Young readers like know more “about the author” and the Internet is rich with resources produced both by the authors themselves, their publishers, and their fans.
Make sure older kids know about free websites like Shelfari, LibraryThing, and Goodreads. Biblionasium id great for younger readers.
Destiny Quest allow students to record what they’ve read, write recommendations, share their recommendations with other students and discuss books online.
While not designed just for sharing reading interests like the tools above, generic curation tools like Pinterest, Tumblr, ScoopIt - along with older tools like Delicious and Diigo - allow the selection and sharing of interests among students.
multimedia tools to generate creative responses to books - and then share them with other students online. Using Glogster, Animoto, poster makers, digital image editors and dozens of other (usually) free tools, students can communicate through sight and sound as well as in writing.
Creative librarians do surveys and polls on book related topics using free online tools like GoogleApps Forms and SurveyMonkey. (Collect requests for new materials using an online form as well.) Does your library have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to let kids know about new materials - and remind them of classics?
Get flashy with digital displays.
less expensive to bring an author in virtually using Skype, Google Hangouts or othe video conferencing program.
Check out the Skype an Author Network website to get some ideas.
Take advantage of those tablets, smart phones and other student-owned (or school provided) devices by making sure your e-book collection, digital magazines, and other digital resources are easy to find.
Book Bowl in May. Students form teams and then we use the book bowl questions from the site to have a great competition.
"I am updating my workshop on how technology can be used to promote Voluntary Free Reading - the only undebatably fool-proof means of both improving reading proficiency and developing a life-long love of reading in every student. "
""I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said.
Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment - even if the pages are somebody else's with the same name."
Welcome to PBL-Online, a one stop solution for Project Based Learning! You'll find all the resources you need to design and manage high quality projects for middle and high school students.
"Learning in Hand #26 is about Padlet and Lino. Padlet and Lino are the two best online sticky note services around. They are web-based and work great on iPads, PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets. Walls can be set up so that students can use them without logins or passwords, making them easy to infuse into lessons. And the sticky notes aren't limited to text-they can have images, videos, and hyperlinks. Discover how teachers are using these virtual message boards everyday to collect student products, power communication, and fuel productive collaboration.
View the 14:30 video on YouTube, on Vimeo, in iTunes as a podcast, through RSS, or download to explore the educational possibilities of Padlet and Lino."
Never say anything on Twitter you wouldn’t want people to find out about, or wouldn’t say in any other situation.
One of the best ways to connect with students and other academics on Twitter is by asking open-ended questions in your feed.
Twitter already forces you to be succinct, but you should keep things under the limit for a reason: when you shorten your tweets, it leaves room for others to chime in and retweet.
Tweet regularly. Twitter isn’t going to do you much good if you don’t ever use it. Develop a regular tweeting schedule both for yourself and for your courses that use Twitter.
Ask for help
Hold after-class discussions.
Ask questions relevant to course material.
Start backchannel talks.
Create a classroom hashtag.
Use Twitter for class announcements
Share interesting online material.
Have a Twitter account for each class.
Reward participation.
Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck is an app by Twitter that makes it easier to arrange your feeds, schedule tweets, filter your content, and much more. A must for any Twitter power user.
This open, online global community for 21st-century education leaders exists to foster Global Education Transformation-the "GET" in GETideas.org-via virtual
collaboration and international dialogue, including the sharing of best practices and resources.
"How to Plan an Author Appearance
Welcome to the home for Penguin Young Readers Group's author and illustrator appearances. We want to help you to bring great authors to your school or library. Below is a step-by-step guide to a planning your next event!
Learn the Basics
This
overview sheet
will give you pointers and information you need to know.
Then look at a
sample author
schedule
for more ideas.
Choose Your Authors
Click on the Author Appearance Listing button on the right. It can help you
narrow your choices down by type of appearance, suitable age level, and author
location.
Request Your Authors
It's easy! Just access the
Author
Request Form
, fill it out, and send it in.
Prepare for your Event
Once you have scheduled your event and you have a finalized and signed
contract, you'll need do the following to get ready!: organize transportation,
have equipment ready for the presentation, provide a schedule to the
author/illustrator, and prepare the payment. You should also have books
available to sell-we encourage you to go through a local bookseller, an
institutional wholesaler (if you use one), or you may order directly from
Penguin
.
Best wishes for a successful event!
-The Penguin School and Library Marketing Team
Featured
Author
Sheila
Turnage
Sheila Turnage grew up on a farm in eastern North Carolina. A graduate of
East Carolina University, she is the author of two nonfiction books and one
picture book, but Three Times Lucky is her first middle grade novel.
Today Sheila lives on a farm with her husband, a smart dog, an ill-tempered cat,
a dozen chickens, and a flock of guineas.
Learn more about Sheila Turnage here.
If you are interested in hosting a Skype appearance by Sheila Turnage at your
school, library, or conference, please use the
online
request form
or send an email to
authorvisits[at]us.penguingroup.com
with
Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. Cacoo can be used free of charge. Collaborating is as easy as sharing a link with others.
"We want a team to think about action research as a collaborative endeavor, where principals and teachers work together to improve something over time. It's not just about gathering data, it's about working hard to improve something. Maybe you see a need to improve writing in the building, and you're going to figure out whether there's a way to take a techno-constructivist approach to strengthening students' writing skills. Maybe you feel the culture of your school is very mired in antiquated approaches to teaching and learning, and you want to build a new culture of innovation and collaboration, so you're going to develop your project around that goal."
"Using software and websites, Dale records many lessons for students and makes those screencast videos available online and via the school's podcast channel."
"As overcrowded classrooms, crunched school district budgets, and online, open learning become more prominent in lower and higher education - for better or worse - teachers and students are feeling stretched in many directions. While the hoped for result in democratic learning is that we'll all be more connected, the truth is that we're also losing valuable face time and struggling to find new ways to bring the world back to students.
Avatars are being used to help these challenges, by helping younger students contextualize history lessons, giving teachers more direct training before they even meet students, and more. Here are 10 amazing ways avatars are being used in education."
"Despite its now-famous Dan-Pink-sponsored affiliation with our esteemed colleague, Karl Fisch, is the 'flipped classroom' a true innovation or just a new label on the old stale wine of lectures? Is it something we should be encouraging or discouraging? If it has benefits, are they worth the accompanying drawbacks? Please join us for a lively, 1-hour online discussion about the 'flipped classroom.'"
Free online access to the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine:answer questions; do math; instantly get facts, calculators, unit conversions, and real-time quantitative data and statistics; create plots and visualizations; and access vast scientific, technical, chemical, medical, health, business, financial, weather, geographic, dictionary, calendar, reference, and general knowledge-and much more.