a discussion of information fluency, searching, teaching, and learning in the 21st century

My blog personality is suddenly split.  I blog here, of course.  I now blog for School Library Journal too.  I am thinking that this is more a space where I can blog in my sweats.  At SLJ, the blazer stays on. Anyway . . . I wanted to alert you.  I’ve been thinking a lot more about [...]

I discovered a couple of new tools this week and teachers here seem to love them! VoiceThread (courtesy of my colleague Ken Rodoff) inspires a new brand of digital storytelling. Storytellers can easily share their own stories (or voice threads or text comments) around any posted image. One of the points is: a [...]

Just a heads-up about an interesting debate about to start. My old friend Tom Panelas, from Britannica, wrote to alert me about a discussion Michael Gorman is initiating on the Britannica blogspace. Tom quotes, Michael’s post: “The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers from an increase in credulity and an [...]

Graduation week is over and what a week it was! For me the highlight was a spontaneous yearbook day in the library. A variety of circumstances caused the books to be late. (They were supposed to be distributed at the senior barbecue. ) My assistant was in charge of distribution this year and for [...]

It’s been around for a bit, but I just discovered it.  Apple now offers iTunesU, podcast lectures and course materials from some of our finest institutions of higher learner. (They should work nicely in our high schools and on our ipods too.) Among the participating institutions are MIT, Arizona State University, Duke, Penn State, [...]

I thought I’d share some of the media we’ve posted in the past couple of days. George’s class got truly engaged in their Voice of Vocab podcasts. Much effort went into making these very short podcasts. Interviews with these sometimes less-than-motivated students revealed that this assignment truly motivated them. They learned the technology and some [...]

At BookExpo America, they announced this year’s Quill nominees. It’s the third year for these consumer-driven awards. The last two lists helped me plan my summer reading and helped me to discover new authors and titles to include on our high school shelves. Scroll down to the bottom of the list for youth titles.

We have two weeks left. As I complete the annual report, I find myself reflecting and worrying a bit too. It’s been an amazing year. We survived a community tragedy. We focused heavily on safety and recovery. But we moved ahead too. This year we piloted many Web 2.0 applications with a core [...]

One of my research questions asked, “How are school library sites evolving? How do the features and services offered by exemplary sites in the 2006/2007 school year differ from the state-of-the-art of the randomly selected sites last studied by Clyde in 2002?” Clyde’s (2004) longitudinal content analysis described the state-of-the-art relating to school library website practice [...]

One of my research questions asked, “How are school library sites evolving? How do the features and services offered by exemplary sites in the 2006/2007 school year differ from the state-of-the-art of the randomly selected sites last studied by Clyde in 2002?” Clyde’s (2004) longitudinal content analysis described the state-of-the-art relating to school library website practice [...]