Technology

Friday night a team of teacher librarians, and a few friends, hosted AASL’s first unconference. It all started with a conversation with Susan Ballard at a CiSSL Retreat at Rutgers this summer. I wondered if AASL would consider the idea of a participant-driven unconference event. Sue said, why not? and that she’d check on it [...]

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.

Celebrating the 150th birthday of the Gettysburg Address, students around the national are connecting via social media for simultaneous readings of President Abraham Lincoln’s iconic, 172-word speech.

OverDrive is rolling out upgrades to its digital service for school libraries, with a choice of thematic visual screen settings, more deft searching tools, a new book recommendation system, and social media options, among other features.

I’ve just discovered the ridiculously useful Remix-t and I cannot wait to share it with our teachers and students. Created by the Learning Technology Lab at the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning, University of Notre Dame, the site presents a full-blown kit for inspiring media-rich, project-based instruction and suggestions for hours of engaging professional development. Designed for the [...]

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.

Last week, Tammy Pirmann and our STEM 1 Class hosted, what we think, may be the first ever Cell Phone Carnival. Tammy, K12 Coordinator for Computer Science, is also our high school STEM teacher. The curriculum for her two mixed-grade classes called for a Rube Goldberg-type of machine as the students’ first project.   But [...]

In searching for great examples of presentations for our seniors, I happened upon the TED Playlists. They’re not really new, but they’re new to me. And these curated collections of TED Talks are a treasure! Some are curated by TED, others are guest curated by thought and cultural leaders like Dan Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, and Bono. [...]

Roxie Munro has created a number of maze books; here she takes that concept and turns it into a puzzle app that offers both depth and detail for a range of ages.