Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. (Stephen Stills For What it’s Worth) I have no idea how to measure it. But in my many years of being a youth librarian, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. I know that somewhere beyond the space where we introduce and teach Lord of [...]
This is going to be a lovely week (or two) for the readers of the world! 1. March 1st is the 15th annual World Book Day, designated by UNESCO as a worldwide celebration of books and reading, and marked in over 100 countries all over the world. The site (with a bit of UK flavor) [...]
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society released an interesting paper today focusing on how young people use digital media–how they search for and evaluate information, how they create, their levels of new literacies, and the social patterns that affect their work. Investigators Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, & Ashley Lee drew heavily from [...]
Apology and rationale: I am about to describe a lesson about skills in isolation. This is not something we usually do. But sometimes you feel the need to quickly catch up a particular group of students. Sometimes a librarian’s gotta do what a librarian’s gotta do. Our new ESL teacher (my friend Christine Settino) and [...]
With great power comes great responsibility. So advises Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. In a blog post Henry Jenkins re-imagines Peter/Spiderman as a case study representing a whole generation of youth who, like Peter, are deploying new media technologies and the processes associated with them to develop a clearer understanding of themselves and their place in [...]
On Monday, Google launched its Solve for X project–a forum to encourage and amplify technology-based moonshot thinking and teamwork. Solve for X talks address three criteria. They must highlight a huge problem present a concrete solution that could make a radical impact explain breakthrough science and technology that could enable this solution The videos archived [...]
Your history and language teachers will be very interested in the recently launched EUscreen. The new multimedia, multilingual portal reaches back to the early 1900s and offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives. The About page describes the need for this collaborative project: Although audiovisual content [...]
We’re trying something a little different with our ESL class this week. The new semester brought us two new students from Korea with limited English. We wanted to get to know them and encourage them to get to know us better. So we thought we try picture books. Our Picture Book activity asked learners to: [...]
I had a wonderful chat with the co-founders of instaGrok, a new search tool designed to help users learn about a topic by facilitating the finding of context and educational content. Still in Beta, InstaGrok is nurtured by Imagine K12, an incubator program devoted to supporting early stage ed-tech startups through a funding and mentorship [...]
Each year I point to Frank Baker’s remarkable aggregation of media literacy resources. Frank makes it easy for us to use Super Bowl ads as tools for deeper thinking about media messages. His general questions for discussing the game are kind of timeless and his list of links are super helpful: Super Bowl Ads Home [...]
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