts,  with links to 7) specific systems, muscles, organs, etc.

And,  just because we're teachers and we have to ask,  8) here's a picture of the anatomically correct male parts. I think Google does as good a job as possible removing any titter-causing elements.  But, hey, 7th graders are 7th graders, and they're going to titter no matter what!  (No similar worries with female mammaries, I might add).

This will also allow them to take very specific screen grabs to illustrate reports and research, instead of hunting for generic images.

I can't wait to show this to our elementary and science teachers tomorrow.  I also think students will love playing around with it, and may even learn something in the process!

(click on photos for larger view)

Literacy Week: Worth the Work!

One area I need to work on as a Media Specialist is non-research programming.  My first school had never had a teaching librarian before; thus, the bulk of my time went to a) building a culture of library use and b) putting together and developing the information literacy curriculum.  About the time I was ready to start focusing on traditional literacy, I changed schools and started all over again!

Fortunately, my current school informed me the first week I arrived: "We have Literacy Week.  You're in charge!"  Gulp!

The past few months my team and I put the week together, and it was a success, if I say so myself.  In order to share the wealth and make it easier for you, dear reader, to plan such an event (or just use part of what we did), I'm going to have a short series describing the week and the events.

Since we're a K-12 school, we had to develop activities for both divisions, as well as plan some all school activities.  I also made an "executive" decision to define literacy broadly, including technology and information literacy as well as the more traditional reading/writing.  Today, I'll just describe what those activities were; the next three posts will look at them in more detail and supply handouts.

All-School Activities

Read-a-Thon:  This lasted for an entire month.  Students find sponsors who agree to pay either a set amount or a certain amount per book. We found two local schools in need of books, and will donate the money towards that.

Book Buddies:  Secondary students paired up with primary students and shared their favorite picture book.

D.E.A.R:  Drop Everything and Read, 20 minutes per day, with "guest" announcers.

Skype Author Visits:  Laurie Halse Anderson and David Greenberg.  WONDERFUL!!!

Secondary:
Search  Story Contest:  We used the Google Search Story tool and had students create their own stories.

Library Mystery:  This took a lot of planning, and only about 12 students participated, but they had a blast (as did I and the "suspect" teachers), so I count it a big success.


Primary:
StoryBirds:  We used StoryBird to have the students write their own stories.

3D Book Promotion Contest: We wanted to move beyond designing book covers.  That's a picture of one of the entries. 


Since I need to plan another one of these next year, if you have any ideas or successful activities you've used in your own library, add them to the comments!

Circumventing Animoto

I'm not all that thrilled about the re-designing of Animoto.  Dropping the "shared" videos tab makes a teacher's life  harder--I liked being able to just scroll through that to watch/grade my student's videos.  Worse, I've now lost access to all the past videos that I used for demonstrations, since they've locked down the site so you can no longer search through other users' public videos.  What's up with that, Animoto???

My internet connection here in Borneo is not the best; it can take forever to log on, and once you're on, it repeatedly kicks you off.  Not good for a 50 minute presentation highly dependent on online videos and tools.  I've been frantically trying to "internet proof" the workshop the last few nights:  I downloaded the Prezi, took screenshots of the apps (Animoto and Myna) in case they're not working, and downloaded the Animoto videos.  That's where I hit the troublespot:  Two of my examples were from my last school, and since they're not in my account, I can't download them (though, fortunately, I had links, so could still access them!)

I tried using Video Download Helper (a Firefox add-on) to download the booktrailer, but that doesn't work on Animoto anymore.  After trying a couple other tools, I finally found Real Player SP for Mac.  It's a quick download, then

• Open the program, go to File>Open Location, add the URL and wait for RP to load the page.
•  In the meantime, go to Window>Open RealPlayer Downloader.
• Back in the RealPlayer window, click play for the video, which will open it in Downloader, with a download button. Click that, and you're good to go!

The Prodigal Blogger Returns, Along with iPhone Citations

Well......so much for my Christmas blogging blitz!  I have just not been motivated to blog the past few months.  I'd have an idea for a post or learn something new, but couldn't be bothered to actually write it down and share.  Not good.  Mea culpa.  I suspect if you search that term on the blog, it would pop up several times; I'm definitely a go-through-phases poster, which is only the least reason among many while I'll never be a Doug or a Buffy or a Joyce.

Anyway, I am currently escaping from the end of the Mongolian winter and luxuriating in a 5 star hotel in Borneo,  attending EARCOS, the big conference for Asian international schools.  I'm doing a short workshop tomorrow on Animoto booktrailers, which I've written about previously here, so I won't do it again!  

I'm attending other workshops, though, and have fodder for much online thought, in addition to planning and running Literacy Week at the school a few weeks ago, so I'll post all my stuff on that once I'm back.

In the meantime, here's a nifty little iPhone app I learned about yesterday:  Quick Cite
It's a 99 cents app wherein you basically take a picture of a book's barcode, and it emails you the citation. You can choose among several formats: MLA, APA, etc.  and they have plans to integrate with EndNote--f any of you are using that--in the next few days.

I'm excited about this.  Like most schools, ours "officially" tells students they can't use their phones, but let's be realistic about it.  I ignore that most of the time (as do the students!), and love pointing out ways they can use their smartphones for something other than texting!  In fact, I'd argue we have an obligation to do that, but not everyone agrees.

That's it for now--I'm off to the Bornean forests to view the Orangutans!  I attended a workshop yesterday on QR Codes, so will post my thoughts on those tomorrow. (I know, I know:  you've heard THAT before! )

How Clean is Your Facebook Account?

Given this recent headline in The Atlantic, and given many schools' tendency to panic and over-react regarding most social networks, I'm sure we all, as tech-savvy media specialists, keep our online digital footprints pretty clean.   But is your Facebook profile as clean as you think?

SocioClean, a free online tool, promises to analyze your profile and give you the bad/good news.

I gave it a go, and think the tool is just about as reactionary as many a district superintendent.

Once you log in, it only takes a few minutes for SocioClean to analyze your status updates, images, and wall posts (both from you and your friends), then report back your grade. Here is my report:

Yikes!  Fortunately the site breaks down your results and gives specific examples of objectionable content, and I was very surprised to find out my biggest fault is my aggression level.  Really?  Laid back me?  My profanity level was also pretty high.   Once I started digging into the results, however, it turned out to be not quite as bad as SocioClean would lead me to think.

The aggression level came from many of the reports on Egypt (I lived in Cairo for 5 years, so followed the uprising there very closely)--some of the offending words being bombs, wrecked, terrorist,  and fire.  Hmmm.  My profanity level was medium high, and on looking at it, I am rather chagrined at how often I say "bloody hell" on a post.  I'll have to watch that.  However, it also pegged calling someone a "blow-hard" as sexual, as well as the xxx a couple friends signed off with.  Getting up at the crack of dawn was tagged as a drug reference, as was a dinner of Korean Hot-Pot, while a mention of Dick Cheney was tagged as profane.  Well, no argument there.

If SocioClean gives me an F, I give it a solid C.  It's overly sensitive, and doesn't recognize context,  but would be interesting to use with students to get them thinking more clearly about the cumulative effect of their posts.  It gives back results for racial comments (for some reason, the word Osama makes you racist), as well as those mentioned above.

21st Century Nativity

I'm home for the holidays, and have promised myself a blogging extravaganza, to make up for my silence the last few months.

In the meantime, enjoy this...