Social Media

Teen Read Week (TRW) kicked off with a lively Twitter chat among supporters of teen literacy and leisure reading on October 15. SLJ, Blink, Goodreads, Merit Press, Soho Teen, and AASL participated in the hour-long virtual conversation, highlighting ways librarians can help celebrate teen reading. The following are some of the tweets that resonated with SLJ editors.

Facebook has announced that it is changing its privacy options so that teens ages 13 through 17 can choose whether or not to post publicly on the site, a reversal of the company's previous policy. Teens also will now be able to turn on "Follow" so that their public posts can be seen in people’s News Feeds.

Using Pinterest, online students at Rutgers have been curating boards for students on civil rights and robotics with the Common Core State Standards in mind. Take a peek at their efforts.

California minors now have the legal right to erase their social media posts, a positive step toward giving them greater control over their online identities—or is it? Online content, after all, is not so easily erasable, according to Gary Price, editor of Library Journal’s INFOdocket.

Curious about STEAM? Check out School Library Journal's Pinterest board, curated by children’s librarian Amy Koester, author of our October 2013 cover story, “Full STEAM Ahead: Injecting Art and Creativity into STEM.”

YALSA and Dollar General Literacy Foundation are offering two $1,000 grants for Summer Reading programs: one for employing a teen intern and another for purchasing resources. The Library of Congress has launched a new Twitter feed for K–12 educators which can be found @TeachingLC. ALSC members are encouraged to send suggestions for the 2013 Theodor Geisel Award to the committee chair, Penny Peck. Capstone Interactive ebooks are now compatible with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

IFTTT—“If This Then That”—helps you automate tasks in order to better maintain professional learning networks, resources, and schedules. Learn how to find and create recipes on the Web (ifttt.com) or via the new IFTTT iPhone app in this video guide.

Tumblr can be a successful way to connect to new and diverse audiences, provided you understand who you’ll be attracting to your site and how to use Tumblr to your advantage. Should libraries and librarians use Tumblr? Teen librarian Robin Brenner says yes, and explains why.

Here’s one Pinterest rabbit hole well worth falling through. I discovered Alida Hanson’s wonderfully comprehensive and attractive Pinterest boards promoting the new books and media at Weston High School (MA) Library, via a recent AASLForum discussion. When I asked Alida if she’d allow me to share her process for organizing those boards, she generously agreed. [...]