Increase student engagement in watching videos 

Edpuzzle gives teachers a great set of tools to customize videos for their classes including the ability to crop videos, create voice-overs, and (my favorite) create questions for students to answer as they watch the video. Edpuzzle allows teachers to import their own videos or use videos from sources such as Ted Talks and YouTube.  Using Edpuzzle ensures that all students respond to formative questions (open-ended or multiple choice), not just the few students that might participate in class discussion, so it increases accountability and engagement.

Teachers can see data from the formative questions and video completion for the whole class and also broken down for each student. This data can then be used to guide further instruction. Some teachers use Edpuzzle in the flipped classroom model where students watch an interactive content lesson in Edpuzzle outside of class, and then use class time to engage in activities that apply what was learned. Below is a video I created about Edpuzzle.

We in the library would love to help you get set up with Edpuzzle or give you more information!

Use Word Clouds to present words and concepts in visually interesting ways

Creating "word clouds" quickly is something you could do as a fun activity with your students to show words and concepts in a visually interesting way. Students could install the add-on and create their own word clouds or teachers could generate the word clouds and project them based on student responses in a shared Google document.   

How to do it?

In any Google Doc, go to Add-ons at the top, click “Get add-ons” - search Word Cloud Generator and install it and accept the terms.  

Then in your Google Doc, click “Add -ons” menu again and choose Word Cloud Generator. Then click “Create Word Cloud.” You can "refresh" the word cloud as you add more words to your Google doc.

SSR and Independent Reading

First, let's take a moment to celebrate the amazing reading happening at South this year. In the first quarter alone, South High led the district in eBook checkouts with 743 items checked out. In addition, our students and staff checked out 3,267 print books. Wow! That is over 4,000 total checkouts. Thank you for your work in promoting our school's library. Keep up the great work, teachers!

In order to help you continue supporting our students' reading, we have put together some videos that walk you through checking out Overdrive eBooks and navigating the library catalog (see below). Please feel free to share them with your students.

We look forward to another great quarter. Have a wonderful day!

• Overdrive
• Username and password are the same as computer logins for staff and students
• Overdrive allows you to sort by Lexile level

• OPAC Library Catalog
• Using a book students have read and enjoyed, you can use the catalog's subject headings to find another book they may enjoy.