"As an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was created in 2002 to be a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education."
See their findings about Accelerated Reader: http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/interventionreport.aspx?sid=14.
At EasyBib we are intimately aware of the issues that plague students surrounding information literacy. Plagiarism, source attribution and critical thinking are among some of the real problems that our educators and students face. We put together this infographic to shed light on the matter, to underscore why librarians are needed more than ever, and to show what EasyBib is doing about it. Click the image for a bigger size!
Here we will meet the writers whose words are presenting nonfiction in a whole new way. Discover books that show how nonfiction writers are some of the best storytellers around
Libraries are increasingly getting hip to using Twitter as a tool, with many offering the service as a point of contact with librarians. But Twitter is an excellent tool for librarian learning as well, offering lots of great opportunities for discussion. Many Twitter chats exist for the literary and library world, and we've discovered 20 of the absolute best for librarians to check out.
Banned Books Week is an annual event drawing attention to the concept of intellectual freedom and is celebrated during the last week of September. In 2011 ALA introduced Banned Websites Awareness Day to draw attention to problems Internet filtering can cause. For those who want to promote the event, the ALA Store has posters, bookmarks, t-shirts, and more.
http://www.alastore.ala.orghttp://bannedbooksweek.org/
YALSA offers webinars on various topics for YA librarians a few times a year. From this site you can learn about upcoming sessions and access archived ones.
In Colorado, the State Library, which is part of the Department of Education, produced five videos that illustrate what a highly effective school librarian looks like.
Carl A. Harvey II has some thoughts on that. He's a nationally recognized school librarian and the 2011-12 AASL President. A few years ago he created a handout to describe for administrators the varied roles of the 21st century school librarian.
"Publishers have spent a lot of time and money building their own company Web sites with fresh information on their books and authors. The trouble is, very few book buyers visit them. In search of an alternative, three major publishers said on Friday that they would create a new venture, called Bookish.com, which is expected to make its debut late this summer. The site intends to provide information for all things literary: suggestions on what books to buy, reviews of books, excerpts from books and news about authors. Visitors will also be able to buy books directly from the site or from other retailers and write recommendations and reviews for other readers." As of early August 16 2011, the site is not ready. However, you can enter your email address to be notified when it goes live.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/07/books/publishers-plan-a-joint-one-stop-book-site.html?_r=1&src=recg
This is from the website's About page: "The world is now more social. We share, we like, we tweet, retweet, link and generally exchange information on the social web. But how do you keep track of the things you like? Trunk.ly takes care of that for you. By connecting into your social networks, Trunk.ly monitors and collects the links that you find interesting across the social web. More importantly, it indexes the web pages these links point to and builds a personal search engine, so you never have to tag or describe a link again, you just search and Trunk.ly will find it again for you."
This is from the June 2011 ODE Social Sciences Newsletter: "Understanding how to manage money is a skill that is more important today than ever. You can look all around for examples of poor financial decisions. Let us turn that around for our next generation. Financial Beginnings and Operation HOPE offer free financial education programs for students in grades 4-12 as well as young adults. All programs are free and provide age-specific curriculum and activities and are designed to promote self-sufficiency, fiscal responsibility, and encourage active and educated participation in the banking system. The fun, engaging and relevant programs are taught by professionals from the community. Together, Financial Beginnings and Operation HOPE have served nearly 25,000 youth at more than 100 schools throughout the Pacific Northwest." Every year the Office of the State Treasurer sponsors the Reading is an Investment (RII) program between October and March. Anyone who wanted to schedule the elementary financial program, Banking on our Future, could try to time it so it happens when RII is active.
http://www.ode.state.or.us/search/page/?id=1707http://www.ost.state.or.us/read
The United States Department of Agriculture updated their dietary guidelines in 2010, and My Plate is the new graphical representation instead of the Food Pyramid. Are there books and other resources in your library with this new information? Note that the USDA's website is not fully updated yet. The sections for kids and preschoolers still reflect the former Food Pyramid information but should be updated by the end of summer 2011. http://www.choosemyplate.gov/specificaudiences.html
Information in quotes was taken from Ann Scheppke's post on Libs-Or. The website "is the culmination of more than two years' work by staff at the University of Oregon Libraries, in collaboration with the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of state agencies and stakeholders" and was partially funded by an LSTA grant. Users have access to "historical materials originally published by Oregon journalists between 1846 and 1922. The website includes more than 180,000 pages of digital content drawn from historic newspapers that include the Salem Capital Journal and the Portland Oregonian." K12 lesson plans are available, although that section is still being developed.
http://listsmart.osl.state.or.us/pipermail/libs-or/2011-July/010667.html
From the website's About page: "Read It Later lets you save what you find on the web to watch and read on any device, at anytime. It's been called 'a DVR for the web' by the New York Times, Business Week, Time, TechCrunch and more." You can access saved items online or offline, mark them as "read," and more. Use it with smart phones like iPhone and Android versions, with Internet browsers like Firefox and Safari, and applications like Flipboard and TweetBot.
The website's About Us section states that the "goal was to create a simple to use and easy to learn tool to help people organize their ideas in a way that make sense to them." Click on Help in the top right corner of the homepage for tips on how to use the site.