About a month ago I entered a video in a contest sponsored by the Gale/Librareo group, a national library resources company. They were offering a grand prize of $5000 to be split between the video creator and the library of their choice.  The video had to be two minutes long, use an original song or one in the public domain, and feature a favorite author or book. My wife Karen Rose and I have been producing videos for our respective elementary schools for the last few years. We decided to give it a try. Since we both will be assigned to the new McKillop Elementary school in Melissa next year, she as a third grade teacher and I as the librarian, we made that our designated library should we win. We have had previous success with entering national video contests this past year. We were finalists in both the Interwrite and SMART board contests and won the grand prize in the AverMedia document camera competition.  We also collaborate on a series of science and library instructional videos for elementary schools featuring the character "Dr. Loopy." These videos can be used freely by anyone and are located on TeacherTube at: http://www.teachertube.com. You also can find it on neighborsgo.com.

Karen and I collaborate a great deal on the videos and in this case she came up with the song and I came up with the lyrics. We both have a love for Kevin Henkes books and I realized their were a ton of books about mice we could sing about.  The situation in the video is one many school librarians face all the time; "can you help me I need it now."  We shot backgrounds in my former library at Skyview elementary and then using a "green screen" we added ourselves into the video. Everything you see live was actually shot in our den! we finished up the editing and uploaded the video to the Librareo site.  During the initial contest period videos were on Youtube where everyone could see them. Then judges from Librareo rated their favorite five for the finals.  We were fortunate enough to be included. After that the public voted for a week.  Fianlly the call from Librareo arrived and we were declared the winner!  As part of the prize package we get a trip to the national American Library Association convention in Anaheim in July. We have no immediate plans for our share of the money but the libraries share will go into assuring that McKillop elementary library is exemplary!  The video can be viewed at: Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse.