John Green Visit - January 14, 2012

You've seen authors at Ravenscroft, but on January 14th at 6 PM, join us for a whole new event - the Vlog Brothers are coming!  John Green, author of award-winning books like Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, and his musically talented brother, Hank, are coming to the Jones Theatre.

Hank and John promise lots of fun with music, videos, and a Q&A session, see this video for details, The Tour de Nerdfighting 2012.


UPDATE: This event is sold out!  If you bought your ticket and copy of The Fault in Our Stars through Quail Ridge Books, you can pick it up between Tuesday morning 1/10/12 and 3:00 PM on Saturday afternoon.  Ravens, I'll get the books during 4th period on Tuesday so you can come by the library anytime after Tuesday at lunch to pick up your book and ticket!  Otherwise, get them the night of the event, doors open at 5 PM in the Lobby, see the campus MAP here!  Seating is General Admission so come early for the best seats.

Breaking Dawn

 Our group, on opening night,
November 18th at
Six Forks Cinema!

EasyBib or NoodleTools

The Ravenscroft Researcher isn’t the only product to help you cite your paper. Our library has new online resources to help you write citations in MLA format. With these products, you’ll need to create an account while you’re on campus, but then you can access it anywhere, it will hold your data safely! We started out with EasyBib, and wow, is it easy! You can type in ISBN numbers, book titles and authors, or cut and paste from a library database when a citation is provided for you. It saves all of your work so you can print it out, already alphabetized and with a hanging indent when you’re done with the whole paper. They even have an EasyBib App for your iPhone, you can scan and email citations as needed. In fact, this has easily been one of the most exciting new products that I’ve shared with students. They were sitting in class downloading the app and clicking on all of the books they could find, just to see the citation!

NoodleTools started out as NoodleBib, but it has tools, lots of them. Yes, you can cite your work, but it’s more indepth. In order to learn all of the steps, you have to go through each step for each book. No shortcuts, no cutting and pasting. And that has been rough for the Composition students who had been using EasyBib, and are now doing NoodleTools.

Why, then? Well, NoodleTools has this awesome notecard and paper organization feature. EasyBib has this too, but doesn’t allow collaboration. NoodleTools allows your teacher to access your notecards and outlines as you work on your paper, comments will pop up in your dashboard, it’s a very smart program! The collaboration part is why we’re using NoodleTools in our Composition classes, for the paperless and timely dialogue between teacher and student.

So, if you want to learn how to cite correctly, maybe for the first paper of the year, use NoodleTools. EasyBib will make it easy to do afterwards, organizing your scanned or entered information into a beautiful Works Cited. Both integrate smoothly with Google Docs, making your paper complete and beautiful.

Ask any of our Librarians for more information on how to get started with your classes using these or any other resources!

Hunger Games Trailer

Hey Hunger Games fans!

The trailer for the upcoming Hunger Games movie was just released. Watch it at this link!

Oxford Music Online and Google Docs

Upper School Strings came in this week to learn more about the composers for the music they play. Instructor Pam Kelly and I collaborated, using our new Oxford Music Online database to get the information they needed. Try it out from our databases page, it’s new, along with Oxford Art Online!

Students worked in groups to find biographical and historical references to the composer, time period, and frame of reference. I need to clean it up to make it easier to read, but here’s a link to the Google Doc. You can open it if you’re on campus.

Quidditch - Oct. 22

Join us for our first match against Enloe @ Fletcher Park at 10:30 AM.  For this match, we will be the Basilisks, so wear BLACK!


Bring water and your broom, and come at 9:45 to warm up.

Contact Mariel for details, her number is 618-5758.

How to get there:
http://www.raleighnc.gov/arts/content/PRecRecreation/Articles/FletcherPark.html

Video Taping for NBPTS

Fun stuff! Around this time of year, I get to sit in on Upper School classes. Depending on who is a candidate for National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I learn Biology, Physics, US History, English, or Art… I set up the camera so I can see faces of students and teacher with an easy pan of the room, and I have a boundary microphone to listen in on discussions.

I’ve learned a lot by taping teachers and being a National Board Candidate myself. I really wish that someone would have told me how to best videotape from the very beginning, so I’ve made a post with the steps here.

Reimagine:ED

Most professional conferences involve sitting, listening, and taking home a new idea or two. What if you went to a conference that was all about brainstorming? Reimagine:ED was just that, a conference about ideas, thousands of ideas, held at The Lovett School in Atlanta, September 23-25. Librarians, technology specialists, administrators and visionaries worked together to imagine the future of education and specifically libraries.

What did I bring home? A “Yes, And…” attitude, because it’s all about listening and adding, and not saying “but, we can’t do that” because we all can be the future we want to see in education. I’m hoping to share more new ideas on this blog over the next few months as I review notes and stay in touch with my new colleagues virtually.

The Economist

A few of you have asked about paper copies, and others for the web subscription to The Economist, so here are the directions to get to get into The Economist issues from our library databases online. Our online access goes all the way back to June 1990, and because of this, we’ve recycled our old magazines and don’t receive the print edition.

Along the right side of the blog, choose Databases for Searching Magazines, Books, Journals, Newspapers.

Choose EBSCO – this is our biggest Database with thousands of full text articles! On campus, it will recognize your IP Address, off Campus you will need to enter our passwords. If you can’t remember the library database passwords, email library@ravenscroft.org.

Choose Academic Journals, Grade 9-12 – most of these links are taking you to the same resources, but with more user-friendly/fun icons for younger kids. Choose MAS Ultra Database, and search by date or by article title.

• If you know the exact date of the article you want, click on PUBLICATIONS in the top of the screen or Advanced Search and just search for Economist under publication. The Economist has a 21 day “rolling” publication release, so you can’t get this week’s issues, but usually, you can still get those on http://www.economist.com/

• If you know the title of the article, you need to enter the title of the magazine and title of the article: for example, Economist and Street of Shame

You can email this article to yourself or print it out. If you want to save the link back to it, don’t use the link in the top of the browser, make sure you save the “Permalink” found on the right side of the screen.

Library iPad Program!

The Ravenscroft Libraries strive to develop students as self-directed learners, complex thinkers, quality producers, collaborative workers, and community contributors. Our iPads will help us achieve this mission, through independent reading, research and group projects using the Apple iPad 2.

For our pilot program in Fall of 2011, iPads may be checked out during normal hours (Monday- Thursday 7:45-4:30 and Friday 7:45-3:45) from the main circulation desk in the Middle/Upper School library. We have set the loan period at 24 hours for faculty and staff, and one class period, common period, lunch, or afterschool session for 6-12th grade students with a requirement that devices be turned in no later than 4:20 PM each day. For student check out, the iPad must stay in the library.

For other policies, see this link, and watch for details about iPads in Winston Library later this year.

JK Rowling has announced her new project: Pottermore. Opening in October, Pottermore will be an interactive, extremely high tech website that takes you through the books as a student in Hogwarts. JK Rowling started this project to feed fan's imaginations and bring new accessibility to the coming generation who, lets face it, don't find much time to read thousand page books. The site will not only include info from the books but also brand new information about the world of Harry Potter that JK Rowling has known for years but never released. With innovative and highly particular ways of finding the correct wand (33,000 different results) and house (series of thorough questions) for each user, Pottermore guarantees a safe and unique environment for people of all ages to experience the books in a way they never thought possible.

For more information as well as a video of her announcement and press conference visit this site.

Hunger Games In NC?

Hey Hunger Games Fans! There has just been word that the District 12 shots for the Hunger Games movie, due to be released in 2012, will be set in Shelby North Carolina! The cast and crew will be there until June 1st and the roads have been completely closed for the days they're shooting. For more information visit hypable and click on Hunger Games. For any of you who aren't familiar with the casting information a summary can be found here. The most important being Jennifer Lawrence (who's usually blond but went brunette for this movie) as Katniss, Liam Hemsworth as Gale, and Josh Hutcherson as Peeta. What are your thoughts? Are these the kinds of actors you imagined? Did they make a good choice with the set for District 12?