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Safe Digial Social Networking - 0 views

  • Young people also need guidance and adult assistance to learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. Schools must be proactive, rather than merely defensive, in helping students acquire the skills of digital citizenship needed today and in the future. Simply banning read/write web tools on school networks is an inadequate response: Educators must strive to learn alongside students and parents how these technologies can be safely and powerfully used to communicate and collaborate.
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    "Young people also need guidance and adult assistance to learn how to safely navigate the virtual environments of the 21st Century. Schools must be proactive, rather than merely defensive, in helping students acquire the skills of digital citizenship needed today and in the future. Simply banning read/write web tools on school networks is an inadequate response: Educators must strive to learn alongside students and parents how these technologies can be safely and powerfully used to communicate and collaborate."
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    resources and links provided - from a workshop to schol library media spcialists (and others) by Wesley Fryer
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ALA | - 0 views

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    "Reading is a foundational skill for 21st-century learners. Guiding learners to become engaged and effective users of ideas and information and to appreciate literature requires that they develop as strategic readers who can comprehend, analyze, and evaluate text in both print and digital formats. Learners must also have opportunities to read for enjoyment as well as for information. School library media specialists are in a critical and unique position to partner with other educators to elevate the reading development of our nation's youth."
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TED-Ed Blog» Blog Archive » 20 books to read in 2015: TED-Ed Educators share ... - 45 views

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    If one of your New Year's Resolutions was the classic "read more books" and you haven't so much as opened a magazine, we're here to provide some inspiration. TED-Ed asked a few of our favorite educators to weigh in on the best books in their subject - for students, teachers and lifelong learners alike - to crack into during 2015. Here, find a list of their top 5 picks in literature, science, math and history.
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Slightly addicted to fiction - 5 views

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    Judi Jagger, the current Western Australian Children's Book Council judge, has developed her own blog. It is a must read for anyone interested in children's and YA literature.
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School Library Websites: Examples of Effective Practice - 0 views

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    Lots of ideas and musts for the school library environments not limited to the website alone.
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12 Valuable Wordle Tips You Must Read - 28 views

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    …Word Clouds in Education Series: Part 1 | 21 st Century Educational Technology and Learning  In this series of posts I will cover: 12 Tips in Using Wordle  (Some you may now… but other you may not.) Over 10o ways  to use Word Clouds in the classroom There is more to Word Clouds then Wordle… other awesome word cloud generators Beyond word clouds… cool sites and applications to integrate word clouds
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Five must-read books by Indigenous authors | Books | The Guardian - 3 views

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    In response to Barry Spurr's comments about Indigenous literature, Sandra Phillips says these books 'astonish, perplex, and at times comfort the reader into re-imagining our relationships'
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Weighing In: Three Bombs, Two Lips, and a Martini Glass -- NCAC - 0 views

  • why books such as Markus Zusak’s Book Thief and Annika Thor’s Faraway Island, both set during the Holocaust, and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Chains, set during the American Revolution, weren’t given any “educational value.” The editor in chief had no clear answers, but those books have now been awarded “educational value” on Common Sense Media’s site. It is clear to the nine organizations that are working hard to protect children and young adult’s freedom to read that Common Sense Media is a moving target, and their piecemeal response to such questions won’t fix what is at heart a misguided and dangerous concept.
    • anonymous
       
      Wow! I had no idea. I've used the Internet saftey information and videos but didn't know about the book ratings.
  • While Common Sense Media isn’t censoring anything, it is providing a tool for censors. There is already a documented case in the Midwest where a book was removed from a school library based solely on a Common Sense review. Common Sense Media allows users to filter books by “on,” “off,” and “iffy” ratings. And reviewers are instructed to point out anything “controversial.” Such warnings encourage site browsers to take things out of context instead of looking at books as a whole.
    • anonymous
       
      This is a form of censorship.
  • Bombs, lips, and martini glasses! Indeed, let them be a warning. We must be proactive in helping parents understand that rating books is dangerous. Otherwise, more censorship bombs are sure to explode.
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  • If you had asked me a year ago what bombs, lips, and martini glasses have in common, I would have answered, “A fraternity party.” Now I have a different answer. It’s called Common Sense Media. This not-for-profit Web-based organization is in the business of using a “rating” system to review all types of media that target children, but their “ratings” of books are especially disingenuous. They claim that they want to keep parents informed. Informed about what? What their children should read or what they shouldn’t read?
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The Innovative Educator: 10 Proven Strategies to Break the Ban and Build Opportunities ... - 0 views

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    Excellent article on using cell phones in class. Links to research, templates for lessons, letter etc. This is a much read!
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    Not specifically geared towards librarians but so much useful information here it is a must read for all.
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The Library in the New Age - The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.
  • around 4000 BC, humans learned to write.
  • the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity
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  • second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll
  • eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces
  • other reader's aids
  • codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.
  • technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.
  • fourth great change, electronic communication
  • movable type to the Internet, 524 years;
  • writing to the codex, 4,300 years;
  • codex to movable type, 1,150 years;
  • would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself.
  • Internet to search engines, nineteen years
  • search engines to Google's algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years;
  • continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.
  • continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts.
  • every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.
    • beth gourley
       
      premise
  • pace of change seems breathtaking:
  • news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
  • News is not what happened but a story about what happened.
  • aving learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary sources for knowing what really happened
  • newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events
  • We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?
  • as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission
  • Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.
  • Unbelievers used to dismiss Henry Clay Folger's determination to accumulate copies of the First Folio edition of Shakespeare as the mania of a crank.
  • When Folger's collection grew beyond three dozen copies, his friends scoffed at him as Forty Folio Folger.
  • eighteen of the thirty-six plays in the First Folio had never before been printed
  • only two were reprinted without change from earlier quarto editions
  • extual stability never existed in the pre-Internet eras.
  • Piracy was so pervasive in early modern Europe that best-sellers could not be blockbusters as they are today
  • They abridged, expanded, and reworked texts as they pleased, without worrying about the authors' intentions.
  • question in perspective by discussing two views of the library, which I would describe as grand illusions—grand and partly true.
  • o put it positively, there is something to be said for both visions, the library as a citadel and the Internet as open space.
  • We have come to the problems posed by Google Book Search.
  • Google proposal seemed to offer a way to make all book learning available to all people, or at least those privileged enough to have access to the World Wide Web
  • will open up possibilities for research involving vast quantities of data, which could never be mastered without digitization
  • Electronic Enlightenment, a project sponsored by the Voltaire Foundation of Oxford
  • scholars will be able to trace references to individuals, books, and ideas throughout the entire network of correspondence that undergirded the Enlightenment
  • notably American Memory sponsored by the Library of Congress[1] and the Valley of the Shadow created at the University of Virginia[2] —have demonstrated the feasibility and usefulness of databases on this scale
  • will make research libraries obsolete
  • 2. Although Google pursued an intelligent strategy by signing up five great libraries, their combined holdings will not come close to exhausting the stock of books in the United States.
  • 1. According to the most utopian claim of the Googlers, Google can put virtually all printed books on-line.
  • If Google missed this book, and other books like it, the researcher who relied on Google would never be able to locate certain works of great importance.
  • On the contrary, Google will make them more important than ever. To support this view, I would like to organize my argument around eight points.
  • For books under copyright, however, Google will probably display only a few lines at a time, which it claims is legal under fair use.
  • 3. Although it is to be hoped that the publishers, authors, and Google will settle their dispute, it is difficult to see how copyright will cease to pose a problem.
  • But nothing suggests that it will take account of the standards prescribed by bibliographers, such as the first edition to appear in print or the edition that corresponds most closely to the expressed intention of the author.
  • Google defines its mission as the communication of information—right now, today; it does not commit itself to conserving texts indefinitely.
  • it has not yet ventured into special collections, where the rarest works are to be found. And of course the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google's capacity to digitize
  • Electronic enterprises come and go. Research libraries last for centuries. Better to fortify them than to declare them obsolete
  • 5. Google will make mistakes.
  • Once we believed that microfilm would solve the problem of preserving texts. Now we know better.
  • 6. As in the case of microfilm, there is no guarantee that Google's copies will last.
  • all texts "born digital" belong to an endangered species
  • 7. Google plans to digitize many versions of each book, taking whatever it gets as the copies appear, assembly-line fashion, from the shelves; but will it make all of them available?
  • 4. Companies decline rapidly in the fast-changing environment of electronic technology.
  • No single copy of an eighteenth-century best-seller will do justice to the endless variety of editions. Serious scholars will have to study and compare many editions, in the original versions, not in the digitized reproductions that Google will sort out according to criteria that probably will have nothing to do with bibliographical scholarship.
  • 8. Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book.
  • ts physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.
  • Rare book rooms are a vital part of research libraries, the part that is most inaccessible to Google. But libraries also provide places for ordinary readers to immerse themselves in books,
  • Meanwhile, I say: shore up the library.
  • I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns.
  • he research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.
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    The library as citadel and as the open internet both play an important and distinguishable role.
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Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade - NYTimes.com - 20 views

  • Simply put, we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist. We can’t keep ignoring the formidable cognitive skills they’re developing on their own. And above all, we must stop disparaging digital prowess just because some of us over 40 don’t happen to possess it. An institutional grudge match with the young can sabotage an entire culture.
  • A classroom suited to today’s students should deemphasize solitary piecework. It should facilitate the kind of collaboration that helps individuals compensate for their blindnesses, instead of cultivating them. That classroom needs new ways of measuring progress, tailored to digital times — rather than to the industrial age or to some artsy utopia where everyone gets an Awesome for effort.
  • The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects.
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    According to Davidson (2011 p7) if we're frustrated at information overload then we should quit operating under twentieth century rules ... I'm currently reading "Now You See It". This is an article about the book.
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School library strategic plans | Brad Tyrrell - 0 views

  • without a strategic plan for a department, you cannot implement new initiatives successfully, nor can you plan changes or institute changes in thinking. Without a strategic plan, movement forward will always feel forced, slow and lacks critical conversations that must take place with all members of staff in order to have team “buy in”. In the formation of the strategic plan, it is the one time that all staff have input and can “own” the direction of the department as a whole.
  • As a library we are a strategic arm of the school, even if we are not mentioned directly, and if we are not mentioned directly, then that’s our fault for not doing enough to be important to the school plan.
  • Library strategic plan based on the goals of the school strategic plan
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  • If you have a Library strategic plan that you wrote with your staff, but never talk to other departments about then how do you expect them to have “buy in”?
  • sent it to other Libraries or your personal learning network (PLN), then how do you know what you are missing that is critical Library functions?
  • no corresponding operational plan then you have not thought about how you are going to archive your goals in the strategic plan
  • if you do not review the plan with all your staff and see how far you have moved, then its just a bit of paper that makes you feel better and is not an item that you have action as a team.
  • ask everyone to write one goal based on the overarching goals setout in the School Strategic Plan. These are big picture statements.
  • highlight the main goals of the school strategic plan
  • 1. Tell your team that you are going to need them to review and read the school strategic plan.
  • Each individual sent these through to the Head of Library who combined and sent these to everyone removing who wrote what.
  • this was the main opportunity for all staff to have a chance to contribute to the strategic plan and the direction of the library for the next three years.
  • As the Head of Library I undertook the role of reading each goal and combining some goals together to ensure they incorporated the essence of each team members thinking.
  • From these I started to break out these goals into articulated statements that specifically looked at the library and what this meant day-to-day.
  • the strategic mission statement needs to be written which sums up the overarching goal of the plan
  • Once completed you need to send these goals out to the team for comment and any aspects that need clarification.
  • Once the fundamentals have been articulated in the goals and then corresponding support statement as Head of Library I need to present these back to the Curriculum Leadership group for comment. In addition a meeting with individual departments needs to be conducted to hear what they require from the Library going forward over the next three years.
  • The plan is then reworked and specific items for each department are highlighted in a separate document.
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The End of the Textbook as We Know It - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 11 views

  • Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).
  • Why electronic copies? Well, they're far cheaper to produce than printed texts, making a bulk purchase more feasible
  • An Indiana company called Courseload hopes to make the model more widespread, by serving as a broker for colleges willing to impose the requirement on students. And it is not alone.
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  • The real champions of the change are the college officials signing the deals.
  • "Our game plan is to bring the cost of textbooks down by 75 to 80 percent."
  • In its standard model, Flat World offers free access to its textbooks while students are online. If students want to download a copy to their own computers, they must pay $24.95 for a PDF (a print edition costs about $30)
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    Unusually informative article on the state of digital texts in 2010. Short and concise. Good info for librarian tech leaders.
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