Recently our school held our version of Donalyn Miller’s 40 Book Challenge at the high school level. We challenged teachers in our school to read forty books in teams of 11. Whoever read 40 books first, won. It was very exciting and fueled a love of literacy and LOTS of talking about books at our school. Our 20th Century Skills Class designed trading cards for each teacher/team member using the app MomentCam. We were looking for an app that we could use to easily create caricatures of each teacher. We LOVED Moment Cam for all of the choices it gave us, many including books! One critique we had, is that we could not get the app to work properly, even with the tech department troubleshooting, on our library ipads. The ipads are new and up to date, but the app only worked successfully on iphones, so the teachers and students had to use personal devices to have it work. All it required was a quick portrait snap of the subject.
I have seen several libraries that use shelf “talkers” or “markers” with a teacher or student picture on it, next to the book the patron has read, with a recommendation or review of the book. Often it’s a more formal school picture that is shared. I prefer using our Moment Cam photos. You can clearly identify most of the patrons, but the caricatures are cute and frankly, often more flattering that a real selfie. Most people agreed and shared a smile when they saw theirs.
A. Charland LIS 568 