Library Links

"Content that might be of interest to Teacher-Librarians..."

5.2.11

BCTLA document - The Points of Inquiry - is available

The completed The Points of Inquiry: A Framework for Information Literacy and the 21st-Century Learner has been released.  The document is available here (16 pages - PDF) and supporting resources (more will be added over time) are available here.  
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Booktrailers for all - search tool

Teresa Schauer, a District Librarian, in Pettus, Texas has been working on her site: Booktrailers For All. Her newest tweak is a search feature that makes it easier to find the clip you are looking for.

"With the search page, users are now able to search for book trailers by title, author, interest level, trailer creator, software used in trailer creation, and subject keywords.   Each entry includes a summary, information about the trailer creator, subject words, and links to the three sites where the trailers are housed:  4shared, You Tube, and Teacher Tube."  

To try it out, go to http://booktrailersforall.com  and click on the "Search" tab at the top.
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Training Handouts for Animoto, Wordle and Tagxcedo

Adam Janowski, Library Media Specialist at Naples High School has created some handouts ( 1 pagers) that explain how to use three popular webapps: Animoto, Tagxcedo, and Wordle.

Teacher Training - How to Create Animoto Videos

Teacher Training - How to Create a Tag Cloud With Style

Teacher Training - How to Make a Wordle
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4.2.11

Get the Reel Scoop: Comparing Books to Movies

Compare and contrast books with their movie counterparts.
Students first read a book and analyze the literary elements. They then watch the film version, using a graphic organizer to compare elements of the book and film versions. Next, they discuss which changes they think improved the book and which changes they think were a bad idea. Finally, they select a scene from the book that they think wasn't well represented in the movie and adapt it for a readers theater performance. (Grade 3-5)

ReadWriteThink calendar of activities

Calendar Activities
Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students. View by day, by week, or by month.

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Heads-up: April is Poetry Month in the US

National Poetry Month (main page):

As part of your celebration of poetry, enjoy these
features from the "Academy of American Poets" web site:

(get a poem emailed to you each day)

Poem on the Range: www.poets.org/ontherange
Video and picture interpretations of poems

(Build collections on a topic of your choosing

Poem in Your Pocket Day page:
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School Library Web Presence - Archived Webinar

TLVirtualCafé: School Library Web Presence
(Offered 3/1/10 8pm EASTERN) How is your library available to students via the web? What is your library web presence in the community? Are you a web wallflower or dancing with the stars web-wise? A discussion of effective practice and essential elements for making your library instruction, program, and tools more accessible for students and the community.

Details, Downloadables, slideshow, transcript, etc.

A discussion of effective practice and essential elements of our library web presence with guests: Buffy Hamilton, Carolyn Foote, Barb Jansen, Christina Bentheim (Hosted by Gwyneth and Joyce)
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Beyond the First Five Links - Google Webinar

Getting more out of Google:
Using Google's Left-Hand Panel to Reveal the Good Stuff.  (Archived Webinar) The presenter is a former school librarian, so her examples are "School relevant". Learn how Google's left-hand panel helps you sort and filter search results in ways that reveal compelling new sources, even without formulating complex queries. View a simple research assignment, including hands-on practice, to discover how these tools encourage students to both engage with new forms of data visualization and explore the best resources, whether they come from the print or electronic world.  [LINK] Free registration is required to view the presentation.

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Webinar, Google, searching,

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Math, Science and Tech Webinars for Middle School

The Middle School Portal 2:
Math and Science Pathways project presents webinars on timely topics. This page contains the descriptions of those webinars and links to the archived recordings. (Webinars are offered in Elluminate. You will have to allow a java applet to download in order to view the recordings. Tip: Firefox works better than Safari)


Some of the topics covered:
1 Interactive Notebooks
2 Moodle for the Middle - Part I and Part II
3 Digital Storytelling
4 Wikis for the Classroom
5 Interactive Whiteboards
6 Reading Mathematics is Different
7 Diigo: An Online Research Tool
8 Universal Design for Learning
9 Laboratory Safety
10 Citizen Science: Building Math and Science Skills and Knowledge
11 Teaching About Light and the EM Spectrum at the Middle Level
12 Animoto and Glogster
13 Digital Tools and Math
14 Google Apps for Educators
15 STEM Career Exploration for Middle School
16 Timely Teachings: Seasons and the Cycles of Night and Day
17 Let's Present With Prezi
18 21st Century Skills and . . .
19 Global Treks: Virtual Field Trips
20 Getting the Most Out of Your Students in the Networked World
21 Introduction to mySakai: An Online Learning Management Tool
22 Teacher-n-Teacher: Connecting Classrooms
23 STEM and PBL
24 Author and Copyright
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EcoVoyageurs Junior Lesson Plans

EcoVoyageurs Junior Lesson Plans
The goal of the lesson plans is to create empathy and a knowledge base about the people, flora, and fauna - the places - where students live and go to school. [LINK] Lessons for a variety of grade levels, inclusing PDFs, Powerpoint sides and other resources.

There is also a contest associated with these lesson plans:
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Visa's Choices & Decisions - A Financial Literacy Resource for Educators

Visa's financial literacy resource Choices & Decisions is now available.

This Teacher's Guide includes lesson plans, quizzes, and student activity work sheets. Designed to help educators teach high school students how to manage their money, develop effective financial strategies, and achieve their financial goals, Choices & Decisions contains the most recent financial information available.

To order a Teacher's Guide, go to www.4edu.ca/tors/visa




Media literacy/tech clips

Open Thinking Wiki: 90+ Videos for Tech. & Media Literacy
"Dr. Alec Couros has been collecting Internet videos related to technological and media literacy. The clips are organized into various sub-categories. These videos are of varying quality, cross several genres, and are of varied suitability for classroom use." (NB: Preview the clips first, as some are not suitable for Elementary audiences!)


(The section entitled: "Mashups, Stop Motion, Animations & Short Films", has many clips that would be useful for Animation or Video editing courses.)
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3.2.11

Science House Videos

The Science House Foundation is dedicated to bringing the excitement of science to students around the world. The site has a number of videos explaining simple (and some more complicated) demos teachers can do in the classroom. With over 80 videos, and more added every month, Video Science helps you find inexpensive lab tools and lots of experiments that are easy, effective, and hopefully fun to offer your students.

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How to make recycled paper (video)

Make your own paper.
Here's a nice activity for Earth Day coming up in April. It is a simple lesson that illustrates in a hands-on and clear way a procedure for recycling paper products. (The videos are more of a "how-to" for the science teacher explaining how to use the activity with students)

Step One

Step Two
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2.2.11

Scholastic is celebrating its 90th anniversary

Read Every Day
Scholastic is celebrating its 90th anniversary with a unique global literacy campaign called "Read Every Day, Lead a Better Life." The campaign features a Reading Bill of Rights, which includes eight "beliefs" that affirm every child's right to read and what that means in the 21st century-from access to books and great stories to the ability to understand information. (Some clips, handouts and downloadables on their website.)

(Also on the site: Celebrities and their fav books)

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Scholastic, reading,

Earth Science Links for teachers

Teaching Earth Science?
Here are some links provided by the NSTA.
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Earth Science, NSTA,


The Art Project, powered by Google

"StreetView" comes to the museum.
Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

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museum, Google, StreetView,


"Closing the Book" from Ideas on CBC Radio

Is a book really a book if it's an eBook?
"The world of letters is being rocked by new technology.  The rapid rise of the e-reader could be the biggest change in books since Gutenberg invented movable type.  Readers, writers, booksellers, and publishers are all grappling with its implications and asking a fundamental question: is a book really a book when it exists only as a digital file? CBC producer Sean Prpick goes between the covers of the question."

Check it out at:
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ideas, ebooks, digital,

1.2.11

The Wayback Machine - new version

Want to view a page that no longer exists, or see how it has changed over time? Check out the new version of the Wayback Machine, provided by the Internet Archive. "It offers web researchers several new features and a clean, no-nonsense user interface. Wayback is an essential internet research tool and should be one of the first resources discussed when teaching basic web-based research skills. It offers more than 150 billion archived web pages with some material dating back to 1996."

Note: "There is a delay of at least 6 months before what has been archived becomes accessible, and it’s not keyword searchable. Nevertheless, Wayback is the easiest, quickest, and in some cases only chance a researcher has in trying to find material that is no longer available on the web."

You can access the beta at http://www.waybackmachine.org
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waybackmachine,

Classic Novel Clips

The 60 Second Recap
"60second Recap® wants to make the great works of literature accessible, relevant, and, frankly, irresistible to today’s teens. Through 60second Recap® video albums, we seek to help teens engage with the best books out there."

This site presents a series of 60 second clips on plot, theme, symbolism, etc. for a number of classic novels. The clips could be a good introduction for discussion, or used as exemplars for student projects. Students could also be encouraged to discuss the accuracy or completeness of the clips. (Caveat: each clip is preceeded by a short commercial that cannot be skipped. However, the teacher can mute the ad until the "recap" begins.) Preview them first to see if they meet your needs.

Some of the titles represented:
1984, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Animal Farm, Beowulf,  Brave New World,  Fahrenheit 451, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Jane Eyre, King Lear , Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Of Mice and Men, Romeo and Juliet, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, Wuthering Heights (other titles on the site.)
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31.1.11

A Personal Narrative Exercise

Todd Finley, writing for Edutopia talks about how he inspires and motivates his high school students to be better writers.

"...To disrupt the over-use of [a] mono-strategy [for writing], my job as teacher is to grab up perfectionist writers by the hair and drop them into the drafting process where speed, not caution, is prized. This motivation helped me devise the following personal narrative writing exercise. It’s called Fever Dream...."

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writing, high school,

Another Science Resource - PopSci back to 1926

As you know, the most recent issues of Popular Science magazine are available via EBSCO host, but GoogleBooks has copies of this magazine as far back as the March 1926 edition. These issues are readable in their entirety via your browser. See how certain questions have been covered over the years, and follow the topics that were popular in days gone by. (Other issues.)
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EBSCO magazines related to teaching Science

Magazines from EBSCO related to teaching Science.

Teaching Science - the Journal of Australian Science Teachers
Promotes the teaching of science in all Australian schools with a focus on classroom practices & contribute to the professional development of teachers of science. Articles by and for Australian primary and junior science teachers. Practical ideas for classroom teaching, reviews of resources, summaries of research work, helpful hints and special projects.

Experiments and activities in all phases of science, teacher tested explorations and projects keyed for age level and degree of difficulty; news notes, computer news, book reviews and new products for the classroom teacher. (with a 12 Month Full text delay due to publisher restrictions ("embargo") - you can only read the full-text from articles that are at least a year old.)

Thematic issues containing articles, puzzles, projects and news in science for middle school students; seeds, plastics, toughing out winter, volcanoes.

A publication by and for students published by Scholastic Inc. Includes feature articles, interviews, science in the news, fiction, puzzles and cartoons.

Science World (Teacher's Edition)
Science Education; Teaching & Tutoring

Science Spin - Early Primary
From Weekly Reader Publications. Children's Interest; Science Education

Children's magazine of science and exploration; it helps young children understand the world around them.

Presents articles covering all topics related to science for children at the middle-school level.

Popular Magazines

Presents articles on products for homes, transportation and recreation, including automobiles, boats, tools & garden, electronic, photographic equipment and television.

Written for the knowledgeable amateur astronomer. Articles on space science, astronomy, observatories, planetariums, telescopes and celestial events.

Original research articles & letters, review articles, news of science in universities, industry & government, correspondence and opinion pieces. (with a 12 Month Full text delay due to publisher restrictions ("embargo")


HTML only Magazines
(The following magazines area only available in HTML format only, meaning no images, just text from articles.)

Discover (HTML version only, no images, just text from articles.)
Newsmagazine of science devoted to the wonders, mysteries and challenges of modern science, written for the educated layperson.

New Scientist (HTML version only, no images, just text from articles.)
The print edition of New Scientist has been at the cutting edge of science & technology since 1956. Every week our expert team of science writers bring you, colleagues & students, the latest news & advances in a stimulating, lively & authoritative way. (1 month embargo on deigital version.)

Scientific American (HTML version only, no images, just text from articles.) Authoritative articles on all sciences by scientists who do the research reported. Edited for the interested layman. Features science and the citizen, computer reactions, the amateur scientists, reviews of current books in science and bibliographies.


Acedemic Science Journals

Presents articles of interest to scientists and others involved with the latest developments in science.

Published by the National Academies and the University of Texas at Dallas to inform public opinion, and to raise the quality of private and public decision-making by providing a forum for discussion and debate.

Reports on recent research in pure and applied sciences, written for scientists of all disciplines.

Presents articles dealing with current advances in the field of biological science for researchers, administrators and teachers. Pub. by Am. Inst. of Biological Sciences (AIBS)



30.1.11

An alternative to Wikipedia?

2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for schools

The "2008/9 Wikipedia Selection" is a free, hand-checked, non-commercial selection from Wikipedia, targeted around the UK National Curriculum. It has about 5500 articles and is about the size of a twenty volume encyclopaedia (34,000 images and 20 million words).

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Wikipedia,

eBook sales overtaking print

According to the "technolog" column on MSNBC, Kindle ebooks are now beginning to outsell paper editions.  

"Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books."

You can read the entire story here:
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Kindle, ebooks,


Borrow Kindle ebooks for free

Check out the new social sharing site called ebookfling. (currently in beta)  This is just one example of a new batch of sites that allow Kindle users to "lend books" once to anyone in the world and in turn borrow ebooks from others. (Note: you can read Kindle format books on the device itself, or using the app for Mac, PC, iPhone or iPad.)

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Kindle, ebook, borrow, ebookfling,

Illustrators discuss their work

This past September, the Central branch of the "Brooklyn Public Library" opened an exhibit entitled "Drawn in Brooklyn" highlighting the work children's book illustrators who live and work in the Brooklyn area.  The BPL has a Youtube channel with short videos featuring all the illustrators in the exhibit.  You can hear them talk about their drawing and see their work spaces!

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illustrators, BPL



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