Thing 9: Search Tools Ninja

Last year at one of our school library system days one of the librarians showed the database PebbleGo. I immediately fell in love with it and requested my district buy it as well. I was lucky enough that my superintendent agreed and we now own PebbleGo. I have not had the opportunity to do as much with it as I would like so I am taking the chance with this "thing" to work with PebbleGo. I am also using the search engine choosito which looks really cool. I will not be signing up for an account as it seems like you're able to search on it without creating a trial.

So the project I am working on currently with my kindergarten class focuses on polar bears. We read the story Mattie the Polar Bear during our last library day and began watching the documentary about Tasha the Polar Bear. This week I will be using the article from PebbleGo with the students. We will read the article on the SmartBoard and work with the different categories. This will also help me to teach the students about using articles to read for information.

While searching on Choosito I came across the website for the San Diego Zoo which has a camera in their Polar Bear tank which allows you to watch the live feed. I am hoping to have this cued up so that when we are done reading the article on PebbleGo about Polar Bears we will be able to watch some of the live feed from the zoo. I think the students will really enjoy watching the live feed of the Polar Bears.

I will also show the students how to search using PebbleGo. One of my favorite tools to use on PebbleGo is the spinner. This is a great tool if you don't really know what you want to teach about that day and you want to use an article. Each student would be able to spin the spinner and learn about something new that day. I also really enjoy the games that are available as they provide brain breaks for the students and they also test their knowledge gained from the articles. It is also a good tool to use as a pre-reading test to see what they already know about their animals.

I feel that Choosito will help supplement PebbleGo for the younger students. I love that I can choose the reading level on it to make it beneficial for the students.

I am super excited to try these new tools with my students since I have had the chance to play with them.