SLAVConnects

"Links to Resources of Interest" School library conference. Canada.

"  Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada, 2014 offers a vision and provides practical approaches for all those engaged in creating successful 21st century school libraries in Canada. Its framework presents five standards supported by a set of themes and growth stages that lead to the transformation from traditional library facility to vibrant library learning commons. The standards represent guideposts along a journey of continuous growth. Because Canadian schools are at different points on this journey, this publication includes a range of markers of progress, sets of implementation strategies, and rich examples of innovation and success. Leading Learning also contains key resources to provide educators, individual schools, and school districts with helpful direction and support."

The World Digital Library hosts more than 10,000 primary documents and images from collections around the world. It is sponsored by UNESCO and the mission is to promote the study and understanding of cultures. The WDL can be searched by date, era, country, continent, topic, and type of resource. There are a lot of maps and images as well as text documents.

"The trends identified in the 2014 Horizon Report should inform K12 library practice and the ways in which we partner with classroom teachers.  In many cases we will already recognize them as part of our current practice."

A good piece to read if you are at all interested in libraries and makerspaces

"Write-a-Book-in-a-Day is a literary and fundraising initiative of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation."

" Today's library is a place for social interaction as well as quiet reading. It is a community cultural center, not simply a repository for books. It is a welcoming building with a design focus on transparency, not a series of isolated spaces."

The library now also has reading lounge areas with comfortable modular seating, as well as tables with chairs and stools that students are free to move around; two music studios; a HackerSpace (with high-tech equipment such as a microscope, 3D printer, gaming hardware and software, and a green screen for filming) and a Maker Space that also houses a 3D printer and serves as a "hands-on" craft room where old technology can be disassembled and re-configured with other materials. In short, the Monticello Library Media Center has become a "Learning Commons."

"The creation of a full-text searchable database of millions of books is a fair use of copyrighted works, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday, saying it also is permissible to distribute the books in alternative forms to people with disabilities."

"Google Hangouts is Google's free video-conferencing tool that is available for teachers to use as part of Google Apps for Education."

Add your photos from any time period to the map to build up a history of the location.

Following up on the work of Serra and De Villiers, and in the spirit of recent discussions about the success Bloom's Taxonomy has had in penetrating classrooms, I present the Hexagon of Proof. There are six components to the Hexagon of Proof. Learning is a messy affair that doesn't follow any sort of strict hierarchy, so a math classroom should involve all six of these aspects of proof. Still, if teachers find that their students are having trouble proving things in some area in math, students may benefit from time spent disagreeing over or debating some related mathematical propositions.

"MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses.  Although there has been access to free online courses on the Internet for years, the quality and quantity of courses has changed. Access to free courses has allowed students to obtain a level of education that many only could dream of in the past.  This has changed the face of education."

An informal professional learning community for teachers.

What is the unconference model of professional learning that is so popular.

Good way to being planning for future development by looking at the present situation