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An Easy Way to Make Online Booklets

There are some good services on the web that will turn PDFs into books and booklets and some services that will even allow you to create embeddable booklets online, yet few are quite as simple to use as Simple Booklet. Simple Booklet is a new service offering free online booklet creation and publishing.

Wow, fantastic resource, I'll be using this a LOT in the coming months: Mashpedia: Mashpedia is a thematic content aggregator that integrates a variety of data from online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, and further contextual information into a single interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of data and media that eliminate the user's need to visit each service separately.

Last week Google announced another round of service and product closures. The popular image editing tool Picnik was included in the list of services that they're shutting down. I've had a few people ask me for recommendations for alternatives to Picnik, so here's a short list of alternatives to explore.

Evernote is a great web service and software application that we can use in education. A lot of ink has been shed on this topic and just one click in a search engine is enough to get hundreds of links to guides and tutorials about Evernote. I have been going through so many of these resources and have collected ideas, videos, notes and many more. If you are a loyal reader to my blog ( I am glad most of you are ) you would clearly notice that guides I write here are different in that they are simple. to the point, address teachers and students direct  need, and most of all written in an easy and simple language. In this regard, I am working on an ebook that will contain all the guides I have posted here so far but will be available for free only to my subscribers. Without any further ado, let us get back to our guide.

ALSC (ALA's Association for Library Service to Children) announced the redesign of the Great Web Sites for Kids site. Newly evaluated and accepted sites are added to the database three times a year. The committee also reviews all sites within the database twice a year to guarantee sites are still relevant, appropriate and accessible.

In June of 2010, members of the Georgia Library Association and the Georgia Public Library Service launched this bi-monthly educational webinar series. The series highlights trends, innovation, and best practices in Georgia libraries. The free sessions feature Georgia speakers, but they are open to library employees from all geographic (and astral) locations. Topics are chosen to be of interest to employees of all library types, and each session is approved for one Georgia Continuing Education (CE) contact hour.

Pinterest's inspiration boards have a lot of potential for libraries and other organizations for creating visual displays of resources and services. All of Pinterest's boards and posts can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Here are some ideas for how you can make the most of this popular social network for your library:

Here's information about the Universal Service Program for Schools and Libraries, otherwise known as the e-rate program. A new criteria starting in the 2011-12 school year requires schools to teach students about Internet safety. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2011/08/internet_safety_ed_now_require.html http://statelibrary.mykansaslibrary.org/?p=10298 Five tips for e-rate success: http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/11/03/five-tips-for-erate-success/

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.

Great resource links for celebrating Banned Books Week!

Use twitter as a terrific resource...

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.

This was taken as excerpts from Melissa Dalton's post on Libs-Or: Oregon Poetic Voices (OPV) is a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that complements existing print collections of poetry across the state and is funded by the Library Services and Technology Act FFY2010. The state of Oregon possesses an unusually high number of nationally recognized writers, a very high proportion of whom are award-winning and otherwise notable poets. Additionally, there are active communities of emerging poets around the state, and poetry is regularly taught in the English curriculum of most Oregon schools. Until Oregon Poetic Voices began in 2010, there was no publicly accessible archive of recorded poetry by Oregon poets that could be used to maintain a record of poetry in performance, which is a vitally important aspect of interpretation and a valuable teaching tool. The Oregon Poetic Voices archive currently publishes over 200 prominent and emerging Oregon poets, including their biographies and poem texts alongside their recordings, and will soon feature historic performances recorded by KBOO, Fishtrap, and the Mountain Writers Series. There are also resources for educators, including curriculum guides and links to information about teaching poetry. http://listsmart.osl.state.or.us/pipermail/libs-or/2011-July/010664.html

Recognizing the need for poetry in our lives, the Oregon Poetic Voices Project (OPV) has begun to create a comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings that will complement existing print collections of poetry across the state.