Ideas

Based on a report recently released by the National Center for Literacy Education (NCLE), Working Together is Working Smarter, visually demonstrates the role of school librarians as highly involved leaders playing a critical role in their schools through consistent and sustained collaboration with other educators.   The infographic reveals our dedicated, voluntary leadership in the delivery of [...]

Libraries are in prime positions to take advantage of President Obama’s recent call for an increase of funding and attention to for early childhood education. Early learning has been an integral part of public libraries’ services to children for decades, and the recent increase of grant-funded programs can further extend children’s librarians’ reach into their communities. Wondering where to start? SLJ has compiled a list of grants for libraries seeking new ways to finance early learning initiatives, big and small.

The most exciting time for a kindergarten teacher is when a kid looks up and says, ‘Hey, I can read!’” Fostering early literacy is the focus of our very first theme issue. We're also debuting a new look, with some significant improvements to the all-important reviews section.

One of my favorite tools for curating a breaking story as reported in social media has been Storify.   It’s widely used by journalists to aggregate news photos, videos, and tweets. Conference goers use it to grab and archive memorable moments.  I found it particularly handy to make sense of the multiple feeds emerging from the IASL [...]

Do young fanfiction authors seek the kind of feedback that educators would find “useful” in K-12 settings, and are fanfiction communities really the nurturing environments of peer-critique that some make them out to be?

"We can look at cosplay as a medium that assists other media, anime and manga, by targeting a certain audience segment related to fandom."

Chair of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee Pat Scales tackles censorship questions about The Hunger Games, grammar in "Junie B. Jones" series, and why reporting materials challenges to the ALA OIF is so important.

"The key idea is actually a media literacy one related to representation: no one in real life actually looks like an anime or manga character."

Among my recent discoveries in the world of search is Qwant. Launched in January by a French company, the multilingual meta-search, reaches into news, web, video, image and social content sources and allows (optionally) logged-in users to add and share bookmarks, respond to social posts directly from the interface, and maintain topic-specific notebooks. The attractive interface [...]