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Fake News, Real War & the Power of Information

2/27/2022

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Here are 8 things I thought were worth sharing:

It's important for all of us to stay informed and up-to-date on the war in/on Ukraine. There are some resources for you here, here, here and here. It's also important to be aware of the many other real-time conflicts in the world and to always fight disinformation with information.
Here are 192 ways the world got better in 2021.
Love books & love movies? Then the Netflix Book Club may be for you! A no-pressure online space where readers can talk about the amazing books being made into Netflix series!
Here’s another paywall buster for you when you come across the perfect full-text article you can’t access.
NYPL’s Center for Educators and Schools recently put together Vibrant Voices: New Books from Authors of Color.
Find your next read via Penguin Random House’s The Year in Books. Graphic Novels are having a great run right now!
The OneZoom Tree of Life Explorer is “an interactive map of the evolutionary links between all living things known to science.”
Looking back over all of my blog posts to date, here are my favorite things that I’ve shared with you: Language Reactor, Internet Archive, Five Books, By the People, Radio Garden, Project Muse Open Access, Open Textbook Library, and Aporee.

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"Books may well be the only true magic. -- Alice Hoffman"

1/5/2022

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Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing:

Do you know what each January bestows on us? Exciting works of art that are now in the public domain!! Feast on all we can now freely access & adapt!
New York is a City of Readers. Enjoy a peek into our city’s past and how reading added to our collective personality.
Bibliotherapy is real & really helpful! Some bright souls even prescribe specific poetry for what ails you and Brooklyn’s own Center for Fiction is now getting into the game!
Time is a precious resource for all of us, so subscribe to “The Marginalian” so that Maria Popova can share her thoughts on amazing books and do some “pre-reading” for you!
We have LOTS of new books in our Library! They each proudly sport a red sticker on their spine, so check them out when you have a chance!
Serious about YA books? Check out Stacked!
Librarians fight back against push to ban books from schools.
Join Goodreads, feel free to “friend” me & sign up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge! I pledged to read 33 books in 2022, and am on my way!
If you don’t already, sign up for JSTOR Daily! Here are their most popular stories from 2021.
Since 2014, Tom Whitwell has been compiling a great list full of 52 fascinating facts you didn’t know but might like knowing! Jason Kottke started keeping one, too!

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Happy Reading Season!!

12/9/2021

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Here is 1 thing I thought was worth sharing:

1. READ MORE BOOKS!! They are rectangular tickets to internal VR experiences and one of the most effective ways to boost your empathy quotient! Here are some end of year Best Books Lists that I collected for you. Happy Shopping, Happy Reading & Happy 2022 to you all!

The 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 (Time)
NPR’s Book Concierge 2021
100 Notable Books of 2021 (New York Times)
Best Books 2021 (Publishers Weekly)
Best Books of 2021 (New York Public Library)
Best Books of the Year (So Far) (Amazon)
Best Books 2021 (School Library Journal)
Best Books of 2021 So Far (Book Riot)
The Best Books of the Year 2021 (Barnes & Noble)
Best of 2021 (Kirkus Reviews)
The 10 Best Books of 2021 (Washington Post)
Smithsonian Scholars pick their favorite books of 2021
Best Books 2021 (Library Journal)
Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021 (Oprah Daily)
The 50 Best Books of 2021 (Esquire)
Best Books of the Year (The Guardian)
The 2021 Book Releases to Order Now and Thank Yourself Later (Marie Claire)
The Best YA Books of 2021 (Read Brightly)
The Best Books to Read in 2021 (Vogue)
200 Books that Shaped 200 Years of Literature (Center for Fiction)

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Time to get a library card (if you don't already have one!)

9/21/2021

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Here are 14 things I thought were worth sharing:

September is Library Card Sign-Up Month! If you work at or go to school at BPHS, your name is already in my list of patrons and you can check out books anytime! Here are the links to apply for cards for the "other" libraries in our area: NYPL, BPL & QPL. And IF you have one of those library cards, you can get this for free!
September is also National Hispanic Heritage Month, so take a minute to check out our library catalog for our titles of Hispanic interest and stop by to see our display!
September is also the month of the (temporarily hybrid) Brooklyn Book Festival! It kicks off on September 26th & runs through October 4th and features hundreds of authors from all over the world...
For those bookish types out there, bookmark (truly no pun intended!) Booklist Reader's reviews and features so you can be in the know about the latest things being published!
The Library is hosting our first BPHS Reads! event of the year on October 25th! We'll be reading Traci Chee's "We are Not Free" and we hope you can make it! Pick up a free-to-keep copy of the book in the Library today!
Time Magazine came out with their list of "The 100 Best YA Books of All Time". See if you agree with their choices! We have many of these books in our Library, so come and check them out!
Get into the Cooper-Hewitt (Smithsonian's Design Museum) free through Halloween!
Skipped History is the brainchild of historical satirist Ben Tumin who shines a light on "events, moments, and people conveniently skipped in U.S. History".
The NYPL is now morphing (just a little) into a museum!
Have your students enter this Coming of Age in 2020 Contest sponsored by the New York Times! It runs from September 15-October 27th and is "an invitation to show us — in words or images, audio or video — how you and your generation are being shaped by these extraordinary times."
Help your students be better news consumers with the News Literacy Project! Also check out this online guide by First Draft with tips & activities for your students!
Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) is a free online magazine you should definitely subscribe to!
Check out Google's free Digital Literacy & Citizenship curriculum!
Do some "forest bathing" from anywhere! Should help us all destress as we navigate the tail end of this pandemic! And if you prefer to destress to the foghorns of San Francisco Bay, Austin Kleon has you covered!

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Happy Almost 2021 & Happy Reading!

12/2/2020

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Here are 12 things I thought were worth sharing:

IMAGE: Shaylyn Esposito

1. Publishing companies want to tell you all about their new books!
2. To help commemorate their 125th Anniversary, the New York Public Library has some opinions on their favorite 125 Books for Teens.
3. A new kind of historical podcast series from a new kind of public educator.
4. The American Experience in 737 Novels: a history of American literature in map form.
5. For those of you who loved The Things They Carried, it will now be a movie!
6. Some thoughts from our amazing National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, in the middle of his 2-year term.
7. Open access image libraries – a handy list!
8. I missed this in October, but we now have a LIVE NYC Subway Map! Here’s a great video about how this complicated digital map was created.
9. Are you a bit moody after the year we’ve all had? Use your moods to find your next book!
10. If you haven’t checked it out already, head to Bookshop, the “Rebel Alliance” fighting Amazon for market share, and in turn, supporting scores of independent bookstores.
11. Here are some of the top Best Books lists of 2020:
Time Magazine’s Best YA and Children's Books of 2020
NPR’s Book Concierge 2020
100 Notable Books of 2020 (New York Times)
Best Books of 2020 (Goodreads)
Best Books 2020 (Publishers Weekly)
The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 (Time Magazine)
Best Books of 2020 (New York Public Library)
Best Books of the Year (So Far) (Amazon)
Best Books 2020 (School Library Journal)
Center for the Study of Multicultural Children's Literature Best Books of 2020
Best Books 2020 (Worst Year/Best Books; Library Journal)
Times Critics’ Top Books of 2020
The Best Books we read in 2020 (The New Yorker)
Best Books of 2020 (Book Riot)
The Ten Best History Books of 2020 (Smithsonian)
The Ten Best Books of 2020 (The Washington Post)
Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult Books of 2020
The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 (Time Magazine)
The Best Books of the Year 2020 (Barnes & Noble)
12. As we hurtle towards January, we can look backward (just like the God Janus), at the many book awards that were given out this past year...

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It's Good to See You!

8/27/2020

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Here are 13 things I thought were worth sharing:

Welcome back to possibly the weirdest school year in recent history! All over the world, content creators have been retooling their offerings to make it easier for you and your students to learn and connect with each other. In advance of one of the most contentious presidential elections ever, it’s even more important than ever to consume and spread accurate information. Taking a free class from Checkology can help you do this.
One of my favorite things to do each September is to head to the Brooklyn Book Festival to buy books, meet authors, and steep myself in book culture. This year the festival will be online from September 28th-October 4th. Further uptown, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (a division of the NYPL) will be hosting their own online literary festival from September 21-26. I’ve already signed up for one of the events! Further afield, the National Book Festival (sponsored by the Library of Congress) will also be held online from September 25-27th. For the first time ever, part of the National Book Festival will be broadcast on PBS, so set your DVRs!
I have dusted off my list of Remote Learning Tools from this spring for you and your students, and will be adding new things on a regular basis (noted in yellow).
Our country is going through a much-needed racial reckoning, and our corner of Brooklyn is taking a deeper look at our collective educational history and is doing something about it.
Even if you don’t subscribe to The New York Times (you really should!), their Learning Network is always free to both educators and students. Take some time to peruse their many tools and make them work for you and encourage your students to enter their student contests!
Our school has an educational subscription to the New York Times. Please let me know if the link doesn’t work!
Leave it to a school librarian to rally her librarian comrades to crowdsource a free interactive ebook full of tech tools that will help you do your job!
Over the summer, I updated my Anti-Racism Reading List and will continue to add books to this list.
I just updated our Election 2020 page with new resources.
While Covid-19 has narrowed the options about where we can go in person, it has enlarged our virtual opportunities! Consider signing up for e-newsletters from local cultural organizations (like The Brooklyn Historical Society or Community Bookstore) so you can attend their many online offerings!
We may not all be ELA teachers, but we are all readers! It’s always good to take a fresh look at what we teach and what we read, with an eye for tweaking and for making some switches. Penguin Random House gives us some suggestions!
Want to send your students on a field trip to better understand diseases like Covid-19? Here are 7 virtual museum exhibits that explore pandemics.
Powered by Common Sense Media, Wide Open School makes it easier for you to provide engaging content to your students, wherever they are!

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"We read to know that we are not alone."

6/15/2020

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Here are 4 things I thought were worth sharing before we break for the Summer:

1. Here is the link to my Black Lives Matter Non-Exhaustive Anti-Racism Reading List that is updated on a weekly basis. These books will help dismantle the racism, both internal and external, that is all around us...

2. Here is a treasure trove of Summer Reading Lists that should keep you busy:
The Ultimate Summer 2020 Reading List (contains multiple lists)
Publisher’s Weekly Summer Reads 2020
125 Books We Love (NYPL)
The Best Books of 2020 So Far (BBC)
Summer Reading 2020 with Bill Gates
Summer Reading at NY Libraries
BKLYN Public Library Summer Reading (Middle School)
BKLYN Public Library Summer Reading (High School)
Summer Reading List from ALSC (Grades 6-8)
UC Berkeley Summer Reading List
Let Books Create Your Summer (NYTimes)
NPR’s Book Concierge (Young Adult)
The 30 Best Beach Reads of 2020 (Parade Magazine)
The Best Books of 2020 (So Far) (Real Simple)
100 Books of Summer (Barnes & Noble)
The Best Books of 2020 so far (BBC)
New York Times Book Review
New York Public Library Quest for Adventure Summer 2020
SLJ Summer Series Best Reads 2020 (School Library Journal)
Summer Reading 2020 (Brooklyn Public Library)
ALA’s 2020 Best Lists

3. Take a minute to sign up for NYPL’s Connect newsletter which will keep you up to date on online author events, book clubs, and literary events in the community.

4. Please tell the teens in your life that It’s time for the 11th Annual New York Times Summer Reading Contest! A chance to think deeply and creatively about what is going on in our world, and a chance to get published in the New York Times!

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"Poetry is an act of peace."

3/31/2020

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Here are 17 things I thought were worth sharing:

With thanks to Pablo Neruda for this blog post’s title, poetry is EXACTLY what we should be turning towards in these difficult times. Whether it’s National Poetry Month (which begins today!) or not, the Academy of American Poets wants to help you celebrate!
Ask your students to write a response to a poetry video, and they just might hear back from that poet!
As we all stay at home and do our part to slow the spread of COVID-19, check out the hashtag #shelterinpoems on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram!
Create some spine poetry from the books you have around you!
Sign up for a new daily poetry podcast (created by our current U.S. Poet Laureate) that might just make you feel better!
Even though most of us are not riding the subways now, check out the MTA’s ongoing “Poetry in Motion” campaign.
Think about what role poetry plays in your life…
Sign up here to get a poem in your inbox every day!
This year, Poem in Your Pocket Day is on April 30th, and even though we probably won’t be together at school on that day, plan to celebrate anyway! You can download some poems for the day here, put together by several national and international poetry organizations.
Here are 22 Ways to Teach and Learn about Poetry with The New York Times (updated for 2020).
Billy Collins is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and more than 15 years ago, he created and edited “Poetry 180”, a way for poetry to be shared to high school students for every day they were in the school building. Enjoy this resource at the Library of Congress!
Here are two interactive tools that allow anyone to create, print, and share “erasure” poems: democratic texts and erasures.
We can’t travel very far these days, but we can now easily get back to 1954 if we want to!
Even though it’s physically closed, NYPL is still actively celebrating their 125th birthday! Click here to see 125 books that they just LOVE!
Smithsonian Open Access is a brand-new way to access and re-use millions of images from the Smithsonian’s archives!
The New York Times’ Learning Network now has a YouTube channel! Subscribe today!

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Read to Remember & Read to Forget...

1/31/2020

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Here are 17 things I thought were worth sharing:

photo illustration by Joan Wong

On the eve of Black History Month, LeVar Burton and a few friends have created “This is My Story”, a series of 6 short videos in which Burton shares stories that speak about some of the racist experiences of most black people in the United States. Difficult to listen to but necessary to hear, Burton proves yet again how transformational stories can be…
Google’s Black History Month video has gone viral.
Medium has created “The Zora Cannon”, a list of what they believe are the greatest books ever written by African American women. They also compiled a list of “The Next Generation” of black women writers they think you should read right now. Subscribe to Medium for free via your Google account.
My grandparents were among the millions of African Americans who traveled north during the Great Migration. These photos were all taken over a three week period in 1941 on the South Side of Chicago, where and when my father grew up. An amazing visual record of an important time in our country’s history.
400 years after slavery came to our shores, one of our most decorated African American novelists, both for young people and adults, traveled to Ghana to see what echoes of the past she could hear there.
Now you can read some articles and newspapers that Frederick Douglass wrote and edited!
Move over, Turnitin! You have some competition!
Just a reminder that whether you have a BPL, NYPL, or QPL library card, they all give you access to CulturePass, which in turn gives you access to dozens of NYC cultural institution, all free of charge!
Although I am a die-hard Brooklynite, I love my NYPL library card! Sign up for their Book of the Day newsletter!
The Library of Congress is keeping up with the times, and just created The LGBTQ+ Studies Web Archive which collects and preserves online content which documents LGBTQ+ history, scholarship, and culture in the United States and around the world.
Canva is an amazing design resource (I use it all the time!), and now they have created an Education Program so you can apply with your school email and credentials to get a free subscription to Canva Pro!
We are living through times fraught with political turmoil and divisiveness. Reading, by its very nature, puts you in the shoes of other people. Check out a story about a woman’s reading project: “In the year leading up to the 2020 election, I would read (at least) one book from each state, as well as from Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., prioritizing contemporary fiction and memoir, with the hope of exploring shared experiences, such as family, identity and a sense of home.”
Attention art teachers: Paris museums just put 100,000 images online for unrestricted public use!
Want some free (or cheaper) alternatives to Photoshop & Illustrator?
Creative Commons just released a Chrome extension so that you can find and download CC-licensed photos (and their attributions) with just a click!
A listing of FREE (and sometimes FREE) cultural institutions in NYC!
Kialo Edu is a custom version of Kialo, the world's largest argument mapping and debate site, specifically designed for classroom use. Kialo’s mission is to promote well-reasoned discussion online, and to that end, Kialo is free for educators to use...

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Time to Hibernate & Read!

12/6/2019

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Here are 11 things I thought were worth sharing:

1. It’s the best time of the year to buy books for yourselves (and maybe other people!) Here are some helpful end-of-year lists you can check out to help you make your decisions!
100 Notable Books (New York Times)
Best Books of the Year (So Far) (Amazon)
Best Books of 2019 (Goodreads)
Best Books 2019 (Publishers Weekly)
Best Books 2019 (School Library Journal)
Best Young Adult Books of 2019 (Kirkus Reviews)
Best Books of 2019 (New York Public Library)
CSMCL Best Books of 2019
NPR’s Book Concierge 2019
Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2019

2. Better World Books + the Internet Archive = Perfect Together!

3. Even in these trying global and local times, there are reasons to be cheerful...

4. Want to get ahead and add more tools to your mental toolkit? Take some of these classes/certifications!

5. Teaching climate change to your students? Subscribe to Acid News for free!

6. There are more and more great books for teens about depression and other mental health issues. Check out some of them here and here.

7. Did you know that Poets.org created poetry lesson plans for multiple subject areas?

8. Brooklyn Prospect now has access to Adam Matthew’s Race Relations in America database! Click here for more details!

9. Stay tuned for details on our new free online access to the Financial Times and their lesson plans for teachers!

10. The folks at Stanford are really helpful! Check out their new & free Civic Online Reasoning curriculum that you can use with your students to help them better evaluate the information they come across in their digital lives.

11. Teachers, check out FindNYCulture! It is a “a searchable directory of New York’s 4600+ museums, libraries, historical societies, science centers, parks, zoos, university art galleries, planetariums, and more.” Perfect for teachers and parents!

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<<Previous

Fake News, Real War & the Power of Information

"Books may well be the only true magic. -- Alice Hoffman"

Happy Reading Season!!

Time to get a library card (if you don't already have one!)

Happy Almost 2021 & Happy Reading!

It's Good to See You!

"We read to know that we are not alone."

"Poetry is an act of peace."

Read to Remember & Read to Forget...

Time to Hibernate & Read!

Leslie Gallager

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