Guest Speaker to Spies!

We, the teen trainers at Spies Library have decided on the guest speaker that we are going to bring into the library for our next project. In the past few weeks, we have been planning the event and we just thought that we'd let you in on what we've decided and what we've been doing so far!

Our guest speaker will be the new, up-and-coming author, Nina Lacour. One of our group, Amie Beland, was the one to suggest her for our purposes. When we first talked about people to bring in, Amie brought up her name and we all thought that it was a good idea. Amie then contacted her over facebook and asked if she would be willing to do an event with us. Nina responded with an enthusiastic. "Yes!" Of course, flying Nina all the way in from her home California didn't seem at all practical or possible, but we immediately though of doing a skype event as an alternative.

For this event, we plan on inviting people from our school and community to come and ask Nina questions over Skype about the writing process, her book, and anything else they want to know! We will start with a list of pre-written questions, and then leave it up to the audience to ask. Using Skype also gives us an opportunity to show Skype and its uses off to people in the audience who don't know what it is.

In order to create publicity for the event, we are going to create posters using our wacom art tablet and post them around town and in our school. A few weeks ago, when we met with the Teen Council, we all got out our art supplies out and created some concept posters for our poster. We got some great ideas from the Teen council members and over the next few weeks, we will be working to incorporate these ideas into our tablet-created poster.

If you want to learn more about Nina, you can visit her site which I have put in the links. And if you want to learn more about her book, Hold Still, check it out and read it! Or, you can read my review on chilifresh!

Digg!

Hey this is Matt from Spies Library in Menominee. Let me start out by saying I have never in my life used Digg before this day. I've always been pretty tech oriented but I've never taken the time to look at this site in particular. I've got a rough idea about what the website is for, but it might be a good idea to let Digg explain its self:

"Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users. You won’t find editors at Digg — we’re here to provide a place where people can collectively determine the value of content and we’re changing the way people consume information online."

If you're wondering what that means, it means Digg is a site (primarily for news) where the users both find news, videos, or pictures, and decide what pictures and news stories are the most entertaining or interesting. Unlike conventional news sites, the viewers are the ones picking what is worth reading or watching, not editors. The site uses a point system. When a user "diggs" a story, it gains a point, and when a user "buries" a story, it loses one. It's a simple system, but it works. You can filter media on Digg by categories (Technology, World and Business, Science, Gaming, Lifestyle, Entertainment, and Offbeat) or time frame (Most recent, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 365 days). If you're not viewing by most recent, stories show up in order of how many diggs they have. All the fuss about digging and burying is to figure out which articles are on the front page and which articles no one will read. You can digg or bury stories you like or dislike, leave comments, find related stories, email the story, post the story to Facebook, and tweet the story all from a convenient toolbar that comes up when you click on something on Digg. That's most of what there is to know about Digg as a reader.
Here's a picture of a search I did on Digg for technology stories no more than a week old: http://i45.tinypic.com/2w4bb5j.jpg

Now We'll move on to submitting media. You need to make an account to submit stories, and accounts are easy to make and free. I'm going to submit this article from the Detroit Free Press about Lil Wayne delaying going to jail over dental work. Here's the link:http://www.freep.com/article/20100209/ENT04/100209062/1039/ENT04/Lil-Wayne-sentencing-delayed-for-dental-surgery

To submit an article, click the "submit new" button at the top of the page. After you do that you're brought to a page with a pretty straightforward interface. Paste the link into the bar and pick whether it is a news article, an image, or a video. In my case it's a news article. After that, type in a description and alter the headline if you want, and your story is submitted! Here's a link to the story I picked with the Digg toolbar: http://digg.com/d31IRcW

It's about as simple as that. People will either start digging or burying the story I submitted, only time will tell. If you have any questions or comments, let me know!

Menominee teen trainers create a commercial for all library lovers

The latest project for Menominee Teens has been the creation of a commercial for libraries which we have posted to youtube as one of our social networking projects. On the first night of filming, we had Teen Council members fill in as actors as we tried to show off our own library's amazing resources! On the second night of filming, we visited businesses (which shall remain un-named, for their own sake) offering these same resources in order to illustrate the catastrophic price differences! Although this movie is longer than the 2 minutes stipulated in the directions for the project, we hope that the resulting product is worth just a little bit more of your time. If you want to check it out, here it is



Have Fun!

Teen Trainers of Menominee

I'd like to introduce the Teen Trainer team from Spies Public Library in Menominee, Michigan! There are four of us in the group: Amie Beland (a long-time library devotee), Matt Sbar (the computer whiz of our group), Emma Hitch ( a self-proclaimed nerd-fighter), and myself, Margaret Hitch (your average, everday library lover). We've met with Jessica, bought ourselves some fancy new equipment, and planned out our first few projects. Now we are ready to start our real work on the grant, and to clue you all in to what some of that work may be! But first a little background. Previously, Amie and I had been involved in the Spies Teen Library Council. Amie could tell you more about it, as she's been involved with the group much longer than I have, but I'll tell you what I can. Basically, this group was created to bring teens into the library and to give them a chance to be more actively involved with the library's programs. Members help with many different activities, from putting on skits for Summer Reading programs, to decorating the library's Teen Room, to suggesting new books for the library's Young Adult section. There's plenty of fun to be had in this group, along with ample amounts of cookies and Caprisun. One of the biggest things that the council did was write and recieve a grant from the community for a gaming system for the library. The council bought an Xbox, along with such popular games as Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. They held gaming nights for kids of all ages, which they advertised in their schools. Having a Teen Council already in place is a great assest to our mylibrarymylife program, because we can collaborate with council members for some of our activities. For example, our first big project we plan to tackle is the video project. Our idea is to create a two-minute commercial for libraries in general (Library lovers unite!). One of our main selling points will be our unbeatable price (really, truly, FREE!) and our amazing selection (it's like Barnes and Noble, Family Video, Toys 'R Us, amd your local magazine stand all rolled into one, PLUS wi-fi!) These selling points will be delivered in the style of the late Billy Mays. We plan to point out the resources in our library, using council members as stand-ins for library patrons. Another project we are working on is a collaboration with our area's arts council in order to create a Facebook page for their group. Amie and I are members of this council, and when we heard of their need, we knew it would be just the thing in our community for our team to help out with. At our last meeting, we divided up the blogging projects equally between the four of us, so hopefully you'll be hearing more from us soon, and learning more about what we learn! With our technology budget we have so far bought a new laptop, a GPS locator and a Flip camcorder. We've also chosen a new digital camera, an 8GB itouch, and a Wacom art tablet, which we will be ordering soon. We hope to somehow incorporate this art tablet and the illustration software that comes with it into another project for the arts council. As for the guest speaker that we hope to bring in, we have come to no decision yet. Many suggestions have been made, though most not all that practical. One suggestion was John Green, a celebrated author who has become a semi-famous youtube star by keeping video-blog (vlog) correspondence with his brother for an entire year in a project called "Brotherhood 2.0" (You can check out their vlogs at http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers ) He and his brother have toured libraries in cities as close as Racine, Wisconsin. We can only hope (or maybe, wish) that another such tour is in the works, and that we can be lucky enough to contact him about a visit here! More updates from our group will come as soon as we've actually completed some of these projects, but for now, I leave you in anticipation for the learning to come!