Technology

Wouldn’t it be great to provide a video tour of your library for students and teachers? You can do this easily with TouchCast, an app for creating video for the iPad, enhanced with linked content: photos, maps, polls, websites, and more. Our screencasts show you how it's done.

If schools want their students to become readers for life, then school libraries should be sure to include fiction ebooks as they build their digital collections, Debbie Swartz, Library Technology Facilitator, Mesquite (TX) Independent School District (ISD), noted during her “Meeting Students Where THEY Learn,” presentation during The Digital Shift: Reinventing Libraries, hosted by Library Journal and School Library Journal.

Coupled with the much-anticipated Google Play for Education store, the Nexus 7 bolsters Google’s growing claim to the K–12 tablet landscape.

The Internet offers today’s youth unprecedented opportunities to connect with peers and seek knowledge in almost any area of interest—and libraries are uniquely positioned to play a central role in this learning, according to Mimi Ito, professor and cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and principal investigator for the new education model Connected Learning.

Oyster, the “all you can read,” on-demand ebook app, is now available for iPhone and iPad. In addition, an invite to participate is no longer required. The service, which formally launched in early September, is one that the library community should become familiar with, advises librarian and INFOdocket editor Gary Price.

The iPad has been the tablet of choice for schools, thanks to volume purchasing, volume management, and the vast selection of apps. But that may be about to change. With the recent launch of Google Play for Education, Google is set to challenge the iPad’s dominance.

Gone are the dioramas of yesteryear. Times have changed, and students can ditch ancient techniques for new cool tools that can give them a deeper understanding of what they are studying. Here are a few resourceful ways to create and implement multimedia presentations that educators should explore during the summer.

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.

I’ve been searching for a search tool that makes me want to search on my iPad. I think I’ve found one that will work for me and for my students. Specially for tablets, Izik by Blekko is a new, free search app for iPad and android. Results are organized by contextual categories in an image-rich [...]