Celebrate Earth Day With These Amazing Books and Activities From Capstone and Merge EDU....And Enter For A Chance To Win Them Too!

 

To celebrate Earth Day, I collaborated with my friends at Capstone and Merge EDU to create a series of hands-on Merge EDU activities that go with five of my favorite books from Capstone.  By including these books and activities that cover various topics like bees, trees, soil and rain, students will learn more about these important aspects of Earth in a way that are engaging, memorable, and fun. 

In this post, you can read more about the Nature We Need series from Capstone, and the Merge EDU activities that are paired with each book. 

And guess what?  

Capstone and Merge are providing an Earth Day Prize for a few lucky educators! The prize package will include: 

• 1-year Merge EDU Individual Subscription, 3 Merge Cubes, and Merge EDU stickers
• 1-year access to 5 Capstone Interactive eBooks, which includes the Nature We Need Series and my book, Sonia's Digital World) 
• A set of Nature We Need print books
• Copy of Sonia’s Digital World by Shannon McClintock-Miller

All you have to do is sign up here for your chance to win! 

Winners will be chosen on April 23rd! Good luck, and Happy Earth Day!!

5 Features I LOVE About The NEW Destiny Version 21.0!

I am so excited about the NEW Destiny Version 21.0! 

The new Destiny version is loaded with so many amazing updates and new additions.  We are having a great time getting to know it in our library and today, I want to share 5 features I LOVE about the NEW Destiny Version 21.1 with all of you. 

1. To start, users can now easily access all areas of Destiny from the new waffle menu in the top-right corner. 

When you click on the waffle menu, the drop down menu features all of these different choices shown above and let's you easily go back and forth between them from the waffle menu.  It remembers where you left off which makes it so handy to do all of the tasks we do as librarians. 

For example, you can be working in Destiny Back Office and a student can come up to the circulation desk asking for help finding books about animals.  You can go to Destiny Discover to help the student, and then go back to what you were working on in Back Office. 

2.  There is a NEW district-level and site-level Library Dashboard. You can see it circled in the image above. 

I love this new addition so much as it gives us access to useful and exciting library and resource usage data. 

You can look at the date in special time frames and by grade levels. 

When I look at my Dashboard, I can get a snapshot of Active Highlights such as Checkouts, Holds, Books Checked-in Today, Copies Added, and more. 

And I just love the Reporting features shown including Library Circulations, Most Popular Titles and Series, and Library Circulations down to the Sublocations. 

Your Library Dashboard can be customized, and the Reporting features can even be moved on the Dashboard. 

3. And guess what?  

Within the new site-level Dashboard, there is a place to that even recommends books for your library! 

At the bottom of the Customize your Library Dashboard page, you can enable Show book recommendations for your library. 

This will then show you Top Picks, New Series, and Complete Your Series categories. These are customized book recommendations based on best sellers, your school's interests, and your library collection. 

I love that these will fit the needs and interests of our readers. 

4.  From the Recommendations for your Library widget, I can also click on the choice and it will take me right into....

....our Titlewave, where I can build lists and order books.  

This is such an amazing collection development tool. It will not only save me time, but will help me build a collection for our readers wants and needs.  

I can also get to Titlewave from the waffle menu too. 

5. I also want to point out how awesome it is to have the Most Popular Titles and Series widget on the Dashboard.  

This gives us a glimpse into what our students are checking out and will also help us as we add and highlight more of these titles and series in our library. 

We are going to have lots of fun with this information, as it will be at our fingertips every day. 

As you can see, there are so many features to love about the NEW Destiny Version 21.0.  This is just the start, and I will be sharing more as we work on collection analysis, weeding and collection development during the last few weeks of school in our library. 

To find out more, you can go to Follett Community to What's New with Destiny 21.0 here.

I know you will love all of the updates too!  

Exciting News! StickTogether® Joins The Demco® Family! Read All About It Here, Friends.

 

I have exciting news to share, friends. 

StickTogether® has officially joined the Demco® family. 

You can read all about it in the press release here.

I can't wait for all of the special things to come.