We won!

Well, we ended up winning the Librareo contest sponsored by Gale. As a part of the prize my wife and I will be flying out to Anaheim this weekend to appear in their booth at the American Library Association convention. How cool is that? We had to juggle a few things but I think we are ready to go!

Librareo Finals Information

Voting goes on all this week in the Librareo video contest finals. You can vote once per day per computer. Just go to: http://www.gale.cengage.com/librareo/
and find Lily's Purple Plastic Purse. Vote to the right and then hit the vote button at the bottom. Spread the word and come back the next day!
Thanks.

Librareo Video Finals

I just found out yesterday that my MouseSpace video made the final five in the Librareo competition. The voting starts Monday and lasts a week. I'd love to win this because the prize is $2500 to me and $2500 to my new library! I'll post voting info when Monday rolls around.

Last day of school

You know it's funny, I've been out of school for many, MANY years and yet since I've gotten into teaching I can still feel that excitement mixed with regret that happens that final day of school. This is a special last day for me because I am changing districts and opening a whole new library in a school that is being built as I write. It's a large task, made larger by all of the small things that have to be done this summer to get the new library up and running. It's tough to leave here but change can be a good thing. It can re-motivate you and reset your goals. I've spent four years at my current school and I have to say that it's been some of the best time in my life. One can get complacent however and when that happens it's really time to move on and start again. So here's to a happy ending and a new beautiful beginning.

The 4th Science video

In our 4th video we covered "Planetary Forces." We started out with a question about building a model of the earth-moon-sun system and ended up covering some very simple physics.

Blinding you with Science #4 Planetary forces from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

More Science videos

The third video in my Blinding You With Science series covered learned and instinctive behaviors in animals. We had a lot of fun with this one and found a use for all those old Beanie Babies we had been saving up.

Blinding you with Science #3 Learned and Instinctive Behaviors from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

Mars

Does anyone else find it as amazing as I do that I can sit here and download images directly from Mars? What an amazing accomplishment and it seems so many people just take it for granted.

Smart Board Contest

Another contest we recently entered asked that you show an "extraordinary moment" using a Smartboard in a lesson. The time limit was 30 seconds! This is more difficult than it sounds. Since neither my wife nor I have a Smartboard we decided to do a commercial based on what a Smartboard might mean for a class science lesson. Here is the result.

SMART board video contest FINALIST from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

Librareo Contest

We've entered a video into the Librareo video contest sponsored by Gale. The rules stated they wanted a 2 minute music video about a favorite book or author. We decided to put a video together based on our mutual experience in the school library. And so I present: MouseSpace:

Hello World!

I am Dr. Loopy. I am an elementary school librarian in the state of Tejas. I have a great many interests that I hope to write about here but lately I have been doing a lot of video. Over the last four years I have put together a series called "Blinding you with Science." In it, my wife and I teach science concepts in an unusual and hopefully amusing way. Most of my work is up on Teachertube and I am posting it here as well. I think my work got better as I went along, but here is the first episode of BLINDING YOU WITH SCIENCE. (No, my dog was not injured in the making of this video.)

Blinding you with Science: #1 Density from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

My second video was about the concept of Layers and Erosion. Remember, each video was produced ONE WEEK APART throughout the season. so there is that "rushed" feeling to them. I have to say that the kids loved them and requested to see them over and over. Not coincidentally, our science test scores rose over the last four years and we went from being a school with an "acceptable" rating to one with an "exemplary" rating.

Blinding you with Science: #2 Layers and Erosion from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.

Not all of our work has been in science. Since I am a librarian and my wife is a teacher we decided to create a video about collaboration and the problems that sometimes arise. I have been fortunate to have a great staff that buys in to what I do. I know this is not always the case. Here are a couple of clips from our Classroom Teacher/Librarian collaboration video.

Librarian and Classroom Teacher Collaboration from Doug Valentine on Vimeo.