Ideas

Thursday, May 16, 2013, 6:00 - 7:00 PM ET Get the big picture and nitty gritty on what you need to about how to pull off collaborations that work--with peers, principals, public libraries, parents, and others—using partnerships as well as technology to turn gaps into opportunities for learning and leadership.Archive now available!!

BYOD, or bring your own device, programs offer media specialists an opportunity to connect with students, teachers, and school administrators—and to take a leadership role in their schools and districts.

Whether it’s a class assignment or a novel in verse, poetry expresses our deepest desires and fondest memories. It's National Poetry Month, and the editors at the Junior Library Guild have selected the following new titles to motivate students to voice their own poetic thoughts.

In honor of National Poetry Month, acclaimed poet Naomi Shihab Nye—whose anthology This Same Sky (Simon & Schuster, 1993) continues to be used in both college and fifth grade classrooms—offers us five of her “very favorite lovingly-used poetry collections.”

Books about bears and pandas are super-popular with K–4 kids and a great way to encourage them to read.

From The Canadian Press: A recent dust-up between Wikipedia and Canada’s largest university raises questions about how collaborative the popular website that bills itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” truly is. The online information portal recently took a professor from the University of Toronto to task for one of his classroom assignments. [...]

“We’re bringing services to people who either would not or could not access them otherwise….[it] truly does change lives,” says Library Journal Mover & Shaker Richard Lyda, outreach librarian at Arapahoe Library District in Centennial, CO. In our follow-up interview, Lyda shares with SLJ his strategies for effective community outreach, what’s next for him in his district, and much more.

In honor of National Poetry Month, children's poet laureate J. Patrick Lewis picks his favorite collections for kids.

It’s spring! Just like the narrator says in the 1947 educational film Body Care and Grooming, "Ah, spring. When birds are on the wing, when flowers bloom... Spring, when a young man's fancy likely turns to...."—Author unknown. The answer has to be testing! High-stakes testing! Advanced Placement testing! American College Testing or even the SAT! Students feel pressured to work hard to prove themselves in this world of achievement.