Teen Tech Month: Part 1

I know it's really Teen Tech Week, but rather than having to cram a bunch of cool stuff into one week, I've dubbed March Teen Tech Month at my library and am doing one tech-related things a week.

The first thing we did was an online scavenger hunt. The questions were as follow:

Teen Tech Scavenger Hunt

1. Go to Twitter and write down 3 trending topics for right now


2. Go to Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org) and click on their Teen section. Name at least 2 topics in the index there you can click on.


3. Go to our library homepage. Name 3 of the databases you can search from home or the library.


4. Using our library site again, find and write down the Dewey Decimal number for Customs, Etiquette & Folklore.

5. Go to the Kids section of our website. Find where you can search for books that have been made into movies, and list one that was made into a movie during the year you were born. (Write down the year you were born as well) (http://www.mcpl.lib.mo.us/readers/movies/ is the website we link)


6. Look on our website. Who is author we’ll have coming to do a talk at the end of the month?


7. Look up http://teenfire.ning.com. Write down out what event is going on March 18. (While you’re there, you may want to explore. Or come back when you have more time)


8. Go to www.the4yablog.com and find an activity or craft you’d like to do (Note: You will probably have to look at the archives and other posts to find one you like)


9. Go to our website. Find the elibrary database. Do a search of just newspapers and magazines on the topic “teen pop culture”. Look at the first article that comes up and write down the MLA citation for it.


10. Go to www.fantasticfiction.com. Look up Lemony Snicket. What are the 6th and 11th books in the Series of Unfortunate Events? Whose pseudonym is Lemony Snicket?

Now, a lot of these are specific to our library's website, www.ccpl.sirsi.net, but you could adapt them for your own library. These were all written with the idea of getting teens familiar with some of the stuff we have available online, as well as things out on the web. (Whether any of them remember any of it is an entirely different issue.) We had a number of earbuds left over from summers past, so I gave those out to the participants, and the winner (most right in the least amount of time) won a $15 iTunes gift card. The kids had a hard time with it, but they didn't complain too much - it was good for them - they were building character.