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Mackin Educational Resources, national distributor of PreK–12 books, ebooks and digital resources, has announced a new partnership with Hachette Book Group (HBG), beginning this month. As part of the deal, HBG’s entire catalog of more than 6,000 eBooks will be available to Mackin customers, on and offline, through their school’s exclusive MackinVIA platform.
ClassDojo, the free application for recording and managing student behavior, has been updated. As of today, ClassDojo sports a new “Class Sharing” feature, allowing multiple teachers to communicate more easily about their students’ behavior and collectively foster behavioral development.
The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has just launched an updated version of its free Teen Book Finder app—which debuted in June, 2012—to include all of the books the association honored in 2013. The first of its kind, Teen Book Finder gives teens, librarians, parents, and young adult literature aficionados access to YALSA’s recommended reading and award-winning titles from the past three years.
Columbus State Community College’s Delaware, OH, Campus Learning Center starts its information literacy outreach early—really early. The library doesn’t just reach out to new students, or even prospective students. It’s starting with elementary school students, thanks to a campus-wide partnership between the college and the Delaware City School District.
Follett announced today a partnership with U.S. publisher Hachette Book Group (HBG) to provide preK-12 school libraries and students expanded access to popular children’s titles. Award-winning books such as Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Ninth Ward and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian will be available in an ebook lending format for the 2013-2014 school year. The company recently announced a similar agreement with Random House Children’s.
Follett has partnered with Random House to offer new and popular ebook titles to school libraries. The partnership gives librarians the opportunity to enhance their collections with popular titles such as Rachel Hartman’s Seraphina and Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go To Birmingham – 1963.
The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) Great Websites for Kids (GWS) committee announced the inclusion of 10 additions to its compilation of exemplary websites for children on July 29. These online resources are geared to children from birth to age 14, and range in subjects as diverse as animals and dinosaurs; games and entertainment; history and science; art and music; and resources for teachers and parents.
A screencast tour of four free applications to help kids learn how to code: Daisy the Dinosaur, Hopscotch, Scratch, and Tynker.
School’s out—and time to enjoy some serious lounging. Summer is also a time to consider your Web presence. If your website could use an upgrade, consider these tools to give it a boost for back-to-school—and save you time this fall.
Digital technologies are impacting American middle and high school students’ writing in many ways, both good and bad, a new national report from the Pew Research Center shows. According to the survey, tech tools provide significant advantages to learning—although students are still having trouble with informal grammar and navigating the issues of plagiarism, citation, and fair use.
The School Library System of the Genesee Valley Educational Partnership (GVEP) has announced the launch this week of “Here Be Fiction,” a site devoted to the discovery of fiction ebooks available with school library friendly licensing terms, with over 500 ebooks from 17 participating publishers.
StarWalk Kids Media has announced that it has made all 160-plus ebooks in its collection available free of charge to children, families, and educators during the entire month of July. In just the first three days after the initiative was launched via Twitter (#PopUpLibrary), nearly 3,000 ebooks have been read, the company says.
SLJ’s art director, Mark Tuchman, shares the story and process behind the creation of our July cover art—which featured the iconic Big Bird character from Sesame Workshop illustrator Louis Henry Mitchell—from conception to final design.
The National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL) and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Street Workshop have created the Aprendiendo Juntos (“Learning Together) Council (AJC) to identify models and practical strategies to improve digital literacy for Hispanic-Latino families. AJC plans to use the findings to influence public and private sector investments in effective programs for the community on a regional and national scale.
New rules take effect this month intended to protect kids’ privacy online, and some librarians are worried. Some say that the more stringent regulations may impede mobile app use in elementary schools—and also prevent kids from recreationally sharing favorite hobby sites with each other.
Here Richard Byrne covers sound and video applications that enable students to blog—without writing, from SoundCloud and Animoto to a new audio slideshow tool called Narrable.
The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) revealed its inaugural Best Apps for Teaching and Learning list on Jun 30 at the American Library Association annual conference. Head of children’s services at Darien Library, CT, Kiera Parrott highlights some of her favorites from the 25 winning apps that cover a broad range of subjects, inspire curriculum connections, and can be used for classroom instruction and public library programming.
Teacher librarian Joyce Valenza reflects on the 2013 Best Websites for Teaching & Learning, the highly anticipated list chosen annually by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL).
The central theme of year’s lively ISTE conference encouraged educators to take away limits that hinder their students’ learning, and let students build something that matters.
Discovery of ebooks in K-12, particularly worthwhile fiction, has been tough going. A new site, Here Be Fiction, will attempt to remedy that, enabling users to identify quality ebooks accessible to schools on library-friendly licensing terms. Featuring ebook previews and reviews, HereBeFiction.org will enable librarians and others to discover fiction from a wide variety of publishers made available for both individual and multi-user access.
