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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

Policy Statement - School Library Bill of Rights. School libraries are concerned with generating understanding of freedom and with the preservation of this freedom through the development of informed and responsible citizens. The responsibility of the school library is .....

Ebooks outlawed in class. The September issue of School Library Journal addressed not one, but two reader issues pertaining to digital access by K-12 students. Pat Scales, chair of the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, has dealt with many a book challenge and attempts to ban library materials. In her column, "Scales on Censorship," she addresses situations faced by readers. But "this is the first I've encountered in which a book's format has been censored," she writes.

"The annual Horizon report, released June 29 by the nonprofit New Media Consortium, examines the trends and technologies that will shape primary and secondary education over the next five years. It references libraries as being at the forefront of maker spaces, which are among 18 major trends that include the rise of STEAM education: the intersection and importance of science, technology, arts, engineering, and math. The Horizon Report broke down challenges to school technology adoption into three categories: "solvable," "difficult," and "wicked," representing a range of difficulty to implement over the next five years. The "solvable" problems reflect what many libraries are already doing, like focusing more on blended learning and STEAM. The "wicked" problems were far more dramatic: shifting toward deeper learning approaches and rethinking the role of school itself."

"The days of being shooshed in the library are well and truly over at The Illawarra Grammar School. After a $1 million facelift, the school's staid old library reopened this week as a bright, open space where children are allowed to draw on walls, watch TV, play games, gather to chat, or wander around on their own while listening to stories on headphones."

100 blogs about school libraries, educational thinking and books

Bright ideas is a blog by SLAV where school library staff can share ideas on how they can use Web 2.0 tools in their library

Bright ideas is a blog by SLAV where school library staff can share ideas on how they can use Web 2.0 tools in their library

Strathmore Secondary College library have recently set up their own library blog

Your Library - Edinburgh City Council has a a great example of a library breaking out and getting into the wider community. This is a map that details literature based within the city. There are more than 100 books on the map which covers the whole city, from Edinburgh Airport to Portobello Police Station, and Muirhouse to James Gillespie's High School

Libraries and schools that lend Kindles to users might be interested in this new service from Amazon that just launched.

Wiki with examples of school library websites 

"According to School Library Journal's 2012 School Technology Survey, media specialists are leading the charge to bring new media, mobile devices, social apps, and web-based technologies into our nation's classrooms."

This series of tutorials is brought to you by Baltimore County Office of Library Information Services. On the wiki you will encounter the tools of the new Internet: Web 2.0 tools that are bringing our students in touch with the entire world through social networking, video, audio, and gaming sites. There are nine tutorials, each of which focuses on two - three Web 2.0 applications so there are 23 Things for you to do. There are many places for you to explore, experiment with, and think about creative ways to use this in your library or to collaborate with classroom teachers.

Some fair use sites that offer music and other media for a school project.

A wiki for school library media specialists to learn about cool new web tools, see how they can be used in school library media programs, and share ideas & success stories.

A wiki for school friendly media.