Books & Technology by JLGarcia

Podcasts are interesting tools being used by school librarians to engage students and inspire them to read.   A podcast is easy to record, but requires time to edit.   There are applications available to make this step a little easier.   Garageband is user friendly and offers plenty of features to help record and edit your podcast.   I have shared a link below to a helpful tutorial on YouTube.   It shows how simple it is to add music and edit the music to fade in and out.   You can also easily shift tracks around to accommodate the music.   However, th e main issue with using Garageband is that it is only compatible with Apple products.   So trying to share audio files to edit is difficult. The app only recognizes audio files saved within the app or this may have been a glitch when I was trying to upload an mp3 file to edit.   How to Record & Edit a Podcast in Garageband (Complete Tutorial) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhes...

Comics can provide teachers with an engaging way for students to express what they have learned.  There are several websites that provide easy to use programs that will help students create their own comics.  Below are three websites that I have reviewed and examples of the comics that I made using each website.  Each of the comics that I made are examples of interactions of body systems which can be used as an assignment for students in a science class. The first application I reviewed is ToonDoo which can be reached by clicking on this link:  http://www.toondoo.com  ToonDoo was very user-friendly and even allowed for images to be uploaded from the computer.  However, the application provides its own images and editing functions.  It is limited to just a few panels, though.  The graphics provided are very basic and image quality is not as high, but the program is sufficient for use in the classroom.  Students can log-in using their google ...