The world's largest reviewer of books, multimedia, and technology for children and teens
Odgen, UT is located about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. From Fox 13 Salt Lake City: The twenty Library Media Specialists were called to a mandatory meeting on Friday morning where they were told that their contracts won’t be renewed and their positions will no longer exist starting July 1. According to 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 [...]
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 [...]
iGoogle retires on November 1st and folks who currently rely on it as a dashboard are shopping around for an alternate, cloud-based, personal launch solution. How can you replace those convenient gadgets, feeds, easily accessible bookmarks, useful tools, and pretty backgrounds? Here are a few of the options for us and for our students. A [...]
With a few notable exceptions, the entriesin this mixed bag of high-tech offerings are aimed at casual readers enthralled by images of big, noisy machines–preferably the sort that carry guns and bombs.
Interactive video is a powerful new tool that allows teachers and learners to enhance video they make themselves–as well as the videos they discover on the Web–with text, images, maps, links, and other media. It transform video from static to dynamic, enabling the traditional medium to morph from monologue to conversation, often crowd-sourced style. It [...]
April is Poetry Month. Last week, just a little early, we hosted our first ever Springfield Slam. The kids from Literary Mag, Gay Straight Alliance, and Gallery Club, who helped me organize the event, assured me, Dr. V, there will be poems. I worried anyway. No need for that. There was a poem or two [...]
For those of you out there who are planning a Passover seder about now, you may want to rethink digging up the old wine-stained Haggadah’s (Haggadot?) you store in the dining room hutch. You may want to expand your traditional storytelling repertoire. And you may want to make a little space at your table for [...]
For newcomers, computer source code can look quite alien. Librarians might be reminded of the first time they saw a MARC record—a mishmash of recognizable words and bits of information embedded in funky punctuation. But it doesn’t have to be that way–learning code can help librarians customize and improve the usability of web-based resources and vendor interfaces and improve communication with a library’s IT staff and software vendors.
A couple of summers ago I was invited to visit New Zealand and speak at the SLANZA Conference. I will never forget the warm welcome, the energy, and the passion of the librarians I met in Auckland. While I was there I toured the National Library of New Zealand and had the pleasure of meeting [...]
From ebooks to digital literacy, there was plenty to debate at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association. But the unconference on January 25 revealed clear consensus on one topic: maker spaces. They’re red hot.
If we build it well, a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) can help school libraries meet the information needs of students even as local budgets shrink. The DPLA can provide important resources to the partnership between library-based and classroom-based teachers, especially during this period of rapid change in education, in libraries, in technology, and in the world of information generally.
Scholastic has announced it will release Spirit Animals, a new multi-platform, multi-author fantasy adventure series for readers ages 8–12, in September. The story arc of the seven-book series and online game will be established by New York Times bestselling author Brandon Mull, with a second title launching next year from bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater.
Because these are the details we obsess over. The authors who write them and the readers who read them. They connect us with our stories and connect our stories with each other. And with these connections comes a whole new world of discovery. Valla Vakili’s talk at the Tools of Change Conference. 2/14/12 In his [...]
SLJ’s latest tech survey shows that school librarians need to master a new game.
From kindergartners with truck obsessions to high school students researching the latest inventions, books on technology are always in demand. Some notable topics appear in this fall’s crop of books: simple machines and tools, amazing vehicles, and the development of technology over time.
Chris Lehmann, the founding principal of Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy, isn’t surprised most teens think, “school stinks.” This innovative educator is out to change their opinion.
This past summer I attended my first International Society for Technology in Education conference (ISTE), and was awestruck to be among 20,000 plus educators who share the exhilarating goal of advancing “excellence in learning and teaching through innovative and effective uses of technology.” Four of the promises of technology that permeated conference conversations—along with exemplar multimedia resources from TeachingBooks.net—are highlighted in this month’s column.
Once upon a time, publishers promoted books with jacket blurbs, bookmarks, and author tours. Then six years ago, YouTube changed the rules of the game. Today publishers are spending as much as $20,000 a pop to create book trailers—30- to 90-second teasers, à la movie trailers, designed to generate virtual and word-of-mouth buzz and, of course, to sell titles.
