News & Features

The Los Angeles Unified School District avoided additional cuts to educators and support personnel for the first time in five years, saving 208 mental health counselors, librarians, library aides and social worker positions, and is instead allocating $50 million to tablets, laptops, and other technology tools.

Be sure to check out a video challenge for middle and high school students, a chance for educators to win a document camera, children’s and YA book awards, and more.

Skype, commonly used by librarians and other K–12 educators to provide real-time engagement for their students, just got better. As of today, existing members of Skype in the classroom or new registrants can use Skype’s Group Video Calling free of charge.

"It was purposeful that the IWitness platform was built with media literacy and school standards around digital education right at the center of its architecture."

This grand-slam lineup of titles about baseball illustrate why the sport is still America's pastime.

The leader of our Bookmarked review group, Elizabeth Kahn, is always looking for new ways to keep her students engaged and entertained. Elsewhere in this issue of SLJTeen you can read about a recent visit to her library by Ruta Sepetys, author of the award-winning Between Shades of Gray (Philomel, 2011). She also recently wrangled a stop from Cory Doctorow, who is on the road promoting his latest title, Pirate Cinema (Tor Teen, 2012). Her advice on getting authors to visit your school or library? Just ask—the worse they can so is "No," and odds are, eventually you are going to hear "Yes."

This winsome tale about a porcupine and a balloon would make a perfect choice for toddler storytimes.

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.

My Friend Dahmer is a strong example of the power of an engaging nonfiction narrative in illuminating the darker side of human nature. For teens interested in more insightful, hard-hitting works, check out the following titles.  Given that My Friend Dahmer skates the line between teen and adult in terms of collection, please be aware [...]