Geared for grades six to twelve, the song teaches students about the role of media specialists, and it exceeds volumes of fiction and nonfiction. To “search better than Google, declare the lyrics, “come and find me.” The production also addresses “a few misconceptions about our profession….” “We don’t read all day, our hair’s not in a bun. We don’t all wear glasses, don’t always say “shush.”

To enter the “We Heart Librarians” Contest, record a video of yourself—solo or with a group—singing or lip-syncing along to the song for a chance to be featured in an “Ode to Librarians” remix video. You don’t have to be a librarian to submit and students are encouraged to participate (with the necessary permissions secured). Lyrics and a downloadable MP3 of the song, along with complete rules, are available via the contest page.

Submissions are due by November 30, 2013, and winners will be announced December 15.

Unveiled June 29 at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago, the list includes digital storytelling tools such as FlipSnack, for creating books from PDFs, and Inklewriter, an interactive writing platform by Cambridge, MA, startup inkle, designers of the Poems by Heart app for Penguin Classics. Then there’s Biblionasium, a social reading site for kids that’s already being used by a California elementary school for summer reading. (Please let us know how you’re using or plan to use these tools in the comments.)

As she did last year, Valenza posted her take on NeverEndingSearch, Valenza’s School Library Journal blog.

Here in Chicago, AASL’s Best Websites for Teaching & Learning Committee just released its standards-aligned 2013 list.

Sites, apps, and tools are selected because they engage users through innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. Honored websites, tools, and resources will provide exceptional value to inquiry-based teaching and learning.

Using Edcanvas as a platform for curation (see below), this year’s Committee described a fabulous array of tools in the categories of:

Media Sharing

Digital Storytelling

Manage & Organize

Social Networking & Communication

Content Resources

Curriculum Collaboration

The team confirmed several of my personal favorites: Pinterest, Smore, Easel.ly, TED Ed, and DPLA, for instance. But I learned about so many truly useful new tools this morning, my mind was racing with plans for both personal use and serious fall implementation.

Here is a list of some of those new-to-me discoveries:

Workflowy: for planning an organizing

FlipSnack: for digitally publishing professional looking flip books. I’ll check this out as an alternative to Issuu.

Simply put, “The pictures tell the story,” says David Wiesner. The three-time Caldecott Medal winner Wiesner shared his thoughts on visual storytelling,—along with fellow panelists, Lizi Boyd, Oliver Jeffers,  Matt Phelan, and Chris Raschka—at School Library Journal’s 2013 Day of Dialog held May 29 at Columbia University.

Starting with early sketches of his books, notably Flotsam, Wiesner demonstrated his method and how every inch of the book can be used, from endpapers to the spine. It’s “all a part of the storytelling process,” he says.

In this 12-minute clip, Wiesner gives us a peek at his upcoming picture book Mr. Wuffles, whose title character is an inscrutable feline—who encounters the world’s greatest cat toy.

Keynote: Kevin Henkes

Kevin Henkes is he author and illustrator of close to 50 critically acclaimed and award-winning picture books, beginning readers, and novels. He received the Caldecott medal for Kitten’s First Full Moon in 2005 and a Newbery honor for the novel Olive’s Ocean. He is also the creator of a number of picture books featuring his mouse characters, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Lilly’s Big Day and Wemberly Worried, the Caldecott honor book Owen, and the beloved Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. Also among his fiction for older readers are the novels Junonia, Bird Lake Moon, The Birthday Room, Sun & Spoon, and his upcoming novel for middle-grade readers The Year Of Billy Miller. He lives with his family in Madison, Wisconsin. You can visit him online at www.kevinhenkes.com.

Panel I: Informational Picture Books

Moderator: Kathleen T. Isaacs, author of Picturing The World: Informational Picture Books For Children (ALA, 2013)

Panelists: Jim Arnosky, Shimmer & Splash (Sterling) Jennifer Berne, On A Beam Of Light: A Story Of Albert Einstein (Chronicle) Elisha Cooper, Train (Scholastic) Thomas Gonzalez, Gandhi (Amazon) Jonah Winter, You Never Heard Of Willie Mays?! (Random House)

Panel II: Middle School Drama and Trauma

Moderator: Caroline Ward, head of youth services, Ferguson Library, Stamford, CT

Panelists: Ayun Halliday, Peanut (Random House) Josh Farrar, A Song For Bijou (Bloomsbury) Gordon Korman, Hypnotize Me (Scholastic) Holly Sloan, Counting by Sevens (Penguin) Linda Urban, The Center of Everything (Houghton Harcourt)

Publishers’ Pitch I

Brilliance Audio, Candlewick Press, Chronicle Books, Harlequin Teen, HarperCollins Publishers, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lerner Publishing Group, Little, Brown and Company

Luncheon Speaker: Holly Black

Holly Black Is the bestselling author of contemporary fantasy novels for teens and children, including Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale and the #1 New York Times bestselling Spiderwick series. She has been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Award and the Eisner Award, and the recipient of the Andre Norton Award. Holly lives in Massachusetts in a house with a secret library. Her website: www.blackholly.com.

Panel III: Real-World Horror In YA

Moderator: Karyn Silverman, high school librarian, educational technology department chair, Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School

Panelists: Julie Berry, All the Truth That’s in Me (Penguin) Adele Griffin, Loud Awake and Lost (Random House) Elizabeth Scott, Heartbeat (Harlequin) Matthew Quick, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock (Little, Brown) Elizabeth Wein, Rose Under Fire (Hyperion)

Publishers’ Pitch II

Listening Library/Random House, Random House Children’s Books, Penguin Young Readers Group, Scholastic, Sourcebooks, Sterling Publishing, Blink, Bloomsbury Children’s Books

Panel IV: Visual Storytelling

Moderator: Rita Auerbach, children’s literature specialist and storyteller

Panelists: Lizi Boyd, Inside Outside (Chronicle) Oliver Jeffers, The Day the Crayons Quit (Penguin) Matt Phelan, Bluffton (Candlewick) Chris Raschka, Daisy Gets Lost (Random House) David Wiesner, Mr. Wuffles! (Houghton Harcourt)

Here’s a closer look at the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), its features, and “how it works, both good and bad,” according to Linda W. Braun. A library consultant and educator, Braun created a(below) of the highly anticipated project.

Founded in 2010 at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the nonprofit DPLA officially launched April 18, 2013.  With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and other sources, DPLA is intended to serve as a national portal, providing access to millions of items—photographs, books, manuscripts, and sound and moving images—from dozens of US cultural institutions.

“It’s a great aggregation tool, with just a couple of things that might prove difficult for your users,” says Braun, implying that the site might require some guidance especially with students.

But presumably the interface, like DPLA’s content, may still be evolving. Highlights of the portal, according to Braun, include the timeline feature—though students will most definitely need some help here—and the capacity to save searches (you need to create a DPLA account to do this.)

The sharing functions are a great way to push resources out to your community, suggests Braun.

Photograph by Matt Carr/Getty Images.

As a self-described nonreader, Matt de la Peña could never have imagined as a kid that books would play an important role in his life. But key encounters with libraries and, more importantly, librarians, who actively sought to engage him, helped open a new world to de la Peña. The author of novels for young adults, including Ball Don’t Lie, Mexican Whiteboy (both Delacorte) and the upcoming Infinity Ring Book 4: Curse of the Ancients (Scholastic), de la Peña recounted his “path to books” in the closing keynote of SLJ‘s Public Library Leadership Think Tank, held April 5 at the New York Public Library.

In a presentation (audio below) that was alternately funny and moving, de la Peña clued in the audience of mostly public librarians and library administrators on, among other things, how to suck back a tear. But to no avail for some:

Well, an actual tear just exited my eye after that amazing story, so, well-played, Matt de la Pena! #sljtt

April 5, 2013 4:33 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

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 The ability for classrooms to beam in authors, subject experts, and fellow students from around the world has been one of the great advantages afforded by Skype. Commonly used by librarians and other K–12 educators to provide real-time engagement for their students, the service just got better. As of today, existing members of Skype in the classroom or new registrants can use Skype’s Group Video Calling free of charge.

A feature previously available only to paid Skype Premium subscribers, Group Video Calling allows users to connect via Webcam with up to 10 parties. Skype’s blog post details instructions for signing up for free video calling. (Authentication may take 48 hours)

Launched in March 2011, Skype in the classroom offers searchable “lessons,” which enable educators worldwide to connect with each other around various subjects. “My sixth graders from Philadelphia are seven chapters into The Watsons Go to Birmingham,” reads one lesson, for example. “Is your class also reading it? If so, lets plan an activity of some sort. Maybe a book discussion.”

Skype in the Classroom’s partners program includes Penguin Books, LitWorld, Random House Children’s UK, Macmillan Children’s Books, and new partners announced today: Hot Key Books and Pan Macmillan.

New to Skype? Author Kate Messner offers practical advice in her feature articles for SLJ:

Author Visits? A Remote Possibility: Using Skype to connect is fun and affordable

Met Any Good Authors Lately? Classroom author visits can happen via Skype

In the three-minute clip (below), Green recounts his attempt to discern the provenance of a poster (pictured) based on characters from his novel The Fault in Our Stars, revealing the complexities of copyright in the digital age along the way.

“We really don’t have a good way of defining the difference between nerdfighters [Green's community of fans] making something on YouTube and Viacom making something on CBS,” says Green. “Until the laws get better, we’re going to have to police ourselves. The good news is the Internet is pretty good at that.”

In the meantime, Green encourages the creation of fan fiction and other art inspired by his books. And the work that started it all? With the permission of his two 16-year-old collaborators, one Norwegian, the other in the Phillipines, Green’s made the poster available on his DFTBA (don’t forget to be awesome) site.

A new app for the iPad and Android devices uses a highly visual format to provide a different search experience for the tablet user. More than just a pretty interface, Izik—which debuted last month as the top reference app in iTunes—is based on Blekko, the search engine that boasts higher quality results based on human curation.

Enter a search term and Izik surfaces a stack of results based on category. The query “Black History Month” provided a “Quick Answer” up top, followed by related images, recent news, and categories, in this case, “African American,” “Black History,” and “American History.”

Navigation is optimized for the tablet format. So cutting down on keystrokes, users can swipe horizontally to view more results within the categories or swipe vertically to reveal more categories related to your search topic. Pinch to expand a result and share it via Facebook or Twitter directly from the search page.

Gary Price, editor of INFOdocket, cited Blekko, along with Duck Duck Go, as a viable alternative to Google. (“Wary of Google? Try These Alternative Search Tools”)

What distinguishes Blekko is a search tool known as slashtags. This feature enables users to refine results and build curated collections of select Web pages and then search and share those resources with others. So create a collection of Web resources, then share the slashtag with students, suggests Price. “Now, the only sites they’ll be searching are the ones you’ve selected,” he writes.

For a deeper dive into slashtags, creating custom slashtags and even embedding them on your website, check out Blekko’s search tutorial.

School Library Journal (SLJ) is looking for a reporter/editor to write, assign, and edit news for our website, e-newsletters and award-winning magazine. If you have serious journalist chops, with an interest in covering libraries, education, and publishing, we’d be interested in hearing from you.

What we’re looking for

First, you’ve got to bring the skills, with demonstrated experience in reporting and editing (clips and references, please). You’ve got excellent news sense and can work independently, making quick decisions around news, able to turn around polished stories on deadline. You’re fastidious when it comes to copy and can handily craft a lede and a headline. Experience with social networking in a journalistic context and multimedia tools: a plus.

You’ll be covering K–12 schools, including legislation, policy, funding, and reform issues; public libraries; education technology; news in kids and YA (young adult) publishing, including authors; and industry initiatives, as well as cornerstone issues, including literacy, copyright, intellectual freedom, and privacy.

It’s a wide-ranging, eclectic beat and one of the challenges of the position. And we’d expect you to dive in fully, with the spirit of a learner, establishing contacts in these fields—from big associations and vendors to on-the-ground librarians and educators—getting up to speed on the issues (e.g. ebooks, Common Core, etc.), tapping into the insight of your colleagues, unafraid to ask dumb questions.

Passion for the subject is essential to the job—without a true interest in education and libraries, you won’t grasp the larger issues or be motivated to pursue the details to provide the depth of coverage necessary to serve our users.

What the job entails

Per the formal job posting: “The news editor will write and report stories, overseeing news flow to the website, e-newsletters, and print magazine, and assign and edit stories by freelancers and in-house staff.” That means you’ll take point on determining and executing stories posted daily to our site and set the lineup for our newsletters. You’ll also build a stable of freelancer reporters. And we’ll tap you to edit and write the occasional feature story and edit columns. (Our standards, for the feature well in particular, are high—take a look, if you haven’t already, to really get to know our content across the board, print to Web.)

You’re nimble and responsive around what’s going on in the field and look to provide the very best news coverage to inform and engage our users, primarily school/public librarians and information professionals who work with kids and young adults, and by extension their teacher peers and related institutions. You want to do good as well as do a good job.

How to apply

Review the listing in our Job Zone, which has the requirements and the rundown of benefits for this fulltime position at our offices located at the western edge of Soho in Manhattan. Then follow the link to begin the application process.

Photo by Roger H. Goun 

Author Seymour Simon talks to kids via Skype.

Seymour Simon is not your typical start-up hopeful. At 81, he’s already had a long and prolific career as an award-winning author of science books for children. But like the researchers and explorers that he’s written about for more than three decades, he’s all about looking ahead to what’s next.

Simon and his partner, Liz Nealon, have created StarWalk Kids, a digital content streaming service that’s available by subscription. Launched last month, the current catalog of 148 ebooks—expected to grow to 400 by the end of the 2012–2013 school year—emphasizes nonfiction. The list includes 53 of Simon’s own books, updated and reformatted for a new generation of readers.

While there are original ebooks on the list (eventually 10 to 15 a year, according to Nealon), StarWalk has a unique focus on revising out-of-print works by well-known authors, such as Kathleen Krull, Doreen Rappaport, and Laura Vaccaro Seeger. “There are wonderful books, which, through no fault of their own, have become out of print,” says Simon, who personally approached his author friends about giving new digital life to their works.

“We are getting the best out-of-print books and making them better,” he says. “And the authors are absolutely delighted with what we’re doing.”

Available via the browser-based StarWalk Reader, the books can be read via desktop and laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, and interactive whiteboards. And the new service features anytime access—students with an account can log in from home or anywhere they have an Internet connection. And multiple users and whole classes can read the same title simultaneously.

Nealon, Sesame Street’s former creative director, says, “We think this is the future of digital media for schools, because it’s device neutral and offers simultaneous access.”

Without naming names, Simon recalls being turned down by publishers when he approached them about digitizing his titles. “A legacy publisher has to defend its print list,” he explains. “StarWalk has no legacy. Our core business is digital.”

StarWalk’s collection, about 60 percent nonfiction and geared for kids in grades PreK to eight, ranges from the “Zoo Animals” nonfiction series for younger children by Caroline Arnold and the “Riverside Kids” chapter book series by Johanna Hurwitz to Days of the Dead and Surtsey: The Newest Place on Earth, two photo-essay titles by Kathryn Lasky. Newly revised and redesigned, each StarWalk edition is narrated, offering the user a “Read to Me” option.

Designed for classroom use, the books accommodate note taking and highlighting. Educators can search for books by author, title, keyword, subject, Lexile level, alphabetic reading level, and Common Core (CC) State Standards links. An especially handy feature for younger users is the ability to navigate by thumbnail images of each page, which appear along the bottom of the Reader. “Teaching Links” match each title to relevant CC standards and provide suggested activities.

“I’m delighted by the fact that the book can survive from printed form to the new generation of digital,” says Simon, who adds that both have a place and he doesn’t think that print will go away. “I’ve always kept up with computers,” he says, reminiscing about the “Atari days.” “And I’m invigorated by the future.”