Programs & Programming

The White House honored 10 connected educators, including SLJ columnist and school librarian, Carolyn Foote. The Chicago Public Library celebrated families and early literacy with its 20th annual "Bookamania 2013: All Families, All Year", a free, daylong children’s book festival.

In the past nine months at Gum Spring Library, we have hosted numerous programs, welcomed dozens of authors and presenters, discussed books, watched movies, made crafts, and so much more. We believe we have successfully figured out what our teens enjoy, and what they find less than thrilling. And throughout it all, we've continued to take the time to evaluate, assess, and reflect.

Remember Google Search Story?   Google now offers the opportunity to tell stories by animating simulated Docs with its Story Builder. Each document can host up to ten participants and ten actions that may include staged edits.   Storytellers may add a soundtrack from a library of six styles.  Because no login is required to create [...]

The best applications for teaching basic programming skills—no geek cred required to use them successfully in your classroom or library. Other apps enable kids to build 3-D models, which they can print, too.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced that it is awarding $4,329,567 in grants to 20 museums and libraries in 17 communities in order to support the emerging role of these institutions in providing early learning opportunities, especially for low-income families.

Make It @ Your Library, in collaboration with Instructables.com and the American Library Association, has finally launched its searchable website, makeitatyourlibrary.org, for librarians seeking maker space ideas and projects. Make It @ Your Library—an initiative developed through the ILEAD USA program over the past year—aims to help librarians realize maker projects in their own communities at low cost.

Back in May I was excited to discover Voice Comments–a great tool for personally adding voice feedback to student writing or collaborative work. Recently, the app relaunched with a new interface and a bunch of impressive new features, as Kaizena.  (In Japan, Kaizen refers to a philosophy of continuous improvement.) If Google Docs is a way of life at [...]

How does DeKalb Public Library do it? The library has earned seven Big Read grants from the NEA. Read on to find out how they nailed the True Grit western theme without the book's reclusive author.

In an August issue of SLJTeen, we covered a program run by University at Buffalo’s Center for Literacy and Reading Instruction that matched graduate students with 180 elementary school students to advance their reading and writing schools over the summer. We asked readers to tell us about other programs like it, and the Southeast Regional Library (FL) stepped up with their collaboration with University of North Florida's education undergrads.