It’s the season for getting together with family and friends. This year, I’ve found myself giving many of them a rather unintentional gift–an introduction to their public libraries’ digital media collections. While most of my friends and relatives have library cards, I am discovering, among the people I know who are not librarians, a surprising […]
Open Library gets even more open
August 2, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Created in 2006 by a team led by Aaron Swartz and Brewster Kahle, Open Library is an Internet Archive project developed to present one web page for every book ever published. This wiki approach to a catalog encourages new information as well as corrections from the user community. Recent enhancements allow for even more openness. […]
A new kids app on the block: Khan Academy Kids launching learning fun for little learners
July 17, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Khan Academy Kids launched this week. In collaboration with experts from the Stanford Graduate School of Education and children’s book authors, and in partnership with Super Simple Songs, Bellwether Media and National Geographic Magazine, the new app is designed to inspire a lifetime of learning and discovery with our free, fun educational program for children ages two […]
Google’s new Talk to Books: Semantic search for book and idea discovery
April 15, 2018 by 2 Comments
I am truly excited about sharing this new approach to search! Imagine if you had the power to ask authors across time and disciplines your most burning questions or for their best advice. Now you can. This week TED curator Chris Anderson and futurist Ray Kurzweil introduced Talk to Books. The feature was developed by a Google Research team […]
A true gift from SHEG: DIY digital literacy assessments and tools for historical thinking
December 20, 2017 by 1 Comment
You may remember Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) for its groundbreaking and utterly depressing report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Online Civic Reasoning. In the November 2016 Executive Summary, the researchers shared: When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks there are endless variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle […]
Introduce myShakespeare to your students!
January 1, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Fun fact: You may know I was an English major. You may not know that my serious focus was 16th century poetry and drama. My favorite course ever was Shakespeare’s Problem Plays. Not every student I’ve met over the years felt the same draw to Shakespeare. The play is just not every kid’s thing. The […]
New Student Discovery Sets for Tablets from LOC
June 4, 2016 by Leave a Comment
A couple of years ago, I wrote about the first six Student Discovery Sets published by the Library of Congress. The collection, now at 15 titles, covers so many of the themes studied in our school programs. This week, three new sets launched: Scientific Data: Observing, Recording, and Communicating Information Weather Forecasting The New Deal […]
Wonderful news! The launch of the Open eBooks app for your children in need
February 24, 2016 by 7 Comments
Some wonderful news! First Lady Michelle Obama’s video below announces a significant new initiative designed to address the challenge of providing children living in low income households with equitable access to digital reading materials. Open eBooks, is a free app, offering thousands of popular and award-winning titles, available without checkout or cost. It targets all […]
A next chapter: Editions at Play
February 6, 2016 by Leave a Comment
In a world where smartphones are transforming into all-purpose devices, not surprisingly, an October 2015 Pew study found a sizable decline in e-book reader ownership. It’s possible that digital may not be the best container for all physical books. And it’s pretty clear that print and e-readers are not the perfect containers for emerging forms […]
Map of Life goes mobile
May 12, 2015 by Leave a Comment
This app is going to make travel, field trips, birdwatching and walks in the woods, on the beach and in the park way more fun. One of my very favorite examples of crowd-sourced reference sites has been Yale University’s Map of Life . Using a wide variety of data sources, the biodiversity project endeavors to provide […]
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