The world's largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens
I grew up on the ’60’s outside New York, where there were racial riots and free love. The Beatles boomed from boxes and people sang about clouds, vanity, and love. Today we are largely beyond racial riots, love is cheap, and music still booms in ear pieces playing tunes of confusion, vanity, and love. Transformation has occurred, but there are timeless elements. Information is one—valuable and priceless, but packaged differently today than it was 25, 50, or 100 [...]
Photograph by Jim Dandy
Jeri Chase Ferris’s picture book Noah Webster & His Words is a great read, but it could have been a snoozer without your witty illustrations. How’d you react when editor Kate O’Sullivan offered you the assignment?
Being someone who’s very fond of words, I started looking at other books that were done about Webster, and not to degrade them, but they were very dry, realistic, watercolory, and very highly rendered. Noah Webster looked like some [...]
A message from the entire team at Library Journal and School Library Journal and an update on our situation in New York City.
From maintaining a blog to texting updates from the classroom, free web apps can help educators foster those important school-home connections.
Under Common Core, students will be writing scripts, reviewing books, making public service announcements, and creating other content, all using video. For schools, this presents a technical challenge: Where to host all this video? SLJ columnist Christopher Harris has found a solution.
The American Library Association (ALA) is coordinating the annual International Games Day @ your library (IGD12) for Saturday, November 3, 2012. It is estimated that more than one thousand libraries around the world will showcase gaming programs and services in support of IGD12. This year marks the 5th annual event. In 2011, over 27,700 people played games at more than 1,400 libraries across the U.S. and in other countries.
School librarians and the Common Core (CC) have been my focus all year, and especially this fall. Sue Bartle and I have been holding one workshop after another with teachers and librarians, spreading our CC gospel and hearing their issues and concerns. The great thing about being out in the field is that I learn as much as I teach—and one spectacular example of that recently took place in Buffalo, NY.
Rosen Digital has introduced a free, interactive ebook platform that customers can populate, à la carte, with unlimited, simultaneous access licensed, nonfiction titles for $34.95 each or $209.70 for a set of six.Sixty titles are currently available and an additional 60 will be released in January 2013. The ebooks feature colorful designs, eye-popping photographs, plenty [...]
Complexity is a watchword of the Common Core State Standards. The clearly stated expectation is that students will be able to read increasingly complex texts as they move up through the grades. Aside from that, students will be required to complete more complex thinking tasks involving those same texts.
I am writing in regard to Christopher Harris’s recent article, “Summer Project: Kill Dewey” (Aug. 2012). I’m all for making a school library more user-friendly, but why recreate the wheel? A few colorful shelf labels and directional signs would have saved him and Kristie Miller a lot of time and trouble.
Dewey is a system of subjects, so when students are taught how a library is organized, they will quickly see that all the books about a [...]
As SLJ’s editors roll up our sleeves in final preparation for our annual Leadership Summit, in Philadelphia, October 26-27 (www.sljsummit2012.com), and our “Digital Shift: Libraries, Ebooks and Beyond” online event on October 17 (www.thedigitalshift.com/beyondebooks), I’m inspired by both the big ideas in education and the ground-level work I’ve seen in school libraries across the country.
I’m also aware of the vast challenges we face as we strive to give our kids the best educational experience possible. A recent [...]
Every U.S. president had a mother. Most of them had children and pets. Combine these obvious, but often-unconsidered facts with a touch of humor and they spell can’t-miss booktalks.
Your latest novel is a dark and disturbing story about a 16-year-old named Angel who moves in with a guy she meets at the mall and is lured into a life of drugs, violence, and prostitution. It must have been tough to write.
I tried to put it off as long as I could. I wrote Heck Superhero and Tom Finder—both about homeless boys—and I knew that someday I was going to have to write a book about a [...]
Marc Aronson discusses a set of books that looks at the same moment in history from three different angles. Taken together, the three titles offer a more comprehensive picture of a time of invention and discovery than we’d typically get from an individual book: one title focuses on a remarkable genius; another on a breakthrough invention; and the third title, which explores a transforming theory, is really best seen as a moment in which circumstance, individuals, and technology converge to make change possible.
Librarians are masters of information. Finding it, storing it, organizing it, retrieving it—you name it. We excel at a wide range of skills. And in today’s world, that’s the name of the game. Case in point: my team and I were recently asked to choose passages of text for a regional K–8 English language-arts exam. [...]
The post We Could Be Heroes: Research plus tech skills are a hot commodity appeared first on The Digital Shift.
New storytelling application Meograph helps users create uniquely dynamic, interactive projects, incorporating Google Maps and Google Earth to generate a story time line, which can be enhanced with images, video, text, audio, and links for more information. SLJ columnist Jeff Hastings walks us through the platform in his video review.
The issues and questions raised by Common Core are not only apparent stateside. Marc Aronson discusses how his trip to Barcelona revealed that there might be an opportunity to collaborate with the Spanish city, and other international locales, to inspire students to be innovators.
What happens when you comingle 80 or so librarians for some eight hours and give them just enough structure to focus on key issues? Answer: KidLibCamp. I expected this unconference at Darien (CT) Library, on August 16, to be good, but it was so much better than that. It was professional learning at its best—the kind of inspiring event that ought to be replicated in every system and district in the country.
The following is a response to Elizabeth Bird’s feature article “Role Call: Want to work with kids in a public library? Here’s the inside scoop,” .
While there may be children’s librarian jobs out there, and indeed librarian jobs in general, they are few and far between. Plus many of them may be part-time, or downgraded to “assistant” in order to save on salaries. Public service has gone the way of private corporations, wherein job openings require someone to already be doing the exact same job somewhere else, …
As the mom of a now-first-grader, my parenting world is colliding with my professional world. Last year, I eagerly brought my daughter to kindergarten geared not to be one of “those” meddling parents, micromanaging the teachers and hovering over projects. However, I soon realized it was going to be very difficult to keep my professional experiences and opinions to myself when it came to the Common Core. Then again, should I?
