The world's largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens
I recently discovered a couple of wonderful information literacy-inspired song parodies. Chad Bauman wrote and produced a sweet, clever, slightly goofy song on the CRAPtest mnemonic many of us recommend for evaluating sources. Although I would advise kids about thinking a little more contextually about their sources, it’s a very cool way to open the conversation [...]
Dearest readers, What did your edtech year look like? Let’s create a snapshot. As this school year comes to a close, I’d like to call on you to share your discoveries and your wisdom and to help me reflect. Which edtech goodies, tools, apps, platforms, and strategies worked so well for you in 2012/2013 that [...]
Just about a year ago, I shared my excitement about Adam Bellow’s (eduTecher’s) Alpha launch of his clipboard service for education, EduClipper, as a kind of school-friendly, student-safe Pinterest on steriods, without the shoes. EduClipper is now ready for prime time–growing as a collaborative, global, digital curation hub, search/discovery tool and portfolio platform. It is [...]
After our first/last highly successful poetry slam, demand grew for us to schedule a second event before the school year ended. And last week we did. Although I worried that final projects, prom, graduation, finals, etc. would get in the way, the kiddos from my dear Literary Mag, Gay Straight Alliance, Book Club and Gallery [...]
I am a big fan of the talented, adorable and slightly wacky author/illustrator/kidlit blogger/podcaster Katie Davis. I am also a big fan of the slightly wacky, digital animation tool PowToon with its cool themes, props, animated characters and transitions. So what happens to the equation when a popular picture book author/illustrator partners with digital, comic-based presentation/video maker platform? [...]
A Guide to Citing Images, a new infographic from our friends at NoodleTools, offers a MLA-aligned flow chart to guide researchers through a variety of image citation situations. But it is not just about image documentation. It asks learners to ask themselves a few important questions before using and documenting images that were born digital. [...]
We’ve been relatively successful in spreading the gospel of using of Creative Commons and public domain work in student products. Our Copyright Friendly LibGuide is one of the most used of all of our Guides. I recently added this handy infographic Creative Commons: free photos for bloggers by Foter to our resources and hope to [...]
Share this with you favorite essay and paper-grading teachers: So much of our students’ work– collaborative or independent, so many of our professional documents, are created using Google Docs. And so many times it’s a strain to express in the margin, or in text notes, the personal/enthusiastic/caring/connected feedback we’d really like to share. When we [...]
PBS recently announced that its PBS LearningMedia, the media-on-demand service for PreK-12 educators, now offers more than 30,000 free, carefully cataloged, standards-aligned, digital resources. Honored with two 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards in the Education Technology category, these resources were specifically designed to address national curricular gaps for high-quality digital media. The new content features interactive games, images, videos, [...]
For the past several years, our seniors have looked forward to filling the library display case with some sort of artistic expression relating to their plans for next year. This year, we added another element to this tradition. We asked them for a memory card. It hasn’t caught on quite as well as the college [...]
All this month, YALSA and ConnectedLearningTV has hosted a series of conversations around teens and the future of school & public libraries, part of the year-long National Forum on Libraries and Teens. The background: YALSA President H. Jack Martin and Crystle Martin, Postdoctoral Researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network, have been moderators the free virtual chats, which will look at the [...]
I’ve not been a huge fan of listy/form type evaluation tools. So much of the process of assessing credibility has to do with context. Black and white decisions and rules of thumb are far more fuzzy in a read/write, citizen journalist, open scholarship, media-rich web. Truth is, I often find value in casually published, unvetted [...]
The deposit checks are in the mail but the college buzz is buzzier than ever. Having survived the arduous college admissions process, our seniors are now taking full advantage of their opportunities to negotiate the social landcape of their newly selected school well before they land on campus in late August. They are so much [...]
I hadn’t thought about it till today, but our summer reading list is a snooze. A dinosaur. A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists. Today, two things woke me up. 1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation. I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The [...]
I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning. And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania. Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn [...]
Frankly, our password sheet has always been a royal pain. I’ve long been in search of an authentication solution–a relatively barrier-free strategy for out-of-school database access. For Mackin customers, MackinVia creates a single hub for e-books and database content–a one-user ID and password to your database collection (and your MackinVia ebooks) accessible from any internet-connected [...]
It’s time to bust open the OPAC. In fact, it’s long past time. My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day. I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the [...]
To celebrate its 5th anniversary the Classroom 2.0 Community (with the help of additional educational networks), recently released the community-sourced Classroom 2.0 The Book. Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st. In [...]
A few questions continue to keep me up at night. Among them: How can I get my students and teachers to discover and use our e-resources to the max? What does face-out shelving look like in an e-collection? We are fortunate, I know it, to have a wonderful collection of subscription databases and e-books. We [...]
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is one of those projects a librarian (and perhaps any other geeky type) dreams of. We’ve been blessed over recent years with access to the resources of so many powerful digital archives. But until now, these efforts existed as silos. We’ve had no infrastructure to aggregate these wonderful [...]
