School Libraries

I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning.     And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania.  Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn [...]

It’s time to bust open the OPAC. In fact, it’s long past time. My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day. I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the [...]

To celebrate its 5th anniversary the Classroom 2.0 Community (with the help of additional educational networks), recently released the community-sourced  Classroom 2.0 The Book. Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st. In [...]

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has announced that the recipient of its 2013 Distinguished Service Award is Dr. Keith Curry Lance, a Ph.D. sociologist who works with school and public libraries and related library organizations.

What have you done to celebrate School Library Month? The theme this year is Community matters @ your library, and some of your colleagues have contributed their activities to the "Community Calender" which the American Association of School Libraries (AASL) has set up to allow libraries to exchange their ideas and programs.

Long Island (NY) school librarian and tireless school library advocate eva efron died March 20 at the Tuttle Center in Port Washington, NY, following a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 66. At the time of her death, efron—who spelled her name in lower case—was a candidate for supervisor section representative to the American Association of School Librarians executive board, and was serving as chair of the AASL supervisors section.

Yesterday, I was touched when I read a letter by a retiring principal in Diane Ravitch’s blog. In his letter to parents, Don Sternberg (Wantagh Elementary, Long Island, NY), shared that he felt he was abandoning my students at a time that they might need my voice the most. Sternberg writes of his concern that [...]

However compelling the research is, it can be hard to make the case with a 30-page study, or even a executive summary. Sometimes you need the visually attractive, embeddable, tweetable version of the elevator speech. Over the past couple of months we’ve seen a research translated and chunked in the form of infographics.  We’ve also [...]

A couple of summers ago I was invited to visit New Zealand and speak at the SLANZA Conference. I will never forget the warm welcome, the energy, and the passion of the librarians I met in Auckland.  While I was there I toured the National Library of New Zealand and had the pleasure of meeting [...]