Technology

YALSA and Dollar General Literacy Foundation are offering two $1,000 grants for Summer Reading programs: one for employing a teen intern and another for purchasing resources. The Library of Congress has launched a new Twitter feed for K–12 educators which can be found @TeachingLC. ALSC members are encouraged to send suggestions for the 2013 Theodor Geisel Award to the committee chair, Penny Peck. Capstone Interactive ebooks are now compatible with the Amazon Kindle Fire HD.

Late last spring, our district distributed the Danielson Framework for Teaching rubric listing the components of instruction–divided into 22 components and 76 smaller elements, and clustered into four domains. Danielson’s Framework, is designed to serve as the the foundation of a school or district’s mentoring, coaching, professional development, and teacher evaluation processes, thus linking all those activities together [...]

Early in the school year is a good time to help kids get into the swing of things and get to know one another and these apps can help.

Brenda Boyer, Della Curtis and I are trying to better understand the state-of-the-art relating to digital curation across LibraryLand.  And we hope you’ll help us share and distribute this 10 or 15-minute survey among your colleagues and friends in public, academic and special libraries. We welcome additional school library participation and we are especially interested in expanding our [...]

IFTTT—“If This Then That”—helps you automate tasks in order to better maintain professional learning networks, resources, and schedules. Learn how to find and create recipes on the Web (ifttt.com) or via the new IFTTT iPhone app in this video guide.

November is Picture Book Month. Five winners and five finalists of the NYC Neighborhood Library Awards were announced September 17. Apply for the Stony Brook Southampton (NY) MFA in Children's Literature Fellows program. Kids in grades 2–5 can enter the LEGO Essay Contest.

How good is Oyster, the new ebook subscription service? Linda W. Braun puts the application through its paces in a screencast series showing how to get started with Oyster, how to search titles, and what it all means for libraries.

I love searching Twitter. And I love sharing how a Twitter search can dramatically impact student research, by connecting them with experts, encouraging them to develop current awareness, allowing them to listen in on the dialog of a particular field or niche, and, in some cases, enabling them to contribute to the conversation. Learning to [...]

Tumblr can be a successful way to connect to new and diverse audiences, provided you understand who you’ll be attracting to your site and how to use Tumblr to your advantage. Should libraries and librarians use Tumblr? Teen librarian Robin Brenner says yes, and explains why.