WOW!  The plethora of new tech tools that I have been introduced to in just one week is totally amazing!

The first one that I interacted with was Colleen King’s introduction to: Google Spotlight Stories  

(Carrs, 2018)

This tool is a VR (Virtual Reality for those not in the know) that you can download onto your phone and interact with a story in a way that I have never done before!  Once I downloaded the app, it turned my phone into a VR viewer of the story content on Google Spotlight Stories.  By moving my phone from side to side and up and down, I could see different angles of the story.  I watched, Age of Sail, directed by John Kahrs, and as I moved the viewfinder, I could see the endless horizon of water, the entire side of the steamer, and the entirety of the long shadows cast by William and Lara as they stood on the steamer that rescued them. Yes, I am a fan and cannot wait to show it to my 5 year old niece.

The next one is Susan Strab’s find of: MLA Citation Maker (Oregon School Library Information System) https://secondary.oslis.org/@@mla-secondary

This is a potential game changer. I was the long-term substitute English teacher at the middle school level and witnessed glaring citation errors in the students’ work.  They seemed to feel that as long as they copied and pasted the website they found the information from, and usually only one source, that they had done their job of citing the source. They all knew that they needed to cite their work to avoid plagiarism; but the mechanics of proper MLA citation were not something they understood.