Escamilla Reads

From March to May, educators were opened up to the world of virtual learning. For some, it was a piece of cake. For others, there was some struggle. I recall many teachers freaking out on how they were going to teach exact content online. Many of these educators were not aware of screencasts. A screencast captures a person's computer screen and creates a video of everything that is happening on it while the person speaks. It's like a voice over! When teachers use screencasts for instruction, they are able to go through a lesson smoothly by showing specific steps to an audience. In addition to this, the video does not only have to consist of the computer screen. Users can also turn on their webcam so their audience can actually see them as they speak through the video. It's so amazing, and if students miss out on anything the first time they watch the screencast, they can always just rewatch it! I worked with two screencast websites today: Screencastify and Screencast-o-m...

As a current middle school ELAR teacher, I'm pretty familiar with using infographics within instruction. Students really enjoy creating them; however, sometimes they struggle with gathering data and finding the most appropriate way to represent it in the infographic (i.e. a pie chart). I am excited to plan many ways I can use infographics whenever I'm finally a library media specialist. I know I can for sure create different ones to hang up regarding books, copyright, other internet ethics, etc. I can also have students create infographics of their own to help show if they understand the different information literacy tasks being taught. Usually, I use Canva for all my creative designs, including infographics. However, I am pretty familiar with Piktochart as well since most other educators on my campus use it. I honestly thought these two apps/websites were probably the only excellent ones for infographic making, but I was wrong! I've recently checked out Easel.ly and Inf...

Ah, social media. It's such a big thing today, especially in this era of the digital age. Some people may argue that social media is annoying and that too many people are addicted to it. Yes, this is somewhat true; however, because of such popularity, social media can actually be useful among students and educators. In fact, it can be super useful for school librarians! Social media is an excellent way to advocate, share resources, and promote what's in the collection. The following popular social media apps are some of the few that can help with all of this: Facebook School librarians can create Facebook pages for their library. Members of Facebook and can look up the library and "like" the page in order to follow along with posts/updates. I went ahead and looked at three different leveled school libraries and took notes on what they included: High School Library -Virtual reading challenge flyer -Shared audiobook options -Announced reading challenge winners ...

Hello, fellow future school librarians! As my LSSL portfolio deadline and graduation approaches, I've been researching more and more ideas for my future library. I started on Pinterest and have found some amazing ideas so far; however, I realized that I would like another website or app to help me keep different library blogs organized. That's when I decided to check out different feed readers! A feed reader allows users to follow and organize specific desired content. That way there won't be such an overload when searching for topics! Many feed readers are free and also offer premium plans if needed. Some feed readers are both actual websites and apps. Because of this, users will have access to blogs and other content at any time! After looking into several feed readers, I decided that Feedly  was the best option for me! It's actually one of the more popular feed readers, and there are many reasons why! The app is very user-friendly, and the website is very cle...