Literacy

"We use cereal boxes which hang in the library to identify the different aspects used to sell to adults vs children..."

If you are a teacher, getting ready for next weekend might involve more than picking up a bucket of wings.  While the kids cheer their teams on with their friends and family, they could be thinking a little more critically, by reading the text of commercials. Really. Annually, Frank Baker’s Media Literacy Clearinghouse offers an [...]

Teaching librarians and language arts educators have, via fandom, a unique opening to reframe netiquette as something other than a subset of character education or online safety.

I'll hazard that many of us don't immediately think "games" when we think of "transliteracy," but why not?

Why is the case so strenuously made for a potential Best Picture win for 'Life of Pi'?

"There’s a shift towards a more multimodal ways of communicating through digital videos, VoiceThread, and graphic novels/comics that is more appealing and engaging to adolescents who now expect such multimodal ways of learning..."

Although I didn’t come up with this column's name—YA Underground—I'm appreciating it more and more. The kids I serve are living underground both metaphorically and literally. My library is in a 350-bed lockdown facility Amy Cheney juvenile cellthat serves adolescents ages 11 to 19, and it's in one of three rooms with windows. I have the only room with windows that are at eye level. The sunlight streams in and looking out, you can see trees, grass, clouds, sky, and sunsets beyond the barbwire. When Jonas (not his real name), an avid manga fan, was in the library on his every-other-week visit, I heard him describe the library as “a lonely bright spot.” He was talking about books—but aren’t books windows?

I’ve said it before, but last night was further proof of the power of our growing TL network.  The live Monday night twitter chat (#tlchat) we began back in September, ran on both Twitter and Google+ Hangouts last night.  And our intrepid team managed and archived both platforms. The topic was: Get Those Books Moving: [...]

The Lego Group has unveiled Lego Mindstorms EV3, a radically redesigned upgrade to its popular robotics platform that’s designed to introduce a new generation of tech-savvy kids to the world of robot building and programming. Lego announced the new platform earlier this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, timed to the 15th anniversary of the original Mindstorms debut.